The Kite Runner

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Amir and Hassan grow up together in the same household in Kabul: the former, the son of a successful businessman who has a penchant for throwing parties; the latter, the child of the househelp who grew up with the house owner as some form of atonement for a past crime. While a year younger than Amir, Hassan is the more courageous of the two and often defends his friend from their bullies. Despite practically growing up as brothers and moving about in the same world, their roles couldn’t be any less different given their respective ethnic heritage. Their days of innocence and flying kites are disrupted by a personal tragedy as well as the arrival of the Shorawi who takes control of the country. Their lives diverge paths to avert another tragedy, but eventually begin to intertwine again decades later when Amir pays a visit to an old friend in Peshawar and is confronted with a revelation that will change his life forever.

I’ve heard so much about Afghanistan, both the good and the bad, in the last two decades or so. As usual, my beef with news and history books is the dehumanization of the entire crisis, the dead and the living becoming mere faceless statistics as if they weren’t human. I believe this is where literature comes in for a more personal perspective. Fictional as they are, a good writer can provide that certain humanizing factor withheld from us when tackling numbers and facts, by coming up with a tale that evokes emotions. Hosseini has this gift, along with a handful of cryptic cliffhangers that ramp up anticipation to get to the next chapter.

Although contrived in many instances that the novel just starts to come across as a draft screenplay for a soap opera, the twists and revelations do accomplish the task they are set up to do. As a reader, you are forced to look back or even reread some of the previous chapters just to reframe certain scenes and character reactions after you are provided with those belated truths. Some of them are retrospective on your part while some are explicitly blurted out by Amir himself. How would so-and-so have reacted if s/he knew this or that? How would so-and-so’s life have turned out differently if s/he discovered this or that earlier? A lot of what-ifs.

The Kite Runner is heavy on regrets, the protagonist holding on to a past that he just can’t let go. When he finally does, those regrets are immediately replaced by anxiety looking to an uncertain future. As such, it can be a bit difficult to read but the silver lining there is how it makes the storyline more relatable considering nobody is immune to such feelings. It also helps that Hosseini has a weird way of shining a sympathetic spotlight on his characters even at times when you just want to chastise them for being so stubborn. Perhaps this is also where the novel kind of fails the vibe check for some critics. It banks too much on emotions.

Much of the criticism leveled against the author has to do with his depiction of the prevalent ethnic groups in Afghanistan as well as his rather black and white classification of good and bad. Once again, The Kite Runner is not non-fiction and there really is no way for an artist to totally divorce himself from his art. An author’s literary work will never be unbiased, given how his life experiences and belief systems will always factor in the storytelling. The author’s job is to elicit an emotional response. Our responsibility, as readers, is to apply critical thinking and know where to find valid sources for facts instead of treating novels as gospel truth.

After all, the success of literature is when it manages to give us enough of humanity that we can relate to, when we find something universally human in the characters that we can recognize despite all of our differences, based on the feelings that they evoke. Most of the time you don’t need facts for that, but rather just emotions. In this regard, Hosseini succeeds by zeroing in on the themes of family, regrets, and atonement. The Kite Runner might be corny, most of its twists a bit forced, but we can all agree that it is emotionally moving and uplifting, without trying too hard.