Book Review - The Kite Runner
Submitted by Staff on Sun, 2024-04-03 12:00.
"Hey, who’s this bunch of real people we’re bombing the shit out of..."
The Kite Runner
Khaled Hosseini
New York: Penguin, 2003
371 pages
Don’t read this book if you want to think of Arabs as a collective of nomadic barbarians arbitrarily settling in cities infused with Islamic hatred of the West. Like all artworks that dispel such collectivist stereotypes, The Kite Runner carries a moral that should be rung from the rafters: "People are people."
Conversation between the author and a hotel manager in Islamabad, Pakistan:
"Yes," I said, my pulse quickening. How could he be so oblivious to my apprehension?
He shifted the the newspaper to his other hand, resumed the fanning. "They want bicycles, now."
"Who?"
"My boys," he said. "They’re saying, "Daddy, Daddy, please buy us bicycles and we’ll not trouble you. Please, Daddy!" He gave a short laugh through his nose. "Bicycles. Their mother will kill me, I swear to you."
Little touches of common humanity color this book from cover to cover. The sheer storytelling ability of Mr. Hosseni is something to behold; the book is difficult to set aside. You love his family and identify with their struggles. I was struck by how much I cared for the main character, the author. His innocent ways of the childhood he recounts remind me of my own, on the other side of the planet.
The story is a personal one of cowardice and redemption, spanning a thirty year range, from when the author is a young teenager in Kabul, Afghanistan, to the point he returns to Afghanistan from America attempting to find his boyhood friend. His family—the story reads as if it is literally autobiographical, which it is not—becomes refugees during the Soviet era civil war, and locates in the Bay Area, California.
An appealing characteristic of The Kite Runner is its seamlessness, with all the actions of the protagonist flowing naturally as his good life proceeds as best it can regardless of the backdrop of order and chaos. The backdrop is important to thinking Americans, since few have had reason to know much about that region of the world. One is struck by how people left free develop naturally as friends of other people left free… across boundaries.
As for the morality of these strangers, I recall these early passages between the author and his father. They convey a universal morality that transcends the superstitious horde that may come to empower their governments or ours:
"Now, no matter what the mullah teaches, there is only one sin, only one. And that is theft. Every other sin is a variation of theft. Do you understand that?
"When you kill a man, you steal a life," Baba said. "You steal his wife’s right to a husband, rob his children of a father. When you tell a lie, you steal someone’s right to the truth. When you cheat, you steal the right to fairness. Do you see?"
For me the book helps to kindle a vision of world peace where goods and services cross boundaries all the time, armies hardly ever. It reinforces that noninterventionist, free trade libertarian foreign policy that seems so unrealizable in a world where "moneyed suits in power" manipulate (steal) countries like so many disposable chess pieces. And dispose of the countries’ people as readily.
The Kite Runner was a New York Times Bestseller and a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year in 2003. Deservedly so. It remains a timely addition to the reading table in 2005 and beyond.
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what page?
i have this book and i wanted to know what page is this quote on:
When you kill a man, you steal a life," Baba said. "You steal his wife’s right to a husband, rob his children of a father. When you tell a lie, you steal someone’s right to the truth. When you cheat, you steal the right to fairness. Do you see?"
[Unknown, that writer isn't with us anymore. --MJ]