"The Kite Runner," by Khaled Hosseini: A Review

Amir wins. Hassan runs after the last downed kite to bring it back. But he disappears. Someone tells Amir that other boys had been chasing Hassan to steal the kite. Amir knows who they are: he and Hassan had had a run-in with a local gang leader, a Hitler-loving thug called Assef whom Hassan had humiliated when Assef had tried to attack Amir. Sure enough, Amir finally happens by an alley where he sees Hassan facing Assef and his gang. Hassan is cornered. Assef offers to let Hassan go—in exchange for the kite. Loyal at any price, Hassan refuses: “Amir agha won the tournament and I ran this kite for him,” he says. “I ran it fairly. This is his kite.”

Assef rapes him. Amir watches, doesn’t intervene, and goes home.

The betrayal sets up the tension that winds through the rest of the novel. It’s never the same after that between Amir and Hassan—Amir who never lets on to what he saw because he’s too ashamed of his cowardice, Hassan who never lets on about what happened, for obvious reasons. Worse, Amir discovers something about Hassan that goes a long way to explain why Amir’s father seems so protective of the boy, sometimes at Amir’s expense. In one of the less believable contrivances of the novel, Amir frames Hassan to make it look as if he’s stolen family property. Despite Baba’s forgiveness, Hassan and his father leave the home they’ve spent most of their life in, and Hassan and Amir never see each other again. Before long Amir and his father, too, leave Kabul.

News of Hassan’s death years later pummels Amir’s life out of its willed severance, physical and psychological, from his shameful past.

By then the Soviets have invaded Afghanistan, Amir has emigrated to California with his father and gotten married to an Afghan woman called Soraya. He watches the Soviets being driven out as the Taliban gradually replaces one tyranny with another, and tries, unsuccessfully, to have a child with his wife. The pages about the family’s resettlement in the United States are rich in the sorrows and triumphs of immigrant life, as well as in exposing the undying double-standards that immigrants must sometimes live with, as when Soraya finally explodes over having to deal with the Afghan community’s impositions on women even in California: “Their sons go out to nightclubs looking for meat and get their girlfriends pregnant, they have kids out of wedlock and no one says a goddamn thing. Oh, they’re just men having fun! I make one mistake and suddenly everyone is talking nang and namoos, and I have to have my face rubbed in it for the rest of my life.”

It’s one of the strengths of the novel that even minor characters, in California, Pakistan and Afghanistan, are made real, their lives and conflicts more than stick-figure silhouettes on Amir’s backgrounds.

What brings Amir back to Afghanistan in the midst of that country’s imprisonment by the Taliban animates the second half of the novel. Revealing much of anything about that return trip, other than to say that Hassan has left a son behind, would spoil the thriller-like narrative that takes over, sometimes to excess, from that point on. It’s enough to say that Amir’s road to redemption begins with a loving admonition from Rahim Khan, his father’s business partner and best friend: “You can be good again.”

Many times along the way the reader wants to throttle Amir and, on occasions, his creator, for stretching out a few incongruous situations and stretching Amir’s fallibility beyond its limit: that the man is capable of returning to Kabul at its hellish worst is to any reasonable reader proof enough of Amir’s reclaimed courage. Yet whether to lengthen the novel or pack in a few more twists, Hosseini manages to shake down a few more vertebras out of his hero’s spine, quite in contradiction with the moral momentum Amir has amassed by then. Healing has never had so many relapses. But if the book is about healing, it finally succeeds as such, endless sorrows notwithstanding, and manages to do so without taking the easy way of the Hollywood hug.