The Kite Runner
22:00
The Kite Runner
- by Khaled Hosseini
5.0/5.0 stars
~
“For you, a thousand times over...”
“And that's the thing about people who mean everything they say. They think everyone else does too.”
The Kite Runner is one of those books that only comes round once in a lifetime. It is a book, that once read, you will carry it with you until the end of time. It buries deep into your soul, etches into your very being and you are never quite the same after it. The pages and prose haunt your dreams, almost make you scared to pick it back up and carry on reading because you just know that it will break your heart in ways a book should never be allowed to. Then again, The Kite Runner never was just a book...it became a tangible thing in my hand, a living, breathing story that slowly broke me with all its cruel beauty until at the very end, I was an emotional mess.
Have you ever cried because of a book? And I mean, really cried? Not just shedding a tear, but actually crying because of what is spinning out of control on those pages in your hand, so much so, that you have to stop, close the pages and wipe away the tears coursing down your face. Have you ever felt that? Have you ever felt a book tear at your core, felt yourself being ripped apart from the inside as the words sink in and burrow into the deepest spaces of your soul? It's a strange, beautiful thing...that power of ink stains upon paper to make you feel so much that you almost wish you couldn't feel a damn thing.
That's what The Kite Runner does.
It is impossible to encapsulate just how beautifully written The Kite Runner is. Kabul is painted through the eyes of twelve year old Amir who is selfish and cruel, and yet, he is also just a child yearning for his father's affection. It is a weakness that morphs into cowardice, a single act of betrayal in which he destroys the life of Hassan, his one true friend of undying loyalty, as well as destroying his own.
As we fast forward in time, the story-telling switches into the candid, honest voice of Amir who is now a young man building a new life in America, but paying the price for his betrayal. It is a voice tainted with a deep-riddled guilt, the story of a man with blood on his hands and who cannot escape the ghosts of his past. It seeps into the story of his later years, the bone-deep desperation for redemption. You can feel the stabbing pain of his memories and sense the stench of guilt that soaks the pages...you cannot escape the horrors that haunt his nightmares and, like Amir, you are waiting with bated breath for a wave of forgiveness.
That's what The Kite Runner does.
“It may be unfair, but what happens in a few days, sometimes even a single day, can change the course of a whole lifetime."
Afghanistan 1975: Twelve year old Amir is the son of a wealthy Kabul merchant, a member of the ruling caste of Pashtuns. Hassan, his servant and constant companion, is a Hazara, a despised and impoverished caste. When the local kite-flying tournament comes around, Amir is desperate to win it and Hassan promises to help him. But neither can foresee what will happen to Hassan that afternoon, an event that will shatter their lives.
They are wrenched apart amidst the increasing ethnic, religious, and political tensions of the dying years of the Afghan monarchy and following the Soviet invasion, Amir and his father are forced to flee to America. But despite settling into his Western life, Amir realises that he must journey back to the distant land of Afghanistan, now under the savage rule of the Taliban, to find the one thing that his new world cannot grant him: redemption.
 |
| The Kite Runner // Oxford Playhouse It's always difficult to bring a book like this to the stage...but I'll be damned if there wasn't a dry eye in the theatre when the curtains drew close |
It is impossible to encapsulate just how beautifully written The Kite Runner is. Kabul is painted through the eyes of twelve year old Amir who is selfish and cruel, and yet, he is also just a child yearning for his father's affection. It is a weakness that morphs into cowardice, a single act of betrayal in which he destroys the life of Hassan, his one true friend of undying loyalty, as well as destroying his own.
| I opened my mouth, almost said something. Almost. The rest of my life might have turned out differently if I had - Amir, The Kite Runner
As we fast forward in time, the story-telling switches into the candid, honest voice of Amir who is now a young man building a new life in America, but paying the price for his betrayal. It is a voice tainted with a deep-riddled guilt, the story of a man with blood on his hands and who cannot escape the ghosts of his past. It seeps into the story of his later years, the bone-deep desperation for redemption. You can feel the stabbing pain of his memories and sense the stench of guilt that soaks the pages...you cannot escape the horrors that haunt his nightmares and, like Amir, you are waiting with bated breath for a wave of forgiveness.
| I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded; not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night
In a brutal tale that sweeps us through the streets of Kabul to the land of America, all the barbaric, cruel ways in which humanity can be destroyed are vividly splashed across the years that span Amir's journey, from the moment in time when he commits an unforgivable act of betrayal, to the moment in time he dares to tug on the sliver of hope to which he so tightly clings. It borders on poetic, the way in which Amir's story comes full circle, the climax a savage justice for a ruined childhood.
There is no writer out there quite like Khaled Hosseini and I am convinced that there never will be. His hand pens the most devastating tragedies in the most heart-breaking of ways, his words like gunshot wounds that echo with each hit, his storytelling a brutal art that carves its mark with the force of steel nails.
Let me tell you this: you have never truly experienced a book until you are left crying at its hands. The Kite Runner dragged my emotions through the ringer with each new chapter until they bled out and I was left hanging to dry. There are no words to articulate just how much it destroyed me.
0 comments