Saturday, June 14, 2008

The Kite Runner - Book Review

“There is a Way to Be Good Again”

One of the fiction’s greatest magic is the ability to take the reader into a journey in time and place. Like a fly ticket to another country, good fiction can walk you back and forth in old and new times, make you smell, see and feel another places, cultures and people. More than that, good fiction can also create new worlds and which have never been exist and make them to reality in the reader imagination. The book "The Kite Runner" makes what a good fiction should do.
The book "The Kite Runner" provides the reader a magical voyage to an old and new Afghanistan. It walks the reader between colorful markets, dirty streets and beautiful views. But it also takes the reader to a journey between childhood and adultness, loyalty and betrayal, racism and discrimination. In fact, "The Kite Runner" gives a whole new vision of a different world than eastern eyes can see.
Amir and Hassan are two kids, who live in Kabul of the 60s. They both were nursing from the same nurse and grew in the same piece of land. But one of them grew in a house while the other in a hut. One is a servant and the other is his son’s master. They grew as two best friends, but racism had always flown over their head. Amir belongs to the high class while Hassan is a Hazara boy whom belongs to the minority group in Kabul. The great friendship between Amir and Hassan came to end when Amir betrayed Hassan. Amir’s shame but not Hassan’s anger made huge tear between the good friends. Amir and his father left Kabul right before the Taliban came to power, and immigrated to America. But the big shame was still nested in Amir’s heart, and it brought him back to New Kabul in order “to be good again” and to try save Hassan’s son, who became an orphan after the execution of his parents by the Taliban people.
This story doesn’t only deal with Amir’s Shame. However, it takes his eastern characters to the world’s back yard, and points their shame. He introduces them the real life of racism, the radicalness and the minorities group’s screams which didn’t come into the eastern ears. The miserable life the eastern world chose to ignore of for so long time.
No doubt this book is not a master piece. The over melodrama, the author tendency to repeats, could be threaten better in a good editing, but the unique journey he provides us , makes the reading adventure to it haunting and fascinating.

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