By Mark Flanagan, About.com
The Kite Runner is Afghanistani-American novelist, Khaled Hosseini's best-selling debut novel, a tale of betrayal and redemption that rises above time and place while simultaneously remaining firmly anchored against the tumultuous backdrop of modern Afghanistan.
Amir is a privileged Afghani child living alone with Baba, his father, in a large house in the prosperous Wazir Akbar Khan district of Kabul in the early 1970's. There is even a servant's shack on the property in which to house Ali, Baba's servant, and his son, Hassan. Though Hassan is Hazara, a marginalized ethnic minority in Kabul, treated poorly by Pashtuns like Amir, the two boys are inseparable. In fact, Hosseini spends the first 70 pages of The Kite Runner describing Amir and Hassan's immutable friendship.
The one dark cloud that hovers over Amir's otherwise idyllic early childhood is a troubled relationship with his distant father. Baba, a large and worldly man of action reputed to have wrestled a bear (and won), doesn't understand his weak and bookish son, leaving Amir desperate for any opportunity to please his father. The opportunity comes in the form of the Afghani tradition of kite-fighting.
Every year in Kabul there were many kite-fighting tournaments, during which dozens of children filled the winter sky with kites of every hue, each tethered to its owner by a string that had been coated in glue and covered in ground-up glass. The goal of kite-fighting is to cut the strings of your opponents' kites with your own and be the last kite in the air. As it happened, Amir was an excellent kite-fighter. It was, in fact, the only ground upon which he and Baba could find equal footing. As Amir says, "as the trees froze and ice sheathed the roads, the chill between Baba and me thawed a little. And the reason for that was the kites. Baba and I lived in the same house, but in different spheres of existence. Kites were the one paper-thin slice of intersection between those spheres."
In his blinding pursuit of Baba's approval, Amir is undone. After the kite-fighting tournament, he faces a choice - come to the aid of Hassan who is suffering unspeakable abuse by three bully Afghani boys, or leave his friend and flee so as not to mar the sweet triumph of the day's events which he expects to celebrate with Baba. Amir chooses the route of betrayal.
As Baba later tells Amir, sometimes the events of a single day changes the course of an entire life. Amir's betrayal of Hassan is one such event. It is the seed from which Khaled Hosseini grows the story of a scarred man, fleeing the consequences of his actions, until one day years later he is offered "a way to be good again."
The Kite Runner is an epic story, spanning as it does the cruelty of Afghanistan's recent history - the Soviet invasion, Mujahideen, and the Taliban. But it is the story of internal strife that makes Khaled Hosseini's novel as beautiful and as terribly haunting as it is. As Amir's wife tells him, "sad stories make good books."
Khaled Hosseini is also the author of 1000 Splandid Suns.
http://contemporarylit.about.com/od/fiction/fr/theKiteRunner.htm
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