The Kite Runner

“The Kite Runner” by Khaled Hosseini was recommended to me by a dear friend almost a year back.

For all this time, however, this book did not figure in my priority reads. I was vaguely aware that it had Afghanistan as its backdrop, and for some strange reason, my mind connected this with the boring and hugely pretentious “The Afghan” (Frederic Forsyth). I now sincerely regret this long wait of one year.

The Kite Runner is an endearingly honest and from–the–heart story, the kind one rarely comes across in the artificiality of your usual pulp fiction these days.

This is primarily a story of a young Afghani boy Amir and his various relationships –with his servant–friend Hassan, with his father, with his motherland Afghanistan and more importantly, with himself.

Hosseini has treated this beautiful panorama of relationships with amazing sensitivity and truthfulness, specially the father-son relation. This depiction of father–son relation is the best I have come across in my limited reading experience.

And the love Hosseini feels for his motherland Afghanistan is so palpable in his descriptions, which are refreshingly different from the usual western views one gets these days.

To me, however, more creditworthy is that for a first–time writer, he has been able to achieve the rare feat of making the reader intensely feel all the love, happiness, pain & anguish of the characters without indulging in any excessive verbal calisthenics.

A must read – “a thousand times over”!!