How soon my views can be challenged? While reviewing Cuckold, I had argued in favour of a great story ahead of complex literary techniques. Many believe the The Kite Runner has a great story to tell and a moving story. Yes, the story is interesting and at times, moving. Yes, the book has enough to be a pageturner. But something is missing.
By no stretch of imagination can Kite Runner be classified as a great or even a good piece of literature. At best, it is an interesting story with impeccable timing of publishing, when the world, and Americans in particular, wanted to know more about Afghanistan. A few years earlier or a few years later, the Khaled Hosseini could have struggled to find a publisher and even if he did, the book would have got nowhere closer to the best sellers list.
The novel is written, clearly with the Western audience in mind. As a result, there is over-elaboration of events and words when not required and over-simplification of issues. If one wants to understand the thread of the Afghan society and the reasons for the rise of fundamentalist Taliban, this book doesn’t offer any answers. Super-imposing the school-bully-sociopath character of Aseef on Taliban is a shortcut the author should have avoided taking – this is straight out of mainstream cinema. Schindler’s List also had such a character but the depiction was with much more clarity – it came out quite certainly that a socio-path uses the cover of a fundamentalist racist regime to unleash his inner evil. But I think there is much more to religious fundamentalism than just the whims of a socio-path.
However most Americans might love such a depiction of Taliban – an organization consisting of cruel socio-paths and paedophiles, who supervise footballers running around in full trousers. This explains why the book was a major success. Nobody is interested to know why religious fundamentalism arose, how the common man, whithout whose support this cannot happen, is drawn towards the fundamentalist. Definitely the author is not interested into getting into deeper layers of the psyche of a fundamentalist society.
Kite Runner succeeds in exploring the impact and fallout of personal guilt. Otherwise, there are no pretensions of creating a piece of literature. Maybe, the book has been more than successful in achieving what it set out to achieve – it had just fallen into the hands of a wrong reader to elicit such scathing criticism.
January 21, 2008 at 4:11 am |
“The Kite Runner” an awesome book, great attention to details. Every single page made me cry, laugh, warmed up my heart with love, and made me angry… I cried non-stop throughout the book.
January 21, 2008 at 1:35 pm |
If an author can get even a single reader to say what you have said, it is an achievement in itself. And you are not alone in your assessment. But then, my parameters to judge a book seem to be different and from a personal viewpoint, I stand by my review.
October 3, 2008 at 1:33 am |
The movie was good apart from a few contradictions and as the movie portrays itself as a true story and requests donations, it should contain a foot note about things which can be mis-interpreted. True stories and depictions requesting donations should infact issue footnotes specially when they deal with some emotional matters like wars etc which have affected a lot of lives
and are an emotional topic.
Following should be noted though:
1. Kids are kids, either they fight with sling shots or weapons.
2. The kid who abuses Hassan and Amir and calls them different because of certain specific facial feature, fails to notice that his own friends have the same very features.
Infact Amir has the same features as his own and his friends have the same features as Hassan.
3. The movie mentions the soviets as having cut all the trees, but infact if
soviets would have been the ones to cut the trees, then Russia would have
been a barren land by now, which infact it is not. This can be interpreted as
a desire to play on the emotions of the american and afghan public who had been affected by the Afghan conflict.
4. Another thing to note is that the kids fight with each other because of
elder kids and Hassan and Amir being from different tribes. But finally
one of the elder kids is shown to have joined Hassan’s tribe that is the talibans, who as Amir’s father calls as the religious zealots who actually
do not even understand the language the holy koran is written in. This
is typical of asian societies where the religion gets taught from father
to son without explaining any meaning about it and things are supposed
to be followed by tradition, rather than reasoning.