The Kite Runner

by Khaled Hosseini
* * *
Content 3/5
Poetic Mastery 3/5
Literary Truth 3/5

A guest at our house recommended this book to me. She said that once she started reading it, she couldn’t put it down. So it was for me; my other book, The Histories of Herodotus, was cracked only once–for 5 minutes–until Hosseini’s first book was completed.

Besides being engaging, The Kite Runner is by virtue of some mysterious quality a “fast read.” I wonder what aspect of writing style makes a book a fast read: perhaps common words, consistant sentence structures, and/or spontenaity make the difference. Hmmm… in any case I never thought I was reading Hawthorne.

I’m glad that I read this book. Besides the typical enjoyment a good book provides, The Kite Runner, importantly, opened to me the first small window into real Afghani vida diaria. I would trade this boon for only a very high price! This literary truth about their society is a lot more meaningful than a scientific discussion of Afghani sociology; you’re there in a book, not observing.

The sense of personal/familial honor that permeates the Afghani (Arab as a whole?) social mentality is similar, it seems to me, to that of Western society’s earliest days, as told in The Histories, or even in common knowledge of classical Europe, what with all the duels. We’ve changed a lot in the West, in our sense of justice in society. Sometimes I wish I could duel 🙂 Herodotus’ social/political investigations from Greece to Caucasia to Africa to Persia report similar impulses from diverse culture to diverse culture. Perhaps Jesus’ “turn the other cheek” played a subtle force in the West’s abdigation of vengeance to society?