The Kite Runner
by Khaled Hosseini
Garbage. The author writes poorly, has no psychological insight (apparent from the second sentence of the novel onwards), and displays the outlook and attitudes of his nation and class: quasi-mediaeval, that is to say, with a thin veneer of modernity pasted on and peeling right off again.
His hero, Amir, is a treacherous coward, and the reader who retains an atom of sympathy for him beyond the climactic scene of Part I isn't thinking at all about what they read. This is a hero with no heroic qualities. Nor is he much of a protagonist, since he rarely does anything of his own volition; even his betrayals are the circumstantial products of his own cowardice. Life just carries him along, unresisting. And there is nothing Postmodern or experimental about any of this, in case you were wondering: that kind of writing is far above Hosseini’s pay grade. The Kite Runner is a book of pedestrian construction, frothing with cliches – no Pale Fire, I’m afraid.
Worst of all, Hosseini plainly expects you to feel sorry for his repulsive creation. He seems to think this weepy, effeminate, backboneless sentimentalist, this selfish milksop pining desperately for the love of his father, is quite a likeable chap and hard done by besides. I suppose Amir’s sissiness is meant to be a contrast to the conventional Afghan machismo of his father Baba (which Amir aspires to but lacks both the courage and the dash to emulate). In fact, Amir’s character is redolent of nothing so much as repressed and curdled homosexuality, and makes you wonder whether the author is working through some identity issues of his own.
Part Two of the book, set in the USA, is unspeakably awful: slipshod, boring and full of the kind of bad prose that people who attend ‘creative writing’ workshops generate so easily. Its main effect was to persuade this South Asian reader that Afghan society must be just as backward, and as grimly resistant to integration with the modern world (there are no non-Afghan characters to speak of in Amir’s America), as the Western imagination conceives. By the time I finished this part I was thoroughly sick of them all: Amir, his relations (he has no friends to speak of, having betrayed the only one he ever had back in Kabul) and even, unfairly, poor suffering Afghanistan itself. I certainly had no interest in finding out how they all fared in the end, and quit reading while Our Hero was still in Peshawar, Pakistan, en route back to Kabul in a self-flagellating attempt to ‘redeem himself’. According to the spoilers I read, this effort ends in another act of treachery committed by him. Well, at least that’s dramatically consistent.
Awful, awful, awful, awful. I wish I hadn’t read it. It seemed to confirm my already dim view of South Asian elite culture and all the hardest things I’ve ever read or heard said about Afghanistan. I could have done without the endorsement.
His hero, Amir, is a treacherous coward, and the reader who retains an atom of sympathy for him beyond the climactic scene of Part I isn't thinking at all about what they read. This is a hero with no heroic qualities. Nor is he much of a protagonist, since he rarely does anything of his own volition; even his betrayals are the circumstantial products of his own cowardice. Life just carries him along, unresisting. And there is nothing Postmodern or experimental about any of this, in case you were wondering: that kind of writing is far above Hosseini’s pay grade. The Kite Runner is a book of pedestrian construction, frothing with cliches – no Pale Fire, I’m afraid.
Worst of all, Hosseini plainly expects you to feel sorry for his repulsive creation. He seems to think this weepy, effeminate, backboneless sentimentalist, this selfish milksop pining desperately for the love of his father, is quite a likeable chap and hard done by besides. I suppose Amir’s sissiness is meant to be a contrast to the conventional Afghan machismo of his father Baba (which Amir aspires to but lacks both the courage and the dash to emulate). In fact, Amir’s character is redolent of nothing so much as repressed and curdled homosexuality, and makes you wonder whether the author is working through some identity issues of his own.
Part Two of the book, set in the USA, is unspeakably awful: slipshod, boring and full of the kind of bad prose that people who attend ‘creative writing’ workshops generate so easily. Its main effect was to persuade this South Asian reader that Afghan society must be just as backward, and as grimly resistant to integration with the modern world (there are no non-Afghan characters to speak of in Amir’s America), as the Western imagination conceives. By the time I finished this part I was thoroughly sick of them all: Amir, his relations (he has no friends to speak of, having betrayed the only one he ever had back in Kabul) and even, unfairly, poor suffering Afghanistan itself. I certainly had no interest in finding out how they all fared in the end, and quit reading while Our Hero was still in Peshawar, Pakistan, en route back to Kabul in a self-flagellating attempt to ‘redeem himself’. According to the spoilers I read, this effort ends in another act of treachery committed by him. Well, at least that’s dramatically consistent.
Awful, awful, awful, awful. I wish I hadn’t read it. It seemed to confirm my already dim view of South Asian elite culture and all the hardest things I’ve ever read or heard said about Afghanistan. I could have done without the endorsement.
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