Monday, January 16, 2006

the kite runner

My current reading material is The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. It starts out in Kabul, Afghanistan in the early 1970's. The main character, Amir, is the son of a wealthy businessman and has a servant his age named Hassan who will do anything for Amir. The funnest time in their lives is the winter when they have huge kite competitions. The whole neighbourhood sits outside to watch as hundreds of kites are flown in the sky. Participants must cut each others kites so that they fall, and then they chase down and catch ("run") the fallen kites. The winner is the last one flying and he/she must run the last kite that was cut to bring home as a sort of trophy. The copy I'm reading has the green cover but as I was googling for an image of the book, I came across this other tan one. It really caught my attention because it suggests the main incident of the story, the turning point in Amir and Hassan's life. It kind of gave me the shivers because it's not a pleasant incident at all.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

i am very interested in books that take place in middle eastern countries. my fav is caravan by james michner. its afganastan in the 60s and very informative.

elisabeth said...

yeah, the media has really misrepresented, or at least only shown the bad side of, a lot of middle eastern countries and it's nice to be better informed of their culture. that's one of the reasons i really enjoyed Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis 1 and 2 (graphic novels too!).
i will check out caravan.