Kite runner1/8/2024 ![]() In California, Baba works at a gas station to put his son through school on weekends he sells secondhand goods at swap meets. Yet he is generous and tolerant enough to respect his son's artistic yearnings and to treat the lowly Hassan with great kindness, even arranging for an operation to mend the child's harelip.Īs civil war begins to ravage the country, the teenage Amir and his father must flee for their lives. He loves nothing better than watching the Afghan national pastime, buzkashi, in which galloping horsemen bloody one another as they compete to spear the carcass of a goat. Amir's father, or Baba, personifies all that is reckless, courageous and arrogant in his dominant Pashtun tribe. Hosseini's depiction of pre-revolutionary Afghanistan is rich in warmth and humor but also tense with the friction between the nation's different ethnic groups. Amir's failure to defend his friend will haunt him for the rest of his life. Then, during a kite-flying tournament that should be the triumph of Amir's young life, Hassan is brutalized by some upper-class teenagers. Hassan protects the sensitive Amir from sadistic neighborhood bullies in turn, Amir fascinates Hassan by reading him heroic Afghan folk tales. Yet Hassan bears Amir no resentment and is, in fact, a loyal companion to the lonely boy, whose mother is dead and whose father, a rich businessman, is often preoccupied. The fragility of this relationship, symbolized by the kites the boys fly together, is tested as they watch their old way of life disappear.Īmir is served breakfast every morning by Hassan then he is driven to school in the gleaming family Mustang while his friend stays home to clean the house. A more personal plot, arising from Amir's close friendship with Hassan, the son of his father's servant, turns out to be the thread that ties the book together. Both transform the life of Amir, Khaled Hosseini's privileged young narrator, who comes of age during the last peaceful days of the monarchy, just before his country's revolution and its invasion by Russian forces.īut political events, even as dramatic as the ones that are presented in ''The Kite Runner,'' are only a part of this story. THIS powerful first novel, by an Afghan physician now living in California, tells a story of fierce cruelty and fierce yet redeeming love.
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