Runaway Good
I've just finished reading The Kite Runner and it did live up to all I've heard about it being a good book. Last night I was reading it in public and someone noticed it and remarked that she, too, had read it and thought it was just "phenomenal." I don't know if I would call it "phenomenal" but it was a very emotionally engaging book - a story of relationships, of guilt and redemption, loss and hope, as well as a portrait of a people and a culture in the throes of change.
The story, written in the first person, begins with ten year old Amir growing up in Afghanistan before the communist invasion of the 1970's, moves to his life in California, followed by a return to Afghanistan at the age of 38 during the Taliban regime. The story seems almost autobiographical and this made me wonder how much was based on the author's own life.
As a matter of fact the story does roughly follow the author Khalid Hosseini's life. He was born in Afghanistan to a well educated family, father a diplomat, mother a language teacher. They emigrated to America when he was a boy just at the beginning of the Russian invasion, and he did return to Afghanistan at the age of 38 just as Amir does in the story. Amir becomes a writer; Hosseini is a medical doctor, an internist, but obviously a writer as well. In an interesting interview Hosseini describes how "life imitates art." Amazingly, he found that when he revisited Afghanistan after writing the story he found places from his childhood that he didn't know he remembered, descriptions that he had put in the book that were surprisingly accurate.
A point of interest - Hosseini is probably the only author of Afghan descent writing a book in English. The story's themes are, however, universal in any language and I think that's what makes this book "runaway good."
The story, written in the first person, begins with ten year old Amir growing up in Afghanistan before the communist invasion of the 1970's, moves to his life in California, followed by a return to Afghanistan at the age of 38 during the Taliban regime. The story seems almost autobiographical and this made me wonder how much was based on the author's own life.
As a matter of fact the story does roughly follow the author Khalid Hosseini's life. He was born in Afghanistan to a well educated family, father a diplomat, mother a language teacher. They emigrated to America when he was a boy just at the beginning of the Russian invasion, and he did return to Afghanistan at the age of 38 just as Amir does in the story. Amir becomes a writer; Hosseini is a medical doctor, an internist, but obviously a writer as well. In an interesting interview Hosseini describes how "life imitates art." Amazingly, he found that when he revisited Afghanistan after writing the story he found places from his childhood that he didn't know he remembered, descriptions that he had put in the book that were surprisingly accurate.
A point of interest - Hosseini is probably the only author of Afghan descent writing a book in English. The story's themes are, however, universal in any language and I think that's what makes this book "runaway good."
posted by mamie @ 9:42 PM
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