A review by mimsyweretheborogoves
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

challenging dark emotional reflective tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

 
the kite runner is told in three very distinct parts. it begins in afghanistan in the 1970s following twelve-year-old friends amir and hassan. amir watches hassan get raped and feels so guilty about not stopping it that he has to be really mean to hassan from this point forth. he emigrates to america with his dad, where he continues to feel guilty about a hassan who will not do anything else in the story and exists exclusively for symbolic reasons. in his forties he returns to afghanistan, now under taliban rule, to feel guilty about hassan some more.
 
 
i did like parts of this book. there were just a lot of parts i didn’t like. 
 
i really enjoyed the first third of it – story about kids growing up in a ‘troubled’ country? sign me up, i love the book thief. i loved the way afghanistan was presented through nostalgia, i loved hassan and amir’s friendship and even though i really don’t like when rape is used as a plot device i was interested to see the direction it would go in. it felt like there were some very clear themes set up. but then it didn't develop on them. to say the central thread of the story was supposed to be about hassan and amir’s relationship, hassan disappeared around page 100 and there was a lot of time spent on amir brooding about how guilty he felt. 
 
for me it felt like all of the stuff i’d liked in the first third went out of the window when he went to america. it became a completely different book, about a country i am fed up of reading about, and i thought it was honestly quite dull. the only feelings i had about amir and soraya's relationship were annoyance: i literally do not care that amir was embarrassed about having male privilege, it just made him read like he was hosseini’s self insert. if you’re such a feminist, maybe give us a female character who isn’t defined by her relationship to a man, okay? 
 
the bit where amir returned to afghanistan was the bit i’d been expecting when i started reading, but i was let down. there was no actual exploration of the conflict; the taliban were a very generic Big Bad, no nuance to it. it was such a westernised perspective. i liked that assef returned to be evil again, but he was such a poorly written villain. the reason he was a nazi and a pedophile was to make sure people knew this was the Bad Guy, representing the Bad Organisation. amir’s fight with him was exciting, sure, but it was such a straightforward hero/villain dynamic that it wasn't interesting. 
 
everything felt both underexplained and overexplained at once. the actual history and political situation of afghanistan was underexplained (idyllic romanticised place suddenly invaded by russia suddenly invaded by evil group? please elaborate – how did this happen? how did it affect people who weren’t rich and able to move to america?) in favour of talking down to the reader about vague cultural stuff. even if i’d known nothing about islam going in i’d have been able to work out that “eid mubarak” translates to “happy eid”; i haven't learnt anything here. 
 
a couple of things really got on my nerves about the writing itself, but these were more stylistic preferences. using words from other languages in books works sometimes, but in this book hosseini would use a farsi word and translate it IMMEDIATELY every single time rather than allowing the reader to pick it up from context. as well, hosseini really enjoys putting a full stop where a comma would suffice. that can work for sometimes, i guess, but using it all the time undermines the effect of using it in a tense scene. 
 
i did like some aspects of it. as well as the beginning, i found baba a really interesting character to read, and i quite enjoyed all the cheesy stuff linking sohrab and amir and assef and hassan in some fated absolution of amir’s passivity. i am overall just rather disappointed. 

3 stars
Expand filter menu Content Warnings