Thoughts After Reading "The Kite Runner"

I brought Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner with me on a 3-day weekend visit to Columbus, Ohio, to visit my son. I'm still working on another novel, which I'd tried to finish before my trip, but too many things conspired against my finishing that book, and I didn't want to bring an almost-finished book on a cross-country trip in which inches and ounces are precious commodities. So I left Wouk's Brooklyn at home, tucked Hosseini's Kabul inside my backpack, and finished it in 3 days. The cover image didn't even make it to my blog's sidebar (What I'm Reading).

I've been meaning to read this. It's been sitting in my bookcase (right next to A Thousand Splendid Suns, also still unread), for awhile. As usual, I'm several years behind the rest of the reading world, scrambling to catch up, hoping someday to keep pace. Anything I say here will no doubt be redundant. The book came out in 2003--what's left to say? But here are my thoughts anyway, for what they're worth. 

The grand themes, as I see them, are courage and honesty and family love. Courage, as in not cowardly. Honesty, as in not only truth-telling, but truth-living, being true to who and what you are. Amir argued this point to himself when he discovered the truth about his relationship to Hassan, the lies he'd been led to believe all his life, the truth about his father. "I may be a coward, but at least I accept that I'm a coward," he told himself. Nevertheless, there he went anyway, venturing back into Taliban-controlled Kabul to rescue Hassan's small son, setting up a face-to-face meeting with a brutal Taliban leader to try and negotiate for the boy's freedom, fully aware that he could be walking toward his own death. What was driving this recklessness? What replaced the cowardice that had haunted him his entire life, ever since the day when, as a 12-year old boy--immobilized, petrified, horrified--he watched Hassan get beaten and raped, watched, knowing there was nothing he could do to stop it; realizing, too, that Hassan would have done anything in his power to stop it had the situation been reversed. The choice Amir made to stay hidden, to slip away, to pretend he hadn't seen what happened, would have repercussions for decades in the lives of all the characters in this story. 

There would be no reconciliation, no pardon, no public renunciation of his sin, but redemption is another of the grand themes in this book. Amir does find redemption at the end, awkwardly, clumsily, painfully. The courage he discovers is not the courage of a man facing death (which he does), but the courage to tell his wife the truth about his hidden shame, the courage to talk candidly about his father's sin in a society that shuns such sin. 

Honesty and courage, interchangeable in this story, leading to redemption. Leading, too, to faith, another of the great themes. Finding peace, if not solace or answers, face-down in prayer. 

Who is the kite runner of the title? Hassan, the hair-lipped boy, of course. But also, as the final pages show, Amir, his own upper lip now cleft--the result of a terrible, nearly fatal beating--Amir, broken, hobbled, but also healed, and forgiven, is the kite runner.