Thoughts After Reading "A Thousand Splendid Suns"

OK, so I cried at the end, I admit. Hosseini finally got to me, a bit shamelessly, but I think Mariam deserved the attention she finally got, albeit belatedly. 

Reading this novel was a really strange experience for me. I found myself getting really annoyed with the author. When I got to the part where Mariam refused to see her father and tore up his letter without reading it, I actually got angry. This was after the scene where Mariam and Rasheed go to all the trouble of walking to a hotel and borrowing a phone to try and call Jalil (Mariam's father) to ask for financial help--to keep the family from starving--it's a big build-up, and you think, finally, maybe at last, these poor wretches will get some help, only to find out that Jalil is dead and gone, and that whole segment where the reader clings to a little hope for some sort of relief was for naught. 

Angry at the author for manipulating me into a false hope? 

I've never read a novel where I actually found myself wanting to pray for the protagonists. Pray for a character in fiction? How bizarre is that? Yet that's how I felt for Mariam and Laila when they were about to run away from Rasheed. You just knew this wasn't going to be easy in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. I walked away from the book, dreaded starting up again. And of course, I was right, it didn't go well for these women. 

Nothing, it seemed, would go right, especially for Mariam. 

Angry at the author because he seemed determined to make life as miserable for these women as he possibly could. Unrelenting sorrow, unrelenting humiliation. Like a cruel, sadistic puppeteer, he never let up. 

But perhaps that was his point. He pulled back the veil that shrouds western eyes from the cruelty of the Taliban, the indignities women especially but men as well experience in these horribly oppressive societies. 

Reading this novel made me so thankful for freedoms I barely think of as freedom: freedom to step outside my door, get in my car, run a quick errand, wear what I want, say what I think, watch and read and write and wear and eat and sleep when and where and what I want. 

Thankful for my beautiful America. 

I did cry at the end, for Mariam, a sad, wretched and, ultimately, heroic woman.

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.