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Topic: Book Review of "The Kite Runner" by Khaled Hosseini

This book review summarizes the plot of The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. It describes how the story follows Amir who betrays his childhood friend Hassan. Amir lives with guilt for decades until he is called back to Afghanistan to seek redemption. The review praises the novel for providing insight into Afghan culture and highlighting the human struggles that transcend cultural differences. It concludes by noting the story offers a message of hope through its themes of overcoming evil with good.

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Chayan Sen
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74 views3 pages

Topic: Book Review of "The Kite Runner" by Khaled Hosseini

This book review summarizes the plot of The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. It describes how the story follows Amir who betrays his childhood friend Hassan. Amir lives with guilt for decades until he is called back to Afghanistan to seek redemption. The review praises the novel for providing insight into Afghan culture and highlighting the human struggles that transcend cultural differences. It concludes by noting the story offers a message of hope through its themes of overcoming evil with good.

Uploaded by

Chayan Sen
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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TOPIC: BOOK REVIEW OF “THE KITE RUNNER” by Khaled Hosseini

NAME: CHAYAN SEN

ROLL: 19 PGDM-BHU020

SECTION: B

SUBJECT: BUSINESS COMMUNICATION II

SUBMITTED TO: PROF. KAPIL PANDLA

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BOOK REVIEW

Name of the Book: The Kite Runner

Author: Khaled Hosseini

Publication: Riverhead Books

Pages: 337

This story is based on an Afghan boy Amir who betrays his best friend Hasan at the age of 12. After that
he lives with this guilt for a long time thus suffering and being deeply in pain and always wanting to
compensate himself the betrayal. The story is set during the rule of Zahir Shah who ruled Afghanistan.
Amirs’s father is a very wealthy and successful man in Kabul, Afghanistan. Amir’s family lives with
servants, Ali and his son, Hassan. Both Hassan and Amir were of the same age and thus were best
friends. Amir and Hassan were best of friends but things didn’t go well within them at least from Amir’s
point of view. In school the classes separated the boys as did tribe and religion. Hassan was poor and
belonged to the Shia category whereas Amir was rich and Sunni. Hassan and his father Ali were from
Harara tribe and people (generally the higher castes) considered them as inferior people. But Amir’s
father loved and adored Hassan and considered Ali as his best friend. Amir was jealous of Hassan as
because he possessed many characteristics that his father admired. During a crisis when Hassan was
attacked by other Pashtuns boys, members of the Sunni class, Amir didn’t come to help Hassan but he
also allows him to be brutally abused. He was in shame as because he realized that he did not help his
friend due to the reason that was jealous of him as well as he was being cowardly. Soon his own shame
drives him nearly crazy and in anguish to end his pain, he sets Hassan and his father up for a shame so
great they have to leave the home, which will seemingly free Amir of his problem. But this further
treachery doesn’t end the shame, but intensifies it. Due to the political scenario and war in Afghanistan
both Amir and his father had to move to Fremont, California in a neighborhood which had a significant
Afghan immigrant community. Ali and Hasan had no such options and thus they had to remain back in
Afghanistan. After more than 20 years later Rahim Kahn, who was a close friend of Amir and was closest
friend of his father , contacts him to come back to Pakistan, where he has taken refuge, and to patch up
with Hassan and thus proving that he could be a better person as because Kahn knows everything that
Amir has done to Hassan. Amir realizes he has to answer this call, and goes back to redeem himself.

Through the novel the reader the readers are given a detailed picture of general pattern of Afghan life and
politics is the past 40 years. The Story has a theme of Betrayal, redemption and guilt but also the author
treat them with sensitivity and power so that the readers can feel the depth of Amir’s Weakness and the
horror of his deeds. But the fact that the story is set inside Afghan culture and most of it taking place in
Afghanistan made the book a great one for me. It is so powerful because it points up the basic
humanness of us all. Before this novel I had never given Afghanistan much thought, following only the
broadest patterns of its political history in the past 20 years. But Hosseini forces us to see the Afghans to
be like everyone else – humans, complex, both defined and crippled by tradition, but no more or less so
than anyone else. The novel profoundly enriches me in further insight to the unity of the human species,
and the struggles, even agony, of going forward in life. Hassan is too decent person his only problem was

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his excessive servility. The cultural setting such that in 20th century Afghanistan his respect and
politeness to his masters is honorable and believable but it is the cultural setting which makes the book
so highly rated.

There is a lot of differences between Amir and Hassan but they deeply share the fact that they are
Afghans. We can also see that when Amir returned after 20 years to Afghanistan, the driver who was also
a Hazara can’t understand the reason for Amir’s going back. Amir talked about the fact that he is an
Afghan by heart and wants to go back to see his native land. I am deeply challenged by the view, which
seems quite true. Majorly it is the power and money that divides people primarily but other factors like
race, caste, tribal membership are also the factors but still to me it is generally the wealth and money.
After Amir’s marriage he and his wife try to have children but can’t, even after significant medical
consultations and tests, they finally think about adoption. But his wife’s father won’t hear of it saying that
they are Afghans and not Americans.

Once setting that I was completely amazed was after living in California two years, one day Amir’s father
just goes crazy in the local convenience store run by some Vietnamese immigrants. Amir rushes in and
calms his father down, apologizes to the people and says he will take his father home and come back to
pay for the damages, it turns out the dispute was because for the first time in these two years his father
didn’t have the cash and wanted to write a check. However, the owner asked for ID. This made Amir’s
father angry and the author also reveals that back in Kabul when the family servant Ali would go to the
store to buy things he would take a stick off the tree and the shop owner would simply make notches in
the stick to indicate the various debts and every now and again his father would go in and settled up the
debt of the notches. Thus, after dealing with these folks for two years he became furious to be asked for
identification. The hardships of the Afghan people are revealed in passages of power and brutality and
especially the long scene of when Amir and his father are being smuggled out of Afghanistan to Pakistan
over the Khyber Pass – an experience which is convincing, vivid, terrifying, and sickening.

But I think the best bit about the kite runner is its sense of fate and justice, of good overcoming evil in the
end. Without giving away the ending, Amir ends up back in Afghanistan and makes a very different set of
sacrifices in order to set things straight. The final chapter of the book has a very deep message that could
be interpreted differently by different readers, but personally I feel that it offers a small sense of hope for
both the future of its characters, and perhaps for war-torn Afghanistan as well.

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