Warning: Don’t read it if you haven’t read the book. I talked about ending and plot below—(usually i don’t share my email with the public but thought this one is relevant, somehow.)
—-
Dear S..
…

to the Kite Runner – Though I mentioned that the book seems Vietnamese in some ways, I have decided after finishing it that it is more biblical than Islamic, as it has that Cane and Abel overtone and it works well both as a forward arc and as an appeal to western readers.

Richard Rodriguez, teaching me about essay writings, once said that when you put yourself down first, when you admit your faults, and are as hard on yourself as your critics, the reader trusts you more. You will also beat the cynics to the punch.

So I will confess as well: I wept at passages involving Hassan’s cruel fate as well, because I knew people like Hassan in Vietnam, servants’ children that I treated sometimes badly (but never as bad as Amir did, mind you) people who held honors and loyalty in their absolute – and I recognized something of my younger self in Hassan as well. Absolutely loyalty; absolute love; absolute honor. No questions ever asked. The piousness of it all once protected and insulated me am back in Vietnam, though I was always afraid for my loved ones during the war, I was also fierce in my conviction – I thought nothing of dying for country, people, family.

It was what I was taught and I knew it then as the highest act one could offer in this life, an honorable way to go. It is so close to being a fundamentalist that I kind of shudder now thinking about it.

Maybe in some ways, I still think that way, but I for all practical purposes, I have moved on, far away from all that. I am just as worldly and cosmopolitan as you who live in the Hague and speak four languages, and therefore somewhat of a loner. True cosmopolitans are the loneliest people I know because while we can identify each other as travelers – and by the traveler I suppose I mean people who are capable of crossing borders, both the kinds in the mind as well as drawn in the sand. But by being travelers, our experiences are individual and unique. We have connected on many level and alone too at the same time. We are no longer fully communally directed and more self-directed and must measure our own history in comparison and contrast with the larger one that’s sweeping over us and the ones that we enter and live in – we lost our original tribes.

I am telling you all this by a long way of saying how an Afghan Diasporic novel reads like a Vietnamese one. But if my adult life parallels to that of Amir’s, thank god I don’t have his vindictiveness as a child nor that odd weak way of backpedaling ways of his, which can be aggravating, I suppose, which makes it intriguing what he does at the end.

That said, the book to me is not that well written, and though it had moved me in many ways that many more polished novels had not, the flaws kind of irk.

But I think Hosseini could have had a smoother winding down, and here what I think the book’s weaknesses are:

1. the writing itself is simple. No fault there but the easy access makes the reader gloss over scenes rather than dwell in some of them. Some passages are beautiful and are just right but others felt are rushed and could have mined the reader’s emotional depth had it been more descriptive.

2. I agree with you that the ending is rather weak. I think the uncle in law who works for the INS is so plotted and forced that one couldn’t help but note that this was a convenient way out. It felt as if Hosseini didn’t know how to end it, and dawdled. The very end of course is beautiful and cathartic. But I kind of lost my patience a little when he was going to abandon the kid in Islamabad to an orphanage. It doesn’t sound right: the guy had an awakening, his life was saved, he risked his own life for the kid, realized his mission, and then he would do something stupid again right after by offering to break his promise – it’s a bit schizo. Maybe that’s just the way he was but it’s odd. Not that I expected him to be perfect but … it feels as if the kid didn’t attempt suicide then the ending of kite flying and all that wouldn’t work as well.

3. The fact that he became a published writer with four books under his belt was not for some reasons convincing. Part of it was that it never got played up: did his status as a writer help or hurt in some way? Might it not help to bring the kid over? In real life, a well known author w/ such a story would have The New York times doing front page on his plight – that dramatic rescue alone would win the reporter’s a Pulitzer and the kid could have flown over with two congressmen holding his hands.

4. Too well rounded: karma is not so clean and symmetrical. The hairlipped and scar I can almost accept – that Amir turned (almost literally) into Hassan not only in term of being good finally but physical attributes as well. But other part: the kid was raped by the same man who raped his father! The son uses a slingshot just like the father did to protect Amir, just like his father. It’s one too many coincidences, and so melodramatic that it feels above life and not within how reality often plays itself out.

The Cane and Abel overtone works well in the context of tribal racism and division of that region – of any region, for that matter – and the protagonist’s atonement works so well for the benefit of a western reader. But I’m also interested in hearing the Islamic critic of the story – how a Muslim might read the book. Amir after all became a pious person as well, just like Hassan, praying and believing in Allah – is this atonement in the Islamic way?

When he became pious is where I depart from identifying with the main character. I think the whole idea of believing in god, the willingness to devote oneself to him, being dependent on whether he would grant a wish to oneself is somehow troubling: a bargain with the cosmos, as it were. “I will believe in you IF you save my child.”

I think the greater challenge is to experience god in a way that has nothing to do with wish granting or miracle or bringing justice to the human scale: to come to experience god(hood) is in many ways to be free of any assumptions about god and self. To see the cosmos as it really is, with your own ego dissolved. In this sense the book is not what I would have written – even if the history of KR runs parallel to something I might write: the experience of the protagonist would be not atonement but, to some degree, enlightenment.

But I get in trouble when I talk about god or God. And the whole business about Karma needs to be discussed another day. Just landed in SF and though it’s sunny out am beat.

Let me know of your good news.

Your pal.

Andrew