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The Kite Runner (Paperback)
칼레드 호세이니 지음 / Riverhead Books / 2004년 4월
평점 : 
구판절판
I should have written down the review right after finishing the book not to forget what I felt at that moment.
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Hmm. Kite Runner. I didn't actually expect this book to be riveting. I confronted this book from 지식인의 서재, 이미도편 and this was one of his recommending books. How cannot pick it up and read it? I mean, come on. That is THE 이미도's recommending one. As soon as seeing that book, I ordered used one through Amazon. (Actually I bought two other books with it, The Blank Slate and The Sparks of Genius.) This book totally got my interest. It blew me away.
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Isabel Allende praise this novel by saying "this is one of those unforgettable stories that stays with you for years. All the great themes of literature and of life are the fabric of this extraordinary novel; love, honor, guilt, fear, redemption." Like she said, this book has little bit of everything of our lives, but that doesn't bother me at all, because those flakes of our lives are really well fabricated in Khaled Hosseini's hand.
Sin and redemption. Amir wants to redeem himself from the sin that he observes Hassan get raped by Assef but escapes from that situation. The sin caused by fear puts him feel guilty through his whole life and makes him decide to redeem himself when Rahim Khan let him know the way to be good again. Sin is committed by fear, but redeeming himself is the process of overcoming the fear. When he confronted the fear against Assef in 1975, which I want to call first crisis, he denied Hassan by running away from the situation. However, when he met Assef after becoming an adult, which I want to call second crisis, he fought against Assef and fear. This is the only way to be good again like Rahim Khan said, and Amir totally redeems himself even adopting Hassan's child, Sohrab.
The symbolic meaning of the kite is obvious. The thread of the kite is the passage connecting past and present, and also Hassan to Sohrab. To Amir, the past has two contradicting meanings. On the one hand, that was the time he was innocent and had enjoyable time with Hassan running kites. However, on the other hand, the past was his most sinful moments relating with low self-esteem which also comes from the love that Baba showed to Hassan not to him. By fixing the latter part, he wants to be totally good man, but he becomes to find out Hassan is already dead, so he is adopting Sohrab instead.
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The book is unexpectable and enough to fascinate me. If I think about Afghanistan, I automatically relate it to some kinds of malecious terrorists, but there are children who are just like any other children in all over the world. Even though I have an interest in Middle East history, meeting Afghanistan by novel is another exotic experience. I might read Khaled Hosseni's another famous novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns.