A little bit of literature

“I became what I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid overcast day in the winter of 1975. I remember the precise moment, crouching behind a crumbling mud wall, peeking into the alley near the frozen creek. That was a long time ago, but it’s wrong what they say about the past, I’ve learned, about how you can bury it. Because the past claws its way out. Looking back now, I realize I have been peeking into that deserted alley for the last twenty-six years.

One day last summer, my friend Rahim Khan called from Pakistan. He asked me to come see him. Standing in the kitchen with the receiver to my ear, I knew it wasn’t just Rahim Khan on the line. It was my past of unatoned sins. After I hung up, I went for a walk along Spreckels Lake on the northern edge of Golden Gate Park. The early-afternoon sun sparkled on the water where dozens of miniature boats sailed, propelled by a crisp breeze. Then I glanced up and saw a pair of kites, red with long blue tails, soaring in the sky. They danced high above the trees on the west end of the park, over the windmills, floating side by side like a pair of eyes looking down on San Francisco, the city I now call home. And suddenly Hassan’s voice whispered in my head: For you, a thousand times over. Hassan the harelipped kite runner.”

Vocabulary build-up

The adjective overcast means “covered or obscured, as with clouds or mist; clouded over; gloomy; melancholy.”

The adjective unatoned means “(of sins, mistakes, faults, etc) not atoned or made amends for.”

Comments

Khaled Housseini is an Afghan-born American novelist. Hosseini grew up in Kabul; his father was a diplomat and his mother a secondary-school teacher. In 1976 he and his parents moved to Paris, where his father worked at the Afghan embassy. With the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, they found returning to their home impossible, and they moved to California, having been granted political asylum by the United States. “The Kite Runner” is his first novel. Hosseini’s “The Kite Runner” tells the story of Amir, who is also the narrator and a writer who lives in California in the present day but who grew up in the 1970s in Kabul, the privileged son of a wealthy family. Amir’s story centers on his childhood friendship with Hassan, the son of a family servant, and its subsequent dissolution. “The Kite Runner” transports readers to Afghanistan at a tense and crucial moment of change and destruction. A powerful story of friendship, it is also about the power of reading, the price of betrayal, and the possibility of redemption; and an exploration of the power of fathers over sons—their love, their sacrifices, their lies. The book was praised for its powerful storytelling, but it was, at times, dismissed by critics for elements considered melodramatic. Nonetheless, the novel soon gained wide popularity through readers’ word-of-mouth praise, and it was eventually published in more than three dozen countries; film and theater adaptations both appeared in 2007.