'Kite Runner' gives voice to silent Afghans

"Kite Runner" by Khaled Hosseini is one of the rare books that stays with the reader long after the final page. Hosseini's first novel puts a human face on the names and places that have been splashed across newspaper front pages since Sept. 11. Hosseini manages to breathe life into cities that most people only hear of when soldiers are chasing the remnants of the Taliban.\nThe book brings together the past and present of Afghanistan as it is, without presenting itself as a foreign book. The first Afghan book written in English, the novel is written with familiar rhythms found in other American novels. There are traditional Afghan events and Farsi words interspersed in the story, but they are so well described to the reader that they illuminate the story instead of adding confusion.\nHosseini begins his novel in the relatively stable years of the 1970s, before the USSR invaded Afghanistan, touching off the events that led to the rise of the Taliban. The primary focus is on unlikely friends: Amir, the privileged son of a Kabul merchant and Hassan, the hare-lipped son of Amir's father's servant. Amir is a voracious reader, a member of the privileged class and a Sunni Muslim. Hassan is illiterate, a member of the despised Hazara minority and a Shi'a Muslim. However, the two boys find joy together telling stories, exploring Kabul's markets and running kites in the annual tournament.\nIt is this tournament where the story turns; Amir and Hassan are competing in the kite-running tournament, where Kabul's children compete with paper and wood kites, attempting to cut each other's kite strings with their own, which are covered in ground glass. As Amir and Hassan are about to triumph, a group of neighborhood thugs commit a horrific act, changing their relationship forever.\nYears pass, and Amir and Hassan drift further and further apart. Amir and his father flee to the United States when the Soviets invade Afghanistan, while Hassan and his father remain in Afghanistan. As Amir and his father settle in the United States, they join a makeshift Afghani community, continuing their traditions and adjusting to a new land and language together. Amir marries the daughter of another Afghani and seems to move on from Kabul, though Amir's thoughts often wander to his childhood friend left behind.\nA phone call from Pakistan brings Amir back to the land of his birth. The Taliban have changed the face of Afghanistan dramatically, and Amir's chosen task leads to a dramatic rescue. Family secrets are revealed, and the full extent of the relationship between Amir and Hassan is discovered.\nThe relationships between father and son, human and country, and god and human are sensitively explored throughout the novel. The fragility of these relationships and the complex factors that change them irrevocably, are excellently probed by the author, who shows a maturity in his writing far beyond what would be expected of a first time novelist.