The Kite Runner is the debut novel of Afghan-American author Khaled Hosseini. Published in 2003 by Riverhead Books, it tells the story of Amir, a young Afghan boy from Wazir Akbar Khan, Kabul. The story is set against a backdrop of tumultuous events, beginning with the collapse of Afghanistan's monarchy and the Afghan conflict that sparked shortly thereafter, with a particular focus on the Soviet–Afghan War and the exodus of Afghan refugees, as well as the rise of the Taliban regime.
Hosseini has commented that he considers The Kite Runner to be a father–son relationship story, emphasizing the familial aspects of the narrative, an element that he continued to use in his later works. Themes of guilt and redemption feature prominently in the novel, with a pivotal scene depicting an act of sexual assault inflicted upon Amir's friend Hassan, which Amir fails to prevent, and which ends their friendship. The latter half of the book centers on Amir's attempts to atone for this transgression by rescuing Hassan's son two decades later.
The Kite Runner became a bestseller after being printed in paperback and was popularized in book clubs. It appeared on the New York Times best-seller list for over two years, with over seven million copies sold in the United States. Reviews were generally positive, though parts of the plot drew significant controversy in Afghanistan. A number of adaptations were created following publication, including a 2007 film of the same name, several stage performances, and a graphic novel. The novel is also available in a multi-CD audiobook narrated by the author.
Plot
Part I
Amir, a well-to-do Pashtun boy, and Hassan, a Hazara boy who is the son of Ali, Amir's father's live-in servant, spend their days kite fighting in the hitherto peaceful city of Kabul. Hassan is a successful "kite runner" for Amir; he knows where the kite will land without watching it. Both boys are motherless, Amir's mother having died in childbirth, while Hassan's mother abandoned their family. Amir's father, a wealthy merchant known to Amir affectionately as Baba, loves both boys, even paying to have Hassan's cleft lip surgically corrected. When criticized by Baba for being insufficiently masculine, Amir grows jealous of Hassan, and finds a kinder fatherly figure in Rahim Khan, Baba's closest friend, who understands him and supports his interest in writing.
Assef, an older boy with a sadistic taste for violence, regularly mocks Amir for socializing with a Hazara, whose members, according to him, belong only in Hazarajat. One day, he prepares to attack Amir with brass knuckles, but Hassan defends Amir, threatening to shoot out Assef's eye with his slingshot. Assef backs off but swears to revenge.
One triumphant day, Amir wins the local kite-fighting tournament and finally earns Baba's praise. Hassan runs for the last cut kite, but encounters Assef in an alleyway. Hassan refuses to give up the kite, and Assef beats and rapes him. Amir witnesses the act but is too scared to intervene. Guilty and disturbed, Amir begins to reject Hassan, who deteriorates mentally and physically following the assault. To get rid of Hassan, Amir frames him for stealing, and Hassan falsely confesses to the crime. Though forgiven by Baba, Hassan and Ali leave for Hazarajat.
Part II In 1979, five years later, the Soviet Union militarily intervened in Afghanistan. Baba and Amir escape to Peshawar, Pakistan, and then to Fremont, California, where Baba works in a gas station. After graduating from high school, Amir takes classes at San Jose State University to develop his writing skills. Every Sunday, Baba and Amir make extra money selling used goods at a flea market in San Jose. There, Amir falls in love with fellow refugee Soraya Taheri and her family. Baba is diagnosed with terminal cancer, and dies shortly after Amir and Soraya marry. The couple is happy together, but struggle to have children.
Amir embarks on a successful career as a novelist, and he and Soraya settle in San Francisco. Fifteen years after his wedding, Amir receives a call from a dying Rahim Khan, asking Amir to visit him in Peshawar. He enigmatically tells Amir, "There is a way to be good again."
Part III From Rahim Khan, Amir learns that Hassan married and had a son, but was murdered after he refused to allow the Taliban to confiscate Baba and Amir's house in Kabul. Rahim Khan further reveals that Ali was sterile and was not Hassan's biological father. Hassan was actually the son of Sanaubar and Baba, making him Amir's half brother. Rahim Khan asks Amir to find and rescue Hassan's son, Sohrab, from an orphanage in Kabul.
Returning to Taliban-controlled Kabul, Amir learns from the orphanage that a Taliban official paid cash and forcibly took Sohrab away. He locates the Taliban official performing public executions at a football stadium, and secures a meeting at his house. There, the official is revealed to be Assef, with Sohrab deliberately taken to assault and use as a dancing boy. Assef agrees to relinquish him if Amir can escape the room alive, badly beating Amir with his brass knuckles. Sohrab intervenes, taking out Assef’s eye with his father’s slingshot, and allowing them to escape.
Amir tells Sohrab of his plans to take him back to America and possibly adopt him, but bureaucratic problems force Amir to send Sohrab to an orphanage first. Terrified and traumatized, Sohrab attempts suicide by cutting his wrists. Amir eventually manages to take him back to the United States with the help of Soraya, but Sohrab remains completely withdrawn and refuses to interact with them.
One day, Amir, Soraya, and Sohrab go to a park with other Afghans, where some are flying kites. Amir buys Sohrab a kite, and they engage in a kite fight with another boy, winning using one of Hassan’s favorite tricks. Seeing Sohrab smile for the first time, Amir runs the kite for him just as Hassan once did.
Themes
Khaled Hosseini identifies a number of themes that appear in The Kite Runner, but reviewers have focused on guilt and redemption. As a child, Amir fails to save Hassan in an act of cowardice and afterwards suffers from an all-consuming guilt. Even after leaving the country, moving to America, marrying, and becoming a successful writer, he is unable to forget the incident. Hassan is "the all-sacrificing Christ-figure, the one who, even in death, calls Amir to redemption". Following Hassan's death at the hands of the Taliban, Amir begins to redeem himself through the rescue of Hassan's son, Sohrab. Hosseini draws parallels during the search for Sohrab to create an impression of poetic justice; for example, Amir sustains a split lip after being severely beaten, similar to Hassan's harelip. Despite this, some critics questioned whether the protagonist had fully redeemed himself.
Amir's motivation for the childhood betrayal is rooted in his insecurities regarding his relationship with his father. The relationship between parents and their children features prominently in the novel, and in an interview, Hosseini elaborated:
When adapting The Kite Runner for the theatre, Director Eric Rose stated that he was drawn into the narrative by the "themes of betraying your best friend for the love of your father", which he compared to Shakespearean literature. Throughout the story, Amir craves his father's affection; his father, in turn, loves Amir but favors Hassan, going as far as to pay for plastic surgery to repair the latter's cleft lip.
Development and publication
Khaled Hosseini lived and worked as a medical internist at Kaiser Hospital in Mountain View, California for several years before publishing The Kite Runner. In 1999, Hosseini learned through a news report that the Taliban had banned kite flying in Afghanistan, a restriction he found particularly cruel. The news "struck a personal chord" for him, as he had grown up with the sport while living in Afghanistan. He was motivated to write a 25-page short story about two boys who fly kites in Kabul. Hosseini submitted copies to Esquire and The New Yorker, both of which rejected it. He rediscovered the manuscript in his garage in March 2001 and began to expand it to novel format at the suggestion of a friend. According to Hosseini, the narrative became "much darker" than he originally intended. His editor, Cindy Spiegel, "helped him rework the last third of his manuscript", something she describes as relatively common for a first novel.
As with Hosseini's subsequent novels, The Kite Runner covers a multigenerational period and focuses on the relationship between parents and their children. The latter was unintentional; Hosseini developed an interest in the theme while in the process of writing. He later divulged that he frequently came up with pieces of the plot by drawing pictures of it. For example, he did not decide to make Amir and Hassan brothers until after he had "doodled it".
Like Amir, the protagonist of the novel, Hosseini was born in Afghanistan and left the country as a youth, not returning until 2003. Thus, he was frequently questioned about the extent of the autobiographical aspects of the book. In response, he said, "When I say some of it is me, then people look unsatisfied. The parallels are pretty obvious, but ... I left a few things ambiguous because I wanted to drive the book clubs crazy." Having left the country around the time of the Soviet invasion, he felt a certain amount of survivor's guilt: "Whenever I read stories about Afghanistan my reaction was always tinged with guilt. A lot of my childhood friends had a very hard time. Some of our cousins died. One died in a fuel truck trying to escape Afghanistan [an incident that Hosseini fictionalizes in The Kite Runner]. Talk about guilt. He was one of the kids I grew up with flying kites. His father was shot." Regardless, he maintains that the plot is fictional. Later, when writing his second novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns (then titled Dreaming in Titanic City), Hosseini remarked that he was happy that the main characters were women as it "should put the end to the autobiographical question once and for all."
Riverhead Books published The Kite Runner, ordering an initial printing of 50,000 copies in hardback. It was released on May 29, 2003, and the paperback edition was released a year later. Hosseini took a year-long absence from practicing medicine to promote the book, signing copies, speaking at various events, and raising funds for Afghan causes. Originally published in English, The Kite Runner was later translated into 42 languages for publication in 38 countries. In 2013, Riverhead released the 10th anniversary edition with a new gold-rimmed cover and a foreword by Hosseini. That same year, on May 21, Khaled Hosseini published another book called And the Mountains Echoed.
Critical reception
In the first two years following its publication, over 70,000 hardback copies of The Kite Runner were sold along with 1,250,000 paperback copies. Though the book sold well in hardback, "Kite Runner's popularity didn't really begin to soar until when the paperback edition came out, which is when book clubs began picking it up." It started appearing on best seller lists in September 2004 and became a New York Times bestseller in March 2005, maintaining its place on the list for two years. By the publication of Khaled Hosseini's third novel in 2013, over seven million copies had been sold in the United States. The book received the South African Boeke Prize in 2004. It was voted the Reading Group Book of the Year for 2006 and 2007 and headed a list of 60 titles submitted by entrants to the Penguin/Orange Reading Group prize (UK).