Girl's Book Club has been over for a while. I had hoped it would go for a whole year, but we did manage to make it at least 6 months. The biggest struggle was finding time to meet with all our busy schedules conflicting all the time. So, I'm going to try and post about the rest of books we did read after February. The first of which, was The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini (2003). This one was a March and April book because The Vagrant spilled over into March a little.
It's been months since I read this book, so writing about it is going to be interesting...
The very start of the book alludes to an incident that happened in the winter of 1975, but the details are not revealed. It then immediately starts building the relationship between main character, Amir, and his servant and best friend, Hassan. The boys are of different social classes, but still friends. Both boys have lost their mothers, but only Amir and his father's relationship is strained because of this. The tension between Amir and his father is a constant theme throughout the whole book and seems to dictate many of Amir's actions as he tries to impress and win his father's love throughout his life. This theme of having to "win" his father's love is a major factor in the two big plot points of the novel.
The first climactic turning point comes during the winter of 1975; for which the whole first part of the book builds up to. The character- and relationship-building all make sense once the incident takes place. In Kabul there is annual kite fighting tournament and Amir vows to win it for his father. After Amir cuts down the last kite, Hassan runs it down for him to take the kite as a trophy. But this is when we learn that Amir "sacrifices" Hassan and their friendship in the first major step to try and win his father's love. I am going to leave the details of that plot point as is, because any more detail would be MAJOR SPOILERS. And that's not cool.
What happens in that moment, and the aftermath, changes the relationships of all the characters in the book. Amir fails to make amends, and so Hassan and his father, Ali, leave the family shortly thereafter. It then cuts to 5 years later, and Amir and his father find themselves fleeing Afghanistan as the Russians invade in 1980. In America, years pass by, Amir's father gets sick (cancer), Amir marries an Afghan girl and she helps him take care of his dying father. At this point, there a glimpses that his and Amir's relationship might be mended, if only lightly. Amir and his wife, Soraya, have infertility troubles and in 2001 he receives a troubling call from his father's oldest friend in Pakistan that "there is a way to be good again".
The next part of the novel reveals lots of secrets that had been kept from Amir his whole life and they all lead up to the second climax of the story. Amir goes to Pakistan, and then back to Kabul to rescue an orphan boy. At this point, the Taliban have taken over in Afghanistan, and Amir describes being a "tourist in his own country." He risks his safety and life to find this boy that he has been tasked with rescuing. Everything comes to a head when he finds the boy and takes a severe beating, all in the effort to get him out of country and back to America. There would be MORE SPOILERS if I went into any more detail than that. Read the book to find out!
I can say that the book has relatively happy ending and, that as a whole, I enjoyed the book. I did find parts hard to relate to due to the cultural differences and the majority of the book being set in Afghanistan. But aside from that, I do recommend the read. The author does a good job of explaining things that may not be familiar to the general reader. I appreciated that I didn't have to look up too many things online to know what was going on in certain instances. The story has some twists and unexpected surprises that were page-turners when I came upon them. However, I would have liked a little more closer at the end. With it being a standalone, it didn't lend itself well as one of those books with ambiguity at the end.
__________________________________________
I also watched the 2007 movie The Kite Runner earlier this week in preparation for writing this post. The movie was just over 2 hours long, which I thought was a bit much, but I guess to try and fit in all the major plot points it would have to be a little on the longer side. More often than not, movies with this type of subject matter are 1 hour 30 min, maybe 1 hour 45 min. But it was a book adaptation, so.
The movie starts in the middle of the book and uses the first part of the book as more like a flashback. I got about ten minutes into it and realized that the majority of the movie was going to require subtitles and the one I had didn't have subtitles. I had to switch to Netflix so that I knew what everyone was saying. Now, this gave me some respect for the filmmakers, because they didn't just make everyone speak English, they actually kept all the parts in Afghanistan, and where appropriate, all in Farsi. Props to them for that!
I was surprised to find that the film didn't change the narrative of the first major plot twist that took place in 1975. It happens the same in both book and movie. I was sure they would have changed it due to the nature of what takes place. Again, props for that. However, the second one, was less intense in the movie than in the book. The book had me engrossed in what was happening, but the movie fell a little flat in those scenes. I also didn't like how the movie took out how much effort and struggle Amir went through to get the orphan boy back to America. I felt that part of the ending was crucial to show how much the characters had changed.
Still have three more Book Club books to post about... and all the rest of my upcoming ones from my Extended Reading Challenge! At least all the book clubs ones are read and I'm not adding to that struggle. Which is all too real right now. Things got busy again at work, which is making finding time for reading a little hard. *Phew* I will get things read, I promise!
No comments:
Post a Comment