the-kiterunner.docx

杨莉莉 英语 12-03 541208010324
The Kite Runner
Khaled Hosseini (born March 4, 1965) is a novelist and physician originally from Afghanistan. He is currently living in the United States, where he is a citizen. His 2003 debut novel, The Kite Runner, was an international bestseller, selling in more than 12 million copies worldwide. His second, A Thousand Splendid Suns, was released on May 22, 2007. In 2008, the book was the bestselling novel in the UK (as of April 11, 2008), with more than 700,000 copies sold.
Hosseini was born in Kabul where his father worked for the Afghanistan Foreign Ministry. In 1970, Hosseini and his family moved to Tehran, Iran, where his father worked for the Embassy of Afghanistan. In 1973, Hosseini's family returned to Kabul, and Hosseini's youngest brother was born in July of that year.
In 1976, Hosseini's father obtained a job in Paris, France and moved the family there. They chose not to return to Afghanistan because PDPA had seized power through a bloody coup in April 1978. Instead, in 1980 they sought political asylum in the United States and made their residence in San Jose, California.
Hosseini graduated from Independence High School in San Jose in 1984 and enrolled at Santa Clara University, where he earned a bachelor's degree in biology in 1988. The following year, he entered the University of California, San Diego, School of Medicine, where he earned his M.D. in 1993. He completed his residency in internal medicine at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles in 1996. He practiced medicine until a year and a half after the release of The Kite Runner.
Hosseini is currently a Goodwill Envoy for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). He lives in Northern California with his wife, Roya, and their two children.
When Khaled Hosseini was a child, he read a great deal of Persian poetry as well as Persian translations of novels ranging from Alice in Wonderland to Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer series. Hosseini's memories of peaceful pre-Soviet era Afghanistan, "I have very fond memories of my childhood in Afghanistan" as well as his personal experiences with Afghanistan's Hazara people, led to the writing of his first novel, The Kite Runner. One Hazara man, named Hossein Khan, worked for the Hosseinis when they were living in Iran. When Khaled Hosseini was in third grade, he taught Khan to read and write. Although his relationship with Hossein Khan was brief and rather formal, Hosseini's fond memories of this relationship served as an inspiration for the relationship between Hassan and Amir in The Kite Runner.The novel was the number three best seller for 2005 in the United States, according to Nielsen BookScan. The Kite Runner was also produced as an audiobook read by the author. The Kite Runner has been adapted into a film of the same name released in December, 2007.
Hosseini's second novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns (ISBN 1-59448-950-5), the story of two women of Afghanistan, Mariam and Laila, whose lives become entwined, was released by Riverhead Books on May 22, 2007, simultaneous with the Simon & Schuster audiobook. Movie rights have been acquired by producer Scott Rudin and Columbia Pictures.
Here is how the story goes.
Amir lives with his father, in Kabul, Afghanistan. His mother, who had died during his birth, had left behind a collection of Sufi literature. From early childhood, Amir likes to read stories from her books to his servant and playmate, Hassan. While Amir is privileged and able to go to school, Hassan is busy with housework. However, in their free time they are good friends. To commemorate these happy times, Amir carves their names on a pomegranate tree.
Living in a single-parent home, Amir yearns for his father’s attention and gets jealous of Hassan when his father bestows favors on Hassan and arranged a cosmetic surgery for his harelip. Amir’s desire for his father’s affection also stems from his father’s indifference toward his son’s interest in books. When it is time for the local kite-flying contest, Amir gets excited because he knows that his father will be watching him with genuine interest.
Hassan is excited about the contest, too, and after Amir wins, Hassan runs and catches the prizewinning kite for his friend. Unfortunately, the neighborhood bully, Assef, and his companions stop Hassan and demand the kite from him. Hassan does not surrender the kite and is physically assaulted and raped by Assef. Amir sees the assault but, fearing confrontation with the bully, does nothing—an act of betrayal that will affect Amir into adulthood and forever change his relationship with Hassan.
Both Amir and Hassan know the social gap that defines their identities. In Afghan culture, Amir is a Pashtun and Hassan is a Hazara, which makes him a servant. Religious difference also sets them apart, even though they both are Muslim: Amir is Sunni, and Hassan is Shia. Pashtuns, the majority ethnic group in Afghanistan, make fun of Hazaras, a minority ethnic group, treating them as pariahs. Children taunt Hassan’s father, Ali, as “a slant-eyed donkey,” and Assef insults Hassan as a “flat-nosed” Hazara who does not belong in Afghanistan.
Amir is not disturbed with his servant-master friendship until the kite incident. Even as a twelve-year-old kid, he is old enough to know that he has not been good. Hassan’s presence reminds him of his own guilt, so he asks his father to get new servants. Baba refuses but, instead, frames Hassan, accusing him of theft; Hassan and his father leave Kabul. A few years later, because of the Russian invasion, Baba and Amir secretly leave Kabul, too. They cross the border into Pakistan after a difficult journey and emigrate to the United States.
Baba adjusts to the cultural and economic challenges of living in the United States and is happy with Amir’s educational success. Amir had majored in English to pursue a writing career, his childhood dream. On weekends, he helps his father sell at the local flea market, where he meets Soraya, the daughter of an expatriate Afghan general. Amir and Soraya soon fall in love, and Amir’s father makes lavish arrangements for a grand wedding. Baba, who has been suffering from cancer, dies one month after the wedding.
Amir and Soraya are happy together, but they remain childless for many years. Twenty years later Amir is a successful novelist in the United States. An old friend of his father, Rahim Khan, calls Amir on the phone and invites him to Pakistan. Amir meets him and soon learns that Baba had sold his home to Rahim. Rahim had then brought back Hassan and his family to live with him. Unfortunately, in Rahim’s absence, Talibs had come to the house and shot Hassan and his wife; their son, Sohrab, ended up in an orphanage.
Rahim also reveals that Hassan was actually Baba’s son, and Amir’s half-brother. Amir is outraged by this belated discovery, but he also recalls his own guilt. Thus, he embarks on a dangerous journey to Afghanistan to atone his past sins and to rescue Sohrab, his nephew.
Afghanistan is now under the oppressive control of the Taliban. After a great deal of searching, Amir meets a Talib, who agrees to arrange a meeting with Sohrab. Amir goes to the appointed place and recognizes Assef, the neighborhood bully from their younger days, who is now a Talib; Assef practically owns Sohrab. Assef says he will release Sohrab only if Amir will engage in one-on-one physical combat with him, and win. In this mismatched fight, Amir is seriously injured. Sohrab hits Assef in the eye with something fired from his slingshot, and Amir and Sohrab manage to escape.
Sohrab and Amir flee to Pakistan, and Amir is hospitalized. He plans to return to the United States with Sohrab after he recovers from his injuries, but because he is not a legal guardian of the child, he cannot obtain a U.S. visa for him. A lawyer advises Amir tolegally adopt Sohrab, it would be necessary to place Sohrab in an orphanage. When Amir reveals this plan to Sohrab, the child is devastated and feels betrayed; Amir had promised him that he would never send him to an orphanage. Sohrab attempts suicide, and Amir finds his nephew’s body in the bathroom, covered with blood. Amir screams for help and vows to become a devout Muslim if God will spare Sohrab’s life. Sohrab lives, but he no longer talks or smiles.
Finally, Amir is able to return to the United States with Sohrab after Soraya obtains a humanitarian visa for the child. The couple do their best to make Sohrab happy in his new home, and Amir forbids his father-in-law from ever referring to Sohrab as a Hazara. Later, Sohrab shows signs of a faint smile as Amir runs after a prizewinning kite.
The vision of the world that Hosseini offers is one where political and psychological identities are complex realities that individuals must navigate with nuanced understanding.  Contrary to the vision of globalization where individuals are reduced to accepting a borderless world, the modern setting is one where identity on political and personal levels are delicate.
Amir might have emigrated to America, but there is nothing absolute in his decision.  He finds himself a product of the globalized world, where one foot is in one reality and the other foot is in another. This delicate construction of identity is what drives him to return to Afghanistan.  The nation of Afghanistan is shown to be equally complex.  From ruler to ruler, ravaging destruction to ravaging destruction, Afghanistan's identity is far from clear.  Amir comes to recognize that his father holds a complex identity, while Soraya's narrative is far from clear and concise.  Even young people like Sohrab experience intricacies in the formation of their identities. The globalized world that Hosseini renders is one where modern individuals are forced to embrace complexity and ambiguity as a part of their being in the world.  It is in this regard where a statement about globalization is present.  The globalized world is far from simple and "easy." Rather, it is a series of complex and bifurcating narratives that force individuals to widen their scope of understanding and compassion as they strive to better understand one another and themselves.  This is a lesson that Amir experiences in his own development. 
The Kite Runner was published in 2003 to nearly unanimous praise. Said to be the first novel written in English by an Afghan, the novel was instantly popular. Its first printing was fifty thousand copies, it has been featured on the reading lists of countless book clubs, and foreign rights to the novel have been sold in at least ten countries.
Reviewers admired the novel for its straightforward storytelling, its convincing character studies, and for its startling account of the human toll of the violence that has accompanied Afghanistan's turbulent political scene in the last thirty years. In his review in World Literature Today, Ronny Noor remarks, "This lucidly written and often touching novel gives a vivid picture of not only the Russian atrocities but also those of the Northern Alliance and the Taliban." A brief review in Publishers Weekly credited the novel with providing "an incisive, perceptive examination of recent Afghan history and its ramifications in both America and the Middle East," and called it "a complete work of literature that succeeds in exploring the culture of a previously obscure nation that has become a pivot point in the global politics of the new millennium." The novel was noted for its detailed portrayal of a friendship between two boys that tenuously spans class and ethnic lines.
The Kite Runner is being marketed as not just the first novel by its author, Khaled Hosseini, a medical doctor, but the first novel of its kind: an Afghan novel written in English. That, however, is the least of the achievements of this accomplished if not quite flawless debut work which has been hailed as “a haunting morality tale” and “a stirring tale of loyalty and betrayal.” Despite being occasionally melodramatic and overly symmetrical, The Kite Runner is a modestly told, quietly ambitious, story of its narrator- protagonist’s journey from his rather comfortable life in Kabul in the 1970’s to his and his father’s fleeing the country in 1981 and beginning life anew as struggling immigrants in Fremont, California, and, following marriage and the publication of his own first novel, his fateful return to Taliban-run Afghanistan in 2001, where he will atone for a past wrong.
Hosseini successfully sketches not just his characters and their complex social situation, but more importantly the psycho-pathology of their relationship: the petty cruelties that privilege invites, the risk of these escalating into betrayals with far-reaching consequences, and the way loving devotion can become masochistic submission. Hosseini proves especially adept in placing Amir’s story in the larger Afghan context and in making each an allegory of the other. And while his taking his story just past September 11, 2001, seems forced, more an editorial decision than an authorial choice, subsequent events make The Kite Runner not only more timely but more necessary as American interest shifts from Afghanistan to Iraq.
Perhaps what garnered Hosseini's first novel, The Kite Runner, so much early praise, aside from the political relevance of its subject matter when the book was published in 2003, is its successful intertwining of the personal and the political. The novel has an ambitious agenda: to sketch the maturation of its protagonist from a callow boy beguiled by mythical stories of heroes and to portray the political situation of contemporary Afghanistan. The novel begins to show how the personal and the political affect one another through the peculiar relationship between Amir and Hassan. Indeed, James O'Brien, in his review in the Times Literary Supplement, argues, "this muddled, unbalanced and ultimately tragic relationship" between the privileged Amir and the servant Hassan "lying at the heart of The Kite Runner and echoing the betrayals and power shifts that begin to shape the country shortly after the story begins." Through the course of the novel, Amir's personal quest takes him on a decades-long journey from his birth country to the United States and finally back to his country of origin. In passing through this transforming crucible, Amir not only atones for past personal failings but also embraces a hopeful ideal of citizenship capable of upholding principles of liberty and human rights even in the face of repressive, fascist systems.
While the dynamics of these relationships remain central to the story, in later chapters, the political events outside the limits of the family circle propel the story's action. The first hint of this transition occurs when Amir and Hassan have an encounter with a violent older boy named Assef, who wants to persecute Hassan for being a Hazara. Assef, who believes Hitler was an idea