“It was only a smile, nothing more. It didn't make everything all right. It didn't make ANYTHING all right. Only a smile. A tiny thing. A leaf in the woods, shaking in the wake of a startled bird's flight. But I'll take it. With open arms. Because when spring comes, it melts the snow one flake at a time, and maybe I just witnessed the first flake melting.”
The two childhood friends Amir and Hassan grow up together in Kabul in the seventies. Their bond is strong: they share many passions, among which the love for fantasy stories, books and kite fighting. One subtle difference shapes their existence: Amir is Pashtun (an Iranian ethnic group native to Central Asia) while Hassan is Hazara (the principal ethnic group of Afghanistan, often persecuted by Pashtuns). The book revolves around the story of their friendship. It is an emotionally complex story which reaches its culmination on the day of the twelfth birthday of Amir. On that day, the city of Kabul hosts the annual kite-fighting tournament, and that year the two friends are really motivated to win after the many failures of the previous years. After few hours of fighting, their kite is the only one left flying victorious in the sky. Hassan, the great kite runner, runs after the last cut kite to bring it back home as a winning trophy. Unfortunately, the destroyed kite belongs to a group of bully Pashtun boys who surround Hassan, beat and rape him before surrendering their defeated kite to him. Amir, who followed the loyal friend at a distance, covertly assists to his rape, incapable of intervening to save him. This secret moment breaks indelibly the deep bond of the two friends, and will remain forever imprinted in Amir’s memory, hunting him for years. In 1979, the Soviet Union invades Afghanistan, and in 1981 war breaks out in the country. This turmoil is the turning point of Amir and Hassan’s friendship: they are physically separated and will never see each other again. Amir and his father flee to the US, Hassan and his father remain in Afghanistan. Life in the US is not easy for Amir and his father: they are political refugees who try to keep their Afghan traditions alive and cope with the strong feeling of nostalgia for their homeland. They find comfort in the small community of Afghan people in the city where they live, with whom they start to get involved. Amir has more success than his father in building his new American life. He graduates from university and marries an Afghan woman in their community. However, the weight of his secret becomes heavier with the years and prevents him from making peace with his past. One day, he receives a phone call which brings him back to Afghanistan. He is asked to save a child, the child of Hassan called Sohrab, who was orphaned. Amir interprets this call as a sign from the passed away friend Hassan and does not hesitate to rescue the child and bring him back with him to the US. Once back to the US, Sohrab is apathetic and blank, closed in on himself because hurt too many times by the violence and cruelty of men. Amir and his wife adopt him as their own child, try to gain his trust and make him feel at home, but Sohrab does not change. He seems to have lost his interest in the world, in life. One day though, while in a park, Amir sees a group of Afghan children kite fighting and joins them. He is running laughing with a kite when he sees a small shy smile appearing on Sohrab’s face and a feeble light sparkling again in his eyes.
Khaled Hosseini is an Afghan-American novelist who wrote this book in 2003. The overwhelming story of Amir is a first-person narrative which captivated me from the first page. With a lump in my throat, I read the book in only three evenings and needed a break afterwards to fully process its dramatic story, which makes you mull over many different themes. A light of positivity emerges at the very end: the feeble smile of Sohrab is like an explosion of hope and it symbolizes that, under the right loving circumstances, trust towards the world can be restored after many ill-treatments and violence.