I enjoyed...

I see no point in writing negative reviews and I'm definitely not the best one to give you culture tips for the latest and greatest. I'm also very busy with my work and reading or movies are like a candy for my brain. I look forward to them, I absorb them with my entire attention and I savor them for a long time afterwards. Here I offer my opinion on those I consider worth your time, because they were worth mine.

Khaled Hosseini - The Kite Runner (April 3, 2006)

I didn't search for this book, I found it me. Someone left a pile of books for Jim to read in our living room and I found it next to my chair on the side table. I opened it and couldn't stop. If a quality of books can be measured by how many times they make me cry, this is a winner. I admit it just blew me away. But I probably cried in the places Khaled wouldn't expect me to.

Khaled Hosseini is not a cheap tear-jerker, he's just a good writer. This book is mostly set in Afghanistan and although he does briefly touch on the crimes of Taliban or the distruction of the city of Kabul and its society, these parts are not the ones that made me leap out of my chair and go close myself in the bedroom. There parts we know, we saw them over and over on TV, served to us together with our dinners.

The magic of art is in its symbolism and this book is pearced with it. There is the obvious symbolism, the intended, which, if overdone, feels tacky. Hosseini has masterfully danced on the edge of it. At some point, he said: "what most non-Afghans would have seen as improbable coincidence ... such absurdity was commonplace." This, to me, explained a great deal. It said: "OK guys, this book may be so full of symbolism it's nearly tacky, but get over it, Afghanistan IS full of symbolism and, for that matter, all of life is, only some people in the western hemisphere choose not to see it." I've had so much "improbable coincidence" in my own life, that I can just go ahead and take his story at a face value - here it is, why not?

Then there is the second symbolism, the unintended. There is me, the reader or viewer, my own story reveals itself in bits and pieces of someone else's book, art or film. I see things that the author didn't put in, or didn't know he did. My friend Marie, an artist, regularly experiences situations where complete strangers "explain" to her, what she drew. What came to her as part of a mixed fantasy, comes to them as a clear picture - they already had several pieces of a puzzle and hers just fits in. This was my experience with this book.

I've picked it up not out of interest in Afghanistan, but because my recently re-discovered horoscope said I should like "all things about flying including kites". And, in fact, I am interested in kites and I knew about the Asian tradition of kite fights before I started reading this book. I knew it from books about Tibet. And so, I learned the details of kite fights and kite running. But I also found a story of a boy struggling to be a writer, misunderstood, confused in his emotions and it rang true. It was getting close to the bone.

But The Kite Runner is a story of a betrayal, of personal failure, of weakness. This, to me was a completely new ground, I'm a fighter by default and in stress, I'm likely to act before I think, rather than be cautious or run. So, I found myself soaking in the very thought of what it's like to betray someone we value and then deal with those demons in our heads. And with it, as a second and perhaps unintended symbolism, I found myself understanding the myriads of ways we tend to betray ourselves, our inner core, the best friend of all, the one we should love the most, but treat like a servant. This may have been Khaled's "background message", but it may have not. It's more likely something I was ready to understand and his book showed me the mirror. This it the true power of art.

This story has a major plot twist in nearly every chapter. It held me breathless until the very end and every time, I thought I had it figured out, I was rather sure that things will go this way or that, Khaled Hosseini just kicked the legs from under my little inventive writer's brain. I always thought: "OK, Khaled, you got me, I had NO idea what you were after." Yet, like in every good story, there is a light of hope, a mini-redemption at the end, that makes it worth it. Not a happy end, not fireworks and music, but little smile which makes all the difference.

This book ultimately made me understand more about Afghanistan than any press photo exhibition, documentary or evening news show. Jim always says "If you want to understand the South, watch Gone with the Wind." This is equally powerful, but very present. These stories are happening today and I'm just lucky to have been born here, to have escaped communism, to have found the right people in the right moments. But Khaled knows all about improbable accidents, he's my kind of man.