The Kite Runner

"I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded, not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering it things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night."

This is the novel that I saw in every bookshelf in every liberal Norwegian's home. The novel people with coffees and cigarettes read at bus-stops. The novel I had decided to dislike and never read, because to me it was a symbol of the guilty liberal conscience of Western Europe.

And then I had to read it for school.

Yes, it's about Afghanistan. It's topical, it's melodramatic, it can be used both as an argument for NATO's intervention and against the growing islamophobia on both sides of the European political spectrum.

It is also a story built on the thematic. The novel I read is about guilt, atonement, nostalgia, love, culture, morality, class and war. Especially fascinating for me was the epic conflict between Amir and Assef, the coward and the fearless, lover and fighter, creator and destroyer. This story plays out on the individual level, but I find it tempting to see it as part of a larger political context. Khaled Hosseini might have meant to write a story about a group of characters from, as any debutant author is prone to do, a culture or society he is very familiar with. Then again, these characters may be Hosseini's attempt to give a close-up of what Westerners can only experience through the media. The fate of the pure and honest Hassan echoes the fate of Afghanistan. Hosseini might have meant to say that the country was, to put it bluntly, raped by extremists and abandoned by the privileged elite.

The quote that I found most poignant comes from the very end of the novel. Amir contemplates whether forgiveness is a force of its own, a revelation or revolution that causes dramatic change, or simply the exit of the pain caused by the action forgiven. There is no way of explaining the quote other than paraphrasing it, as its meaning is clear and concise. While the war against the Taliban is as of yet still raging, it is not too early for the Afghan people to consider how best to rebuild and heal their torn and tattered nation.