And now? I have only read Khaled Hosseini's: The Kite Runner and John Grisham's: The broker. Wow, look at that, both starts with 'the'. I absolutely loved the former, the latter on the other hand, not so, i'll get to the reason soon. Now, The kite runner is a beautifully crafted novel. Every sentence is like a stanza from a poem, but at the same time it tugs at your heartstrings as your able to connect to it emotionally. It revolves around the narrator Amir and his playmate and servant, Hassan and a lot of other supporting characters. It is set in the time before Afghanistan is as anything as it is now. Back in 1963. Its a poignant tale i would say. One of my favourite is when the father of the protagonist tells me about what is sin:
"Now, no matter what the mullah teaches, there is only one sin, only one. And that is theft. Every other sin is a variation of theft. Do you understand that?"
When the protagonist says no, he continues:
"When you kill a man, you steal a life. You steal his wife's right to a husband, rob his children of a father. When you lie, you steal someone's right to the truth. When you cheat, you steal the right to fairness. Do you see?"
other excerpts:
I watched him fill his glass and wondered how much time would pass before we talked again the way we just had. Because the truth of it was, i always felt like Baba hated me a little. And why not? After all, I had killed his beloved wife, his beautiful princess, hadn't I? The least i could have done was to have had the decency to have turned out a little more like him. But i hadn't tuned out like him. Not at all.
That same night, I wrote my first short story. It took me thirty minutes. It was a dark little tale about a man who found a magic cup and learned that if he wept into the cup, his tears turned into pearls. But even though he had always been poor, he was a happy man and rarely shed a tear. So he fund ways to make himself sad so that his tears could make him rich. As the pearls piled up, so did his greed grow. The story ended with the man sitting on a mountain of pearls, knife in hand, weeping helplessly into a cup with his beloved wife's slain body in his arms.
I shook Hassan awake and asked him if he wanted to hear a story.
After Hassan reads the story:
"Some day, Inshallah, you will be a great writer", Hassan said. "And people all over the world will read your stories".
"But will you permit me to ask a question about the story?" he said shyly.
"Of course"
"Well..." he started, broke off.
"Tell me, Hassan," I said. I smiled, though suddenly the insecure writer in me wasn't so sure he wanted to hear it.
"Well," he said, "if i may ask, why did the man kill his wife? In fact, why did he ever have to feel sad to shed tears? Couldn't he have just smelled an onion?
I was stunned. That particular point, so obvious it was utterly stupid, hadn't even occured to me. I moved my lips soundlessly. It appeared that on the same night I had learned about one of writings objectives, irony, I would also be introduced to one of its pitfalls: the Plot hole. Taught by Hassan of all people. Hassan who couldn't read and had never written a single word in his entire life. A voice, cold and dark, suddenly whispered in my ear, What does he know, that illiterate Hazara (lower caste, which Hassan belong to)? He'll never be anything but a cook. How dare he criticize you?
"Well," I began. But i never got to finish the sentence. Because suddenly Afghanistan changed forever.
to be continued
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