Word: hosseinis
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...shrine. Again the mournful chanting, and the whipping begins, blades flashing in the sun. The air is thick with the metallic edge of fresh blood. It is as much a public spectacle as a demonstration of faith. "Everyone who watches is mourning for Hussein as well," says Ali Hosseini, an 18-year-old who has just pulled a black T-shirt over his lacerated back. Slowly the faded cotton darkens with blood. "Their presence gives us power." Indeed, the presence of an audience appears to egg on the penitents. The strikes are harder in the presence of video cameras...
Monday, April 11. Khaled Hosseini reads from The Kite Runner. 6 p.m., Cambridge YMCA. Admission free...
...symbolic of the Taliban's fall than the appearance of a forbidden kite in the skies over Kabul. Breathless news accounts heralded it as a harbinger of Afghanistan's rebirth; the killjoy Talibs were gone and music, which they had also banned, played at their wake. But in Khaled Hosseini's debut novel, The Kite Runner, this symbol of liberation serves only to remind Afghan refugee Amir of a past he has desperately tried to escape. Exiled to San Francisco, Amir revisits that past in a series of flashbacks set amidst Afghanistan's war-wracked history. What begins...
...athletic, courageous Hassan. Angry and frustrated, he plays cruel jokes on his friend, guiltily justifying them on the basis of Hassan's low status: "Because history isn't easy to overcome. I was a Pashtun and he was a Hazara, and nothing was ever going to change that." Hosseini deftly turns Amir's struggle with race into a parable for Afghanistan. Amir's prejudices contribute to his downfall, much as the Afghans' rigid adherence to tribalism led to the country's implosion after the Soviet withdrawal...
...times, the book suffers from relentless earnestness and somewhat hackneyed descriptions. But Hosseini has a remarkable ability to imprison the reader in horrific, shatteringly immediate scenes?not least the incident in which Hassan is violated. The result is a sickening sensation of complicity. Like Amir, the reader watches the suffering and does nothing. Hosseini turns that shared guilt into a subtle condemnation of a world that watched the rape of Afghanistan?first by the Soviets, then by regional warlords and the Taliban. True evil, he suggests, comes when good people allow bad things to happen...