How did I come to read this book, considering I am about 6 years too late in joining in any conversation about the merits of the book? Well about a couple of months ago, my girlfriend and her friend started a two-person book club and this was one of the first books that decided to read together. They both raved about it after they were through and more than once my girlfriend said I should read it because it's really good (they read A Thousand Splendid Suns too but didn't like it as much).

Ok, so while she is away on holiday in England for about 10 days, I decided to pick it up and see it for myself (after having played computer games for 8 of the 10 days that is). It started off promising, although the last lines of the first chapter: "I thought about the life I have lived until the winter of 1975 came along and changed everything. And made me what I am today." did get me cringing a little. The slight melodrama seemed more apt for pulp fiction. Still it was just two lines.

Chapter Two came and went with the equally cringe-worthy "Looking back on it now, I thnk the foundation for what happened in the winter of 1975--and all that followed--was already laid in those first words." BUM-BUM-BUM!!!! Reader be forewarned: Something important happens in the winter of 1975. Please take note of this and remember that everything changed because of winter 1975. Not summer, and not in 1978 but WINTER. 1975. WINTER.

It sort of went downhill from there. And at page 74, I put the book down, Googled to make sure I was not the only insane person in the world who thought that the book sucked, and started writing this post. The characters are cliched as heck, the plot already contrite, and the subtlety was anything but. It may have been hailed for being the first fiction book in English by an Afghan to depict Afghanistan but it seems that as a book, as literature, it has more than a few short-comings.

Does this mean I think that my girlfriend and her friend are morons for thinking it's good? Hardly. I am envious rather. Everyone takes something away from a book and evidently for them, what they came away with made them exhilarated and in awe. The last time I had that feeling from reading a book was Rushdie's Midnight's Children and that was some years ago. Obviously when I read, I read for something entirely different from them. Perhaps it's a pity that I cannot be transported into a fictional world by a book and just live in it without pointing out how the constructedness of that fictional world is working against the book in general.

So it is with some sadness that I acknowledge I don't feel the way that my girlfriend and her friend did, reading The Kite Runner. But I move on, there are loads to read and god knows I have not read anything more than a restaurant menu for quite some time now. And so I am now midway through Jose Saramago's The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, which is so dense and thick it's like eating New York Cheesecake after a two-hour long buffet. Before each bite I must sit back and rest, or else I risk ruining any enjoyment to be had from the book. I sense its greatness, not because it's difficult, but because everything in it feels right. No pretence (despite the fact that there is a ghost in there that waxes lyrical about politics and love) to be sensed, yet nothing in it can be taken at face value. I plough on.

When you are old - Yeats

To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Triumph
Anne Sexton