Review by Charles Wyrick
Years ago a friend of mine described a peculiar sensation he had while reading a book that he didn't like. He felt that he was being watched, that the author was continually peeking around a corner in order to make himself known. This image he created of the overbearing writer stuck. It resurfaced in my mind after reading Will Self's new novel "Great Apes." Self's presence is insurmountable. He gnaws at the pages and cuts peepholes through the spine. Yet unlike my friend I relish this authorial presence. I enjoy being watched.
Ironically enough "Great Apes" revolves around different types of voyeurism. It begins with Simon Dykes staring out a window watching a rowing team. Dykes is a semi-controversial painter just weeks away from exhibiting his newest work. At a midpoint in both his career and his life Simon is beginning to feel restless. Bored with the now predictable nights on the town with his young girlfriend and her friends, Dykes does not know that soon he will be the subject of another's scrutiny. Soon Dykes will be under psychiatric observation. Just as we as readers meet him, Dykes undergoes a dramatic change. After a night of heavy drinking and drug use Simon wakes up as a chimpanzee.
Using Dykes as his Gulliver, Self takes a hilarious romp through modern society. In "Great Apes" the worlds of contemporary art, academics and psychiatry fall quickly as easy prey to Self's mock sociology of chimpanzee culture. Just imagine a popular art opening crowded with chimpanzees dressed in chic chimp evening wear and you can get a peek at the novel's vision. "Great Apes" is literature's Planet of the Apes as author Self plays the role of a funhouse anthropologist, a voyeur into a world of his own warping. On waking to a world modified to satisfy chimpanzee issues, the protagonist Simon Dykes is hysterical. As readers we can only be amused. When Simon Dykes first screeches at the sight of his girlfriend's hairy chest and arms, we know we are witnessing the birth of a strange world.
What I have liked in the past in Will Self's writing is that he is blunt. In this book there is nothing easy about his characters' transformations from humanity to chimpanity. The chimpanzee world thrives on a brutal code of male supremacy. Dykes is astonished by the physicality of this society. Chimps express irritation through violent physical attacks on one another and tenderness through prolonged grooming sessions. Dykes is completely horrified by these practices. With a shrewd wit Self draws a wonderful and acerbic satire out of his character's absurd dilemma. We see chimpanzee society through the eyes of its weakest member, the spiritually weakened Dykes whose case hinges on what his psychologist sees as the completely unnatural delusion that the world should be run by humans.
There is an overreaching sense of Self's presence in these pages. He forces on us his love of the banal and the absurd. His humor is as bawdy as it is bizarre. But these profanities are not without their compliment. Self litters his work with his sublimities -- his playful yet masterful language and his gorgeous literary control. In "Great Apes" he writes with both the assertiveness of a great satirist and the dexterity of a practiced, well-tuned prose strategist. When reading "Great Apes" do not be afraid to look over your shoulder if you feel you are being watched. Try to take comfort in the intrusion because your voyeur wants to see you laugh.
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Charles Wyrick lives in Nashville and plays in the band Stella.
Showing posts with label St Yrieix book club. Show all posts
Showing posts with label St Yrieix book club. Show all posts
Monday, October 27, 2008
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
August, September, October & November Meetings
Hi Everyone in the Book Club & potential new members
The Book club will meet at the usual venue at the hotel.
Under discussion for the next few months will be:
August
Last King of Scotland
Giles Foden
September
Never Let Me go
Kazuo Ishiguro
October
Grasshopper
Barbara Vine
November
A Piano in the Pyrenees
Tony Hawkes
Reviews of the Book and information about the author are available on the St Yrieix Book club Blog. http://vernonboy.blogspot.com
Please let Pat Dixon know of your coffee/lunch requirements a few days before the meeting.
Pat Dixon ~ 0553552185
Vernon Goddard ~ 0555099490
All welcome ~ but if you are a new member, please contact us to let us know you’re joining. _________________
Gorseinonboy................
The Book club will meet at the usual venue at the hotel.
Under discussion for the next few months will be:
August
Last King of Scotland
Giles Foden
September
Never Let Me go
Kazuo Ishiguro
October
Grasshopper
Barbara Vine
November
A Piano in the Pyrenees
Tony Hawkes
Reviews of the Book and information about the author are available on the St Yrieix Book club Blog. http://vernonboy.blogspot.com
Please let Pat Dixon know of your coffee/lunch requirements a few days before the meeting.
Pat Dixon ~ 0553552185
Vernon Goddard ~ 0555099490
All welcome ~ but if you are a new member, please contact us to let us know you’re joining. _________________
Gorseinonboy................
Friday, July 18, 2008
August Meeting ~ Change of Day!!!!!!!
Please note that in August we will be meeting on Thursday 14th August at the usual time & place.
Friday, May 9, 2008
Monday, October 03, 2005
We Need to Talk about Kevin
Have put up a post on The Middle Stage about Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin. It's a book I can’t recommend strongly enough.
Update: have cross-posted the full review. Here it is:
Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin is one of the most provocative books I’ve read in a long, long time (and when you’re reading books and writing about them for a living, you learn to be chary about sweeping statements like that one; the reviewer’s jargon is already full of stock phrases. But then cliché is sometimes the only recourse). This is a story told in the form of long confessional letters written by a woman, Eva Khatchadourian, to her (presumably estranged) husband Franklin, about their son Kevin who murdered nine people in his school gym a few days before his 16th birthday. Over the course of her letters Eva looks back at her peculiar, strained relationship with her son; but she begins her story with the time when she and Franklin, both in their late 30s, decided to have a child.
In a perfect world, the most important reason – perhaps the only reason - for a couple deciding to have children would be: both of them badly want to, and feel they are ready for it. In the real world, far too often too many other factors play the decisive role. This is especially true in more conservative societies where pressure from family elders is a continuous, intrusive presence – but it holds good everywhere. The reasons can be many. Perpetuating the species – or, less nobly, having children as a means of ensuring immortality for oneself. The knowledge that they’ll talk about us when we’ve passed on (whether they say good or bad things is another matter), the same way we talk about our parents. Simple curiosity about what it might be like to hear someone calling “Momm-MEEE?” from around the corner. The dark thought that if something were to happen to your partner, you’d at least have a tangible memento. Eva’s decision ultimately rests on a combination of these.
The first 60-70 pages give us some of the starkest, most daring writing on the nature of our closest relationships, the ones we take for granted. In her letters, Eva painstakingly dissects her feelings about parenthood. She wasn’t ready, she repeatedly claims:
“At last I should come clean. It is not true that I was ‘ambivalent’ about motherhood. You wanted to have a child. On balance, I did not. Added together, that seemed like ambivalence, but though we were a superlative couple we were not the same person. I never did get you to like eggplant.”
Her descriptions of pregnancy, of the child-bearing and delivering processes, are shockingly subversive, and shockingly honest.
“Crossing the threshold of motherhood, suddenly you become social property, the animate equivalent of a public park. That coy expression ‘you’re eating for two now, dear’ is all by way of goading that your very dinner is no longer a private affair…”
And later, comparing pregnancy to infestation, to “colonisation by stealth”, as depicted in horror films like Alien and Rosemary’s Baby:
“…the host is consumed or rent, reduced to husk or residue so that some nightmare creature may survive its shell…any woman whose teeth have rotted, whose bones have thinned, whose skin has stretched, knows the humbling price of a nine-month freeloader.”
If the gestation period was a nightmare, the actual labour is worse. Finally, however, Kevin deigns to come into the world, and Eva, having heard gush-stories from friends about how parents fall instantly, irrevocably, in love with their newborns, discovers that she feels nothing for him.
“I felt…absent. I kept scrabbling around in myself for this new indescribable emotion…but no matter how I rattled around, no matter what I moved out of the way, it wasn’t there. ‘He’s beautiful,’ I mumbled; I had reached for a line from TV.”
Here, Shriver’s book takes an interesting right turn. Kevin (at least in the account of him presented us by Eva) turns out to be the kind of child who would have both Damian (the kid in The Omen) and baby Hannibal Lecter bawling for their security blankets. Importantly, this is how he is right from the outset (which means it isn’t the result of his mother’s attitude towards him). He’s positively demoniac – frighteningly precocious and aware, yet uninterested in everything; completely bereft of attachments, yet with a fearsome propensity for malice. No babysitter can handle him for any length of time. Classmates and even teachers are frightened of him for reasons that can never be properly explained. He has the power of influencing people to do things that are bad for them. Eva can see this side of him; Franklin, who truly IS in love with his child, can not.
As the years pass, Eva repeatedly questions whether she’s been a good mother but wonders if she even had an option, given her son’s nature: “After having not a child but this particular one, I couldn’t see how anyone could claim to love children in the generic any more that anyone could credibly claim to love people in a sufficiently sweeping sense as to embrace Pol Pot, Don Rickles and an upstairs neighbour who does 2,000 jumping jacks at three in the morning.”
In a desperate attempt to “understand something about my soul”, Eva has another child, against Franklin’s wishes, and this one turns out to be an angelic girl who does indeed stir the mother inside her. Her soul is safe for the time being. But now Kevin has a potential victim right under his nose.
Here, portions of the book start to read like the scripts of those horror movies about malevolent children (albeit much better written). And yet, throughout the reading process, we must be aware that we can’t blindly trust Eva’s narrative. Though there’s nothing equivocal about Kevin’s final act of destruction, there is room for ambiguities in the details that accumulate over the years. Another option presents itself: could it be that Kevin, though undoubtedly a strange, emotionless child, was never as malicious in the early stages as his mother makes him out to be? Could the real evil have resulted from his upbringing, and is this what Eva is trying to conceal (even as she repeatedly apologises for the things she does feel responsible for)?
And by the time we reach the book’s end, there’s yet another option: could Kevin have become what he is because he carries his mother’s genes? Throughout the story we’ve been presented the picture of Kevin as his father’s son, while Eva clings to her darling daughter (when Franklin and Eva decide to separate, they joke darkly about there at least being no argument over custody). But is there a bond between Eva and her son that transcends these surface appearances? The final, chilling paragraphs certainly seem to suggest so.
We Need to Talk about Kevin raises so many issues – about the nature-nurture debate, about family units made up of very different individuals who have to find a way to coexist, about upper-class hypocrisies - that it’s impossible to mention all of them here. Ultimately I have to turn to another cliché, this time from the blurb-writer’s pantheon: consider yourselves grabbed by the shoulders and told “Read this!”
We Need to Talk about Kevin
Have put up a post on The Middle Stage about Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin. It's a book I can’t recommend strongly enough.
Update: have cross-posted the full review. Here it is:
Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin is one of the most provocative books I’ve read in a long, long time (and when you’re reading books and writing about them for a living, you learn to be chary about sweeping statements like that one; the reviewer’s jargon is already full of stock phrases. But then cliché is sometimes the only recourse). This is a story told in the form of long confessional letters written by a woman, Eva Khatchadourian, to her (presumably estranged) husband Franklin, about their son Kevin who murdered nine people in his school gym a few days before his 16th birthday. Over the course of her letters Eva looks back at her peculiar, strained relationship with her son; but she begins her story with the time when she and Franklin, both in their late 30s, decided to have a child.
In a perfect world, the most important reason – perhaps the only reason - for a couple deciding to have children would be: both of them badly want to, and feel they are ready for it. In the real world, far too often too many other factors play the decisive role. This is especially true in more conservative societies where pressure from family elders is a continuous, intrusive presence – but it holds good everywhere. The reasons can be many. Perpetuating the species – or, less nobly, having children as a means of ensuring immortality for oneself. The knowledge that they’ll talk about us when we’ve passed on (whether they say good or bad things is another matter), the same way we talk about our parents. Simple curiosity about what it might be like to hear someone calling “Momm-MEEE?” from around the corner. The dark thought that if something were to happen to your partner, you’d at least have a tangible memento. Eva’s decision ultimately rests on a combination of these.
The first 60-70 pages give us some of the starkest, most daring writing on the nature of our closest relationships, the ones we take for granted. In her letters, Eva painstakingly dissects her feelings about parenthood. She wasn’t ready, she repeatedly claims:
“At last I should come clean. It is not true that I was ‘ambivalent’ about motherhood. You wanted to have a child. On balance, I did not. Added together, that seemed like ambivalence, but though we were a superlative couple we were not the same person. I never did get you to like eggplant.”
Her descriptions of pregnancy, of the child-bearing and delivering processes, are shockingly subversive, and shockingly honest.
“Crossing the threshold of motherhood, suddenly you become social property, the animate equivalent of a public park. That coy expression ‘you’re eating for two now, dear’ is all by way of goading that your very dinner is no longer a private affair…”
And later, comparing pregnancy to infestation, to “colonisation by stealth”, as depicted in horror films like Alien and Rosemary’s Baby:
“…the host is consumed or rent, reduced to husk or residue so that some nightmare creature may survive its shell…any woman whose teeth have rotted, whose bones have thinned, whose skin has stretched, knows the humbling price of a nine-month freeloader.”
If the gestation period was a nightmare, the actual labour is worse. Finally, however, Kevin deigns to come into the world, and Eva, having heard gush-stories from friends about how parents fall instantly, irrevocably, in love with their newborns, discovers that she feels nothing for him.
“I felt…absent. I kept scrabbling around in myself for this new indescribable emotion…but no matter how I rattled around, no matter what I moved out of the way, it wasn’t there. ‘He’s beautiful,’ I mumbled; I had reached for a line from TV.”
Here, Shriver’s book takes an interesting right turn. Kevin (at least in the account of him presented us by Eva) turns out to be the kind of child who would have both Damian (the kid in The Omen) and baby Hannibal Lecter bawling for their security blankets. Importantly, this is how he is right from the outset (which means it isn’t the result of his mother’s attitude towards him). He’s positively demoniac – frighteningly precocious and aware, yet uninterested in everything; completely bereft of attachments, yet with a fearsome propensity for malice. No babysitter can handle him for any length of time. Classmates and even teachers are frightened of him for reasons that can never be properly explained. He has the power of influencing people to do things that are bad for them. Eva can see this side of him; Franklin, who truly IS in love with his child, can not.
As the years pass, Eva repeatedly questions whether she’s been a good mother but wonders if she even had an option, given her son’s nature: “After having not a child but this particular one, I couldn’t see how anyone could claim to love children in the generic any more that anyone could credibly claim to love people in a sufficiently sweeping sense as to embrace Pol Pot, Don Rickles and an upstairs neighbour who does 2,000 jumping jacks at three in the morning.”
In a desperate attempt to “understand something about my soul”, Eva has another child, against Franklin’s wishes, and this one turns out to be an angelic girl who does indeed stir the mother inside her. Her soul is safe for the time being. But now Kevin has a potential victim right under his nose.
Here, portions of the book start to read like the scripts of those horror movies about malevolent children (albeit much better written). And yet, throughout the reading process, we must be aware that we can’t blindly trust Eva’s narrative. Though there’s nothing equivocal about Kevin’s final act of destruction, there is room for ambiguities in the details that accumulate over the years. Another option presents itself: could it be that Kevin, though undoubtedly a strange, emotionless child, was never as malicious in the early stages as his mother makes him out to be? Could the real evil have resulted from his upbringing, and is this what Eva is trying to conceal (even as she repeatedly apologises for the things she does feel responsible for)?
And by the time we reach the book’s end, there’s yet another option: could Kevin have become what he is because he carries his mother’s genes? Throughout the story we’ve been presented the picture of Kevin as his father’s son, while Eva clings to her darling daughter (when Franklin and Eva decide to separate, they joke darkly about there at least being no argument over custody). But is there a bond between Eva and her son that transcends these surface appearances? The final, chilling paragraphs certainly seem to suggest so.
We Need to Talk about Kevin raises so many issues – about the nature-nurture debate, about family units made up of very different individuals who have to find a way to coexist, about upper-class hypocrisies - that it’s impossible to mention all of them here. Ultimately I have to turn to another cliché, this time from the blurb-writer’s pantheon: consider yourselves grabbed by the shoulders and told “Read this!”
Marion Arnott ~ Review of "Kevin etc"
This is an uncomfortable book in many ways, exposing as it does, mercilessly and incisively, myths of family life, motherhood, childhood, social stereotypes, and murder, unthinkable, vile murder.
Eva Khatchadourian is Kevin’s mother and Franklin’s wife. Aged 16, Kevin slaughters nine people in the gym at his high school. Also his father and sister. Eva is left behind to face the law suit, the police, the battery of psychiatrists and child experts and media pundits, who all seem intent on finding out what she did wrong as blame is essential: ‘Blame confers an awesome power, and it’s simplifying…to culprits most of all.’
She writes a series of letters to her dead husband, reviewing her own mothering (scrupulously honestly and with a bitter wit that is both shocking and true), and the growing up of Kevin. With excruciating clarity, she describes her own ambivalence to Kevin before he was even born. She falls into motherhood for want of something better to do in her late thirties for want of something better to do after she notices that when she and her childless friends get together, their family conversations all revolve round elderly parents rather than an up and coming generation. Plus Franklin is keen to have children.
Of the night when Kevin was conceived, she remarks: ‘we might as well have left the door unlocked.’
A stranger has been invited in and there is no way of knowing what he/she will be like or what damage may be done.
Many aspects of the book will be familiar to mothers, harsh judgement and expectation being but two of them. Pregnant, Eva is public property, subjected to the scrutiny and criticism of others. America is ‘composed of’200 million meddlers, any one of whose prerogative it is to object should you ever be in the mood for a jelly donut and not a full meal with whole grains and leafy vegetables that covers all five food groups.’
Franklin is particularly painful to live with at this time: he has expectations of what she should
be like as a mother and sulks and disapproves when she fails him. She discovers very quickly the lie that ‘we are pregnant’ is – she’s pregnant, and the changes which follow will be to her life, not her husband’s. His disapproval continues and grows stronger after Kevin is born and begins to grow up. He is set on living the American Dream and no problems with his son will stop him. He refuses utterly to concede that there is anything wrong and suggests that Eva is the one who needs help. But his attitudes are mirrored by society.
In court, her mothering is under close examination and it is soon clear that she is in a no win situation: going off to work (which she did for a short time) was a failure in parenting which might have damaged her son; staying at home (as she does later) to look after him, proves that the responsibility for the way he turns out is hers and hers alone.
A little self-indulgent Eva might be, a little resentful, but there is nothing in her attitudes that cannot be found in millions of women whose children do not turn out to be spree killers. And of course if Eva had been granted any of the pleasures of motherhood, her normal ambivalences about being Mum might well have disappeared. But she gets nothing form Kevin. From the beginning, he is a difficult baby – won’t feed, won’t sleep, is unresponsive to her.
His war with his mother (for war it is) involves playing Mum and Dad off one another – Franklin ALWAYS sides with Kevin against Eva, in spite of mounting evidence that something is far wrong: they cannot keep a nanny or a babysitter; he is still wearing nappies at six (until Eva snaps and commits her one identifiable sin against the child); there are incidents of cruelty at nursery school, more serious ones at primary school, worst of all at High school – Kevin’s maturing only means more sophisticated malice towards anyone who crosses his path. He has a particular dislike of youngsters who are committed, ambitious, likeable, who enjoy life, an attitude which he disdains entirely. Kevin enjoys nothing, has no interests, has no aims and objectives, is chronically bored. The only thing which pleases him is getting away with things.
Eva, in her letters, makes a study of all the teen spree killers who make the headlines. Nothing about their lives seems to warrant their actions and she comes to see that attention and being special is what matters to them. In a culture ‘which does not discriminate between fame and infamy, the latter presents itself as more achievable’ .
And these children like to be notorious.
Shriver makes a subtle and convincing case for the idea that some kids are ’just mean’. Interspersed with the story of Kevin is the story of other families, none of which meet the romantic American ideal of family life. Eva’s own mother is agoraphobic, traumatised by the massacres which took place in her native land. Franklin’s parents are gadget obsessed and completely ignorant of emotional issues. Her friends have oddities in their home lives too – but not one produces a flat-eyed psychopath like Kevin whose teen years are a catalogue of horrors which include the blinding of his little sister and the tormenting of other kids and even teachers. But his actions are always covert and hard to prove although Eva’s insight into him is proof enough for her. Kevin actually relishes her knowledge of him.
The pleasures of this book are many: the prose is crisp and fluent, Eva’s dialogues with Kevin on her prison visits are electric, her insights on society and its unreasonable judgements of mothers, and its insistence on scapegoating, thought provoking. It is perhaps a stretch of credulity that when Kevin blinds his sister that Eva does not ensure her daughter’s safety in the future, but perhaps this is necessary to the plot if Eva is to see the tragedy through to the end.
All in all, it is not hard to see why ‘We Need To Talk About Kevin’ won the Orange Prize.
© Marion Arnott Reproduced with permission
Eva Khatchadourian is Kevin’s mother and Franklin’s wife. Aged 16, Kevin slaughters nine people in the gym at his high school. Also his father and sister. Eva is left behind to face the law suit, the police, the battery of psychiatrists and child experts and media pundits, who all seem intent on finding out what she did wrong as blame is essential: ‘Blame confers an awesome power, and it’s simplifying…to culprits most of all.’
She writes a series of letters to her dead husband, reviewing her own mothering (scrupulously honestly and with a bitter wit that is both shocking and true), and the growing up of Kevin. With excruciating clarity, she describes her own ambivalence to Kevin before he was even born. She falls into motherhood for want of something better to do in her late thirties for want of something better to do after she notices that when she and her childless friends get together, their family conversations all revolve round elderly parents rather than an up and coming generation. Plus Franklin is keen to have children.
Of the night when Kevin was conceived, she remarks: ‘we might as well have left the door unlocked.’
A stranger has been invited in and there is no way of knowing what he/she will be like or what damage may be done.
Many aspects of the book will be familiar to mothers, harsh judgement and expectation being but two of them. Pregnant, Eva is public property, subjected to the scrutiny and criticism of others. America is ‘composed of’200 million meddlers, any one of whose prerogative it is to object should you ever be in the mood for a jelly donut and not a full meal with whole grains and leafy vegetables that covers all five food groups.’
Franklin is particularly painful to live with at this time: he has expectations of what she should
be like as a mother and sulks and disapproves when she fails him. She discovers very quickly the lie that ‘we are pregnant’ is – she’s pregnant, and the changes which follow will be to her life, not her husband’s. His disapproval continues and grows stronger after Kevin is born and begins to grow up. He is set on living the American Dream and no problems with his son will stop him. He refuses utterly to concede that there is anything wrong and suggests that Eva is the one who needs help. But his attitudes are mirrored by society.
In court, her mothering is under close examination and it is soon clear that she is in a no win situation: going off to work (which she did for a short time) was a failure in parenting which might have damaged her son; staying at home (as she does later) to look after him, proves that the responsibility for the way he turns out is hers and hers alone.
A little self-indulgent Eva might be, a little resentful, but there is nothing in her attitudes that cannot be found in millions of women whose children do not turn out to be spree killers. And of course if Eva had been granted any of the pleasures of motherhood, her normal ambivalences about being Mum might well have disappeared. But she gets nothing form Kevin. From the beginning, he is a difficult baby – won’t feed, won’t sleep, is unresponsive to her.
His war with his mother (for war it is) involves playing Mum and Dad off one another – Franklin ALWAYS sides with Kevin against Eva, in spite of mounting evidence that something is far wrong: they cannot keep a nanny or a babysitter; he is still wearing nappies at six (until Eva snaps and commits her one identifiable sin against the child); there are incidents of cruelty at nursery school, more serious ones at primary school, worst of all at High school – Kevin’s maturing only means more sophisticated malice towards anyone who crosses his path. He has a particular dislike of youngsters who are committed, ambitious, likeable, who enjoy life, an attitude which he disdains entirely. Kevin enjoys nothing, has no interests, has no aims and objectives, is chronically bored. The only thing which pleases him is getting away with things.
Eva, in her letters, makes a study of all the teen spree killers who make the headlines. Nothing about their lives seems to warrant their actions and she comes to see that attention and being special is what matters to them. In a culture ‘which does not discriminate between fame and infamy, the latter presents itself as more achievable’ .
And these children like to be notorious.
Shriver makes a subtle and convincing case for the idea that some kids are ’just mean’. Interspersed with the story of Kevin is the story of other families, none of which meet the romantic American ideal of family life. Eva’s own mother is agoraphobic, traumatised by the massacres which took place in her native land. Franklin’s parents are gadget obsessed and completely ignorant of emotional issues. Her friends have oddities in their home lives too – but not one produces a flat-eyed psychopath like Kevin whose teen years are a catalogue of horrors which include the blinding of his little sister and the tormenting of other kids and even teachers. But his actions are always covert and hard to prove although Eva’s insight into him is proof enough for her. Kevin actually relishes her knowledge of him.
The pleasures of this book are many: the prose is crisp and fluent, Eva’s dialogues with Kevin on her prison visits are electric, her insights on society and its unreasonable judgements of mothers, and its insistence on scapegoating, thought provoking. It is perhaps a stretch of credulity that when Kevin blinds his sister that Eva does not ensure her daughter’s safety in the future, but perhaps this is necessary to the plot if Eva is to see the tragedy through to the end.
All in all, it is not hard to see why ‘We Need To Talk About Kevin’ won the Orange Prize.
© Marion Arnott Reproduced with permission
Kids Eh ~ Who'd have them?
The school shootings that ran rampant through the 1990s had everyone shocked and in fear of sending their kids to school. Throughout the shootings, culminating in Columbine, one thing probably went through everyone’s minds: What were these kids’ parents like? It’s human nature to assume that children who go bad are helped along by cruel or indifferent parents. Why do we think this? Because if we let our minds consider the alternative, that some kids are just born bad, then we must be aware of the frightening fact that it could happen to us.
We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver explores this very idea through a source closer to the subject than any other—the mother of a boy who shot seven of his classmates during a rampage in the school gym.
Although the book is fictional, the subject matter is all too real, and this makes it an exceptionally chilling read.
Eva Khatchadourian explores her feeling about her son Kevin’s actions through a series of letters to her estranged husband, Franklin. Although this might seem like a limiting way to go about a book of this scope, it actually works quite well. Through Eva’s eyes, we watch the excruciating formative years of an evil child who convinces his gullible father that he’s a sweet boy, but whose mother knows better. Eva’s dislike of her cold little boy just fuels his cruel streak, slowly escalating his violent nature as he grows older.
The heartbreaking part of the novel comes when Eva and Franklin have a second child, the incredibly naïve and trusting Celia, who thinks her brother is the greatest person on earth. The foreshadowing of what happens to Celia, and to the entire family, is almost unbearable to read because Shriver does such an excellent job of painting a picture of a family whose members are far from perfect but who certainly don’t deserve what will happen to them. An air of bleak despair settles over the entire novel, reflecting Eva’s mood as she writes to her beloved Franklin.
If you plan to pick up this novel, be forewarned: it is not light, it will not give you faith in humanity and it will probably scare you more than any horror novel you’ve ever read. Why? Because what happened to Eva’s family could easily happen to any family in America. With her eye for detail and talent for creating a chilling, desperate atmosphere, Lionel Shriver has penned a novel that will stay with you long after you’ve read the last chapter.
We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver explores this very idea through a source closer to the subject than any other—the mother of a boy who shot seven of his classmates during a rampage in the school gym.
Although the book is fictional, the subject matter is all too real, and this makes it an exceptionally chilling read.
Eva Khatchadourian explores her feeling about her son Kevin’s actions through a series of letters to her estranged husband, Franklin. Although this might seem like a limiting way to go about a book of this scope, it actually works quite well. Through Eva’s eyes, we watch the excruciating formative years of an evil child who convinces his gullible father that he’s a sweet boy, but whose mother knows better. Eva’s dislike of her cold little boy just fuels his cruel streak, slowly escalating his violent nature as he grows older.
The heartbreaking part of the novel comes when Eva and Franklin have a second child, the incredibly naïve and trusting Celia, who thinks her brother is the greatest person on earth. The foreshadowing of what happens to Celia, and to the entire family, is almost unbearable to read because Shriver does such an excellent job of painting a picture of a family whose members are far from perfect but who certainly don’t deserve what will happen to them. An air of bleak despair settles over the entire novel, reflecting Eva’s mood as she writes to her beloved Franklin.
If you plan to pick up this novel, be forewarned: it is not light, it will not give you faith in humanity and it will probably scare you more than any horror novel you’ve ever read. Why? Because what happened to Eva’s family could easily happen to any family in America. With her eye for detail and talent for creating a chilling, desperate atmosphere, Lionel Shriver has penned a novel that will stay with you long after you’ve read the last chapter.
We need to discuss........!!!!!!!
We need to talk about Kevin
Reviewer Cameron WoodheadMay 14, 2005
We need to talk about Kevin,By Lionel Shriver,Serpent's Tail, $22.95
Well before the post-September 11 security crackdown, there were metal-detectors in American schools. We have become inured, by sheer repetition, to the grisly aftermath of the US high-school massacre. Just as these tragedies continue to occur, they continue to torment the literary imagination.
Most prominent in fiction to draw on these sad episodes in contemporary history is D. B. C. Pierre's Booker prize-winning Vernon God Little. In it, a small Texan community - horrified by the mass murder of their youth by a disturbed native American boy who subsequently commits suicide - is in search of someone to blame. The mob alights on the killer's best friend, Vernon, whose unflinchingly satirical view of a town gone mad takes on messianic overtones as his inevitable martyrdom approaches.
But if Vernon God Little is a remarkable achievement, it pales in comparison with Lionel Shriver's controversial bestseller, We Need To Talk About Kevin - by far the best novel I've read in years.
We Need To Talk About Kevin takes the form of exquisitely crafted letters written by Eva Khatchadourian to her former husband, Franklin, who leaves her just before her worst nightmare comes to life. Three days short of his 16th birthday, Eva's son, Kevin, shoots seven of his fellow students in the school gym and watches with grim satisfaction as they bleed to death.
In her letters, Eva attempts to discover why Kevin became a killer by examining her domestic life.
Before Kevin came along, Eva and Franklin were happy for a while. Franklin was a location scout for TV ads who could find a slice of Paris in Pennsylvania: an unabashed patriot, a staunch Republican, a believer in the American dream. Eva was a lifelong Democrat who loathed America, the parochialism of its people and the arrogance of its foreign policy. A successful businesswoman, she made her fortune publishing budget-travel guides, after much compulsive globetrotting in her 20s.
In many respects they were chalk and cheese, but very much in love. Still, the decision to have children did not come naturally, at least not to Eva. Franklin saw children as the answer to "the big question" (a question he spent much of his own life avoiding). Eva acquiesced out of vanity: she wanted to prove that she could be a good mother. She was destined to fail spectacularly.
Eva became despondent, a feeling exacerbated when Franklin orchestrated a move from their Tribeca apartment to a house in the 'burbs.
Eva interprets Kevin's misdemeanours as early signs of psychological abnormality. She believes that he deliberately refused to stop wearing nappies. She is convinced that he incited his kindergarten friends to anti-social behaviour. Later, she is appalled by his cruelty to an unfortunate-looking girl at a primary school dance.
But if Eva was always suspicious of the kind of person Kevin was growing up to be, in Franklin's eyes he could do no wrong. As Kevin develops into a sullen, manipulative teenager, his parents' difference of opinion became more pronounced. Eva starts to actively dislike Kevin. And his behaviour deteriorates in response: he masturbates in front of her, throws bricks at cars, and is the prime suspect in his little sister's mutilation.
Whether Kevin was born bad, or was failed by his parents, is a question that Eva cannot ultimately resolve. All she can do is narrate what happened, and continue to visit her son in prison. Indeed, these prison visits are among the most sublime and heart-rending passages in the book.
Of all contemporary American novelists, the one Lionel Shriver most resembles is Jeffrey Eugenides. Like Eugenides' The Virgin Suicides, Shriver's novel is assembled over the broken bodies of children, but it is less interested in the cause of tragedy than the architecture of it, less concerned with why catastrophe strikes than in describing its contours.
What really matters is that Shriver has produced - through the voice of a fearsomely intelligent, self-absorbed, and utterly bereft mother - a breathtaking work of art.
Reviewer Cameron WoodheadMay 14, 2005
We need to talk about Kevin,By Lionel Shriver,Serpent's Tail, $22.95
Well before the post-September 11 security crackdown, there were metal-detectors in American schools. We have become inured, by sheer repetition, to the grisly aftermath of the US high-school massacre. Just as these tragedies continue to occur, they continue to torment the literary imagination.
Most prominent in fiction to draw on these sad episodes in contemporary history is D. B. C. Pierre's Booker prize-winning Vernon God Little. In it, a small Texan community - horrified by the mass murder of their youth by a disturbed native American boy who subsequently commits suicide - is in search of someone to blame. The mob alights on the killer's best friend, Vernon, whose unflinchingly satirical view of a town gone mad takes on messianic overtones as his inevitable martyrdom approaches.
But if Vernon God Little is a remarkable achievement, it pales in comparison with Lionel Shriver's controversial bestseller, We Need To Talk About Kevin - by far the best novel I've read in years.
We Need To Talk About Kevin takes the form of exquisitely crafted letters written by Eva Khatchadourian to her former husband, Franklin, who leaves her just before her worst nightmare comes to life. Three days short of his 16th birthday, Eva's son, Kevin, shoots seven of his fellow students in the school gym and watches with grim satisfaction as they bleed to death.
In her letters, Eva attempts to discover why Kevin became a killer by examining her domestic life.
Before Kevin came along, Eva and Franklin were happy for a while. Franklin was a location scout for TV ads who could find a slice of Paris in Pennsylvania: an unabashed patriot, a staunch Republican, a believer in the American dream. Eva was a lifelong Democrat who loathed America, the parochialism of its people and the arrogance of its foreign policy. A successful businesswoman, she made her fortune publishing budget-travel guides, after much compulsive globetrotting in her 20s.
In many respects they were chalk and cheese, but very much in love. Still, the decision to have children did not come naturally, at least not to Eva. Franklin saw children as the answer to "the big question" (a question he spent much of his own life avoiding). Eva acquiesced out of vanity: she wanted to prove that she could be a good mother. She was destined to fail spectacularly.
Eva became despondent, a feeling exacerbated when Franklin orchestrated a move from their Tribeca apartment to a house in the 'burbs.
Eva interprets Kevin's misdemeanours as early signs of psychological abnormality. She believes that he deliberately refused to stop wearing nappies. She is convinced that he incited his kindergarten friends to anti-social behaviour. Later, she is appalled by his cruelty to an unfortunate-looking girl at a primary school dance.
But if Eva was always suspicious of the kind of person Kevin was growing up to be, in Franklin's eyes he could do no wrong. As Kevin develops into a sullen, manipulative teenager, his parents' difference of opinion became more pronounced. Eva starts to actively dislike Kevin. And his behaviour deteriorates in response: he masturbates in front of her, throws bricks at cars, and is the prime suspect in his little sister's mutilation.
Whether Kevin was born bad, or was failed by his parents, is a question that Eva cannot ultimately resolve. All she can do is narrate what happened, and continue to visit her son in prison. Indeed, these prison visits are among the most sublime and heart-rending passages in the book.
Of all contemporary American novelists, the one Lionel Shriver most resembles is Jeffrey Eugenides. Like Eugenides' The Virgin Suicides, Shriver's novel is assembled over the broken bodies of children, but it is less interested in the cause of tragedy than the architecture of it, less concerned with why catastrophe strikes than in describing its contours.
What really matters is that Shriver has produced - through the voice of a fearsomely intelligent, self-absorbed, and utterly bereft mother - a breathtaking work of art.
Thursday, February 28, 2008
Next Meeting of Book Club on 20th March 2008
Hi All
Just a reminder about the next meeting of the Connect FF Book club.
PLEASE NOTE THE CHANGE OF DATE.
We will be meeting on THURSDAY, 20th MARCH, 2008 to avoid Good Friday. The chosen Book is: "The Kite Runner" by Khaled Hosseini. Carol Goddard will introduce the book. Reviews of the Book are available on the Connect FF Book club Blog.
Please let Pat Dixon know of your coffee/lunch requirements a few days before the meeting.
Hope to see you all there...... Vernon Goddard
Just a reminder about the next meeting of the Connect FF Book club.
PLEASE NOTE THE CHANGE OF DATE.
We will be meeting on THURSDAY, 20th MARCH, 2008 to avoid Good Friday. The chosen Book is: "The Kite Runner" by Khaled Hosseini. Carol Goddard will introduce the book. Reviews of the Book are available on the Connect FF Book club Blog.
Please let Pat Dixon know of your coffee/lunch requirements a few days before the meeting.
Hope to see you all there...... Vernon Goddard
Monday, February 18, 2008
Comments from Amazon about Kite Runner
Amazon.com
In his debut novel, The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini accomplishes what very few contemporary novelists are able to do. He manages to provide an educational and eye-opening account of a country's political turmoil--in this case, Afghanistan--while also developing characters whose heartbreaking struggles and emotional triumphs resonate with readers long after the last page has been turned over. And he does this on his first try.
The Kite Runner follows the story of Amir, the privileged son of a wealthy businessman in Kabul, and Hassan, the son of Amir's father's servant. As children in the relatively stable Afghanistan of the early 1970s, the boys are inseparable. They spend idyllic days running kites and telling stories of mystical places and powerful warriors until an unspeakable event changes the nature of their relationship forever, and eventually cements their bond in ways neither boy could have ever predicted. Even after Amir and his father flee to America, Amir remains haunted by his cowardly actions and disloyalty. In part, it is these demons and the sometimes impossible quest for forgiveness that bring him back to his war-torn native land after it comes under Taliban rule. ("...I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded, not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night.")
Some of the plot's turns and twists may be somewhat implausible, but Hosseini has created characters that seem so real that one almost forgets that The Kite Runner is a novel and not a memoir. At a time when Afghanistan has been thrust into the forefront of America's collective consciousness ("people sipping lattes at Starbucks were talking about the battle for Kunduz"), Hosseini offers an honest, sometimes tragic, sometimes funny, but always heartfelt view of a fascinating land. Perhaps the only true flaw in this extraordinary novel is that it ends all too soon. --Gisele Toueg --
This text refers to the Hardcover edition. From Publishers WeeklyHosseini's stunning debut novel starts as an eloquent Afghan version of the American immigrant experience in the late 20th century, but betrayal and redemption come to the forefront when the narrator, a writer, returns to his ravaged homeland to rescue the son of his childhood friend after the boy's parents are shot during the Taliban takeover in the mid '90s. Amir, the son of a well-to-do Kabul merchant, is the first-person narrator, who marries, moves to California and becomes a successful novelist. But he remains haunted by a childhood incident in which he betrayed the trust of his best friend, a Hazara boy named Hassan, who receives a brutal beating from some local bullies. After establishing himself in America, Amir learns that the Taliban have murdered Hassan and his wife, raising questions about the fate of his son, Sohrab. Spurred on by childhood guilt, Amir makes the difficult journey to Kabul, only to learn the boy has been enslaved by a former childhood bully who has become a prominent Taliban official.
The price Amir must pay to recover the boy is just one of several brilliant, startling plot twists that make this book memorable both as a political chronicle and a deeply personal tale about how childhood choices affect our adult lives. The character studies alone would make this a noteworthy debut, from the portrait of the sensitive, insecure Amir to the multilayered development of his father, Baba, whose sacrifices and scandalous behavior are fully revealed only when Amir returns to Afghanistan and learns the true nature of his relationship to Hassan.
Add an incisive, perceptive examination of recent Afghan history and its ramifications in both America and the Middle East, and the result is a complete work of literature that succeeds in exploring the culture of a previously obscure nation that has become a pivot point in the global politics of the new millennium.Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition. See all Editorial Reviews
In his debut novel, The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini accomplishes what very few contemporary novelists are able to do. He manages to provide an educational and eye-opening account of a country's political turmoil--in this case, Afghanistan--while also developing characters whose heartbreaking struggles and emotional triumphs resonate with readers long after the last page has been turned over. And he does this on his first try.
The Kite Runner follows the story of Amir, the privileged son of a wealthy businessman in Kabul, and Hassan, the son of Amir's father's servant. As children in the relatively stable Afghanistan of the early 1970s, the boys are inseparable. They spend idyllic days running kites and telling stories of mystical places and powerful warriors until an unspeakable event changes the nature of their relationship forever, and eventually cements their bond in ways neither boy could have ever predicted. Even after Amir and his father flee to America, Amir remains haunted by his cowardly actions and disloyalty. In part, it is these demons and the sometimes impossible quest for forgiveness that bring him back to his war-torn native land after it comes under Taliban rule. ("...I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded, not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night.")
Some of the plot's turns and twists may be somewhat implausible, but Hosseini has created characters that seem so real that one almost forgets that The Kite Runner is a novel and not a memoir. At a time when Afghanistan has been thrust into the forefront of America's collective consciousness ("people sipping lattes at Starbucks were talking about the battle for Kunduz"), Hosseini offers an honest, sometimes tragic, sometimes funny, but always heartfelt view of a fascinating land. Perhaps the only true flaw in this extraordinary novel is that it ends all too soon. --Gisele Toueg --
This text refers to the Hardcover edition. From Publishers WeeklyHosseini's stunning debut novel starts as an eloquent Afghan version of the American immigrant experience in the late 20th century, but betrayal and redemption come to the forefront when the narrator, a writer, returns to his ravaged homeland to rescue the son of his childhood friend after the boy's parents are shot during the Taliban takeover in the mid '90s. Amir, the son of a well-to-do Kabul merchant, is the first-person narrator, who marries, moves to California and becomes a successful novelist. But he remains haunted by a childhood incident in which he betrayed the trust of his best friend, a Hazara boy named Hassan, who receives a brutal beating from some local bullies. After establishing himself in America, Amir learns that the Taliban have murdered Hassan and his wife, raising questions about the fate of his son, Sohrab. Spurred on by childhood guilt, Amir makes the difficult journey to Kabul, only to learn the boy has been enslaved by a former childhood bully who has become a prominent Taliban official.
The price Amir must pay to recover the boy is just one of several brilliant, startling plot twists that make this book memorable both as a political chronicle and a deeply personal tale about how childhood choices affect our adult lives. The character studies alone would make this a noteworthy debut, from the portrait of the sensitive, insecure Amir to the multilayered development of his father, Baba, whose sacrifices and scandalous behavior are fully revealed only when Amir returns to Afghanistan and learns the true nature of his relationship to Hassan.
Add an incisive, perceptive examination of recent Afghan history and its ramifications in both America and the Middle East, and the result is a complete work of literature that succeeds in exploring the culture of a previously obscure nation that has become a pivot point in the global politics of the new millennium.Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition. See all Editorial Reviews
The Observer review of "The Kite Runner"
An Afghan hounded by his pastKhaled Hosseini's shattering debut work, The Kite Runner, is the first novel to fictionalise the Afghan culture for a Western readership
Amelia Hill
Sunday September 7, 2003The Observer
The Kite Runnerby Khaled HosseiniBloomsbury £12.99, pp324
In this, apparently the first Afghan novel to be written in English, two motherless boys who learn to crawl and walk side by side, are destined to destroy each other across the gulf of their tribal difference in a country of dried mulberries, sour oranges, rich pomegranates and honey.
It's a Shakespearean beginning to an epic tale that spans lives lived across two continents amid political upheavals, where dreams wilt before they bud and where a search for a child finally makes a coward into a man.
The Kite Runner is the shattering first novel by Khaled Hosseini, an Afghan doctor who received political asylum in 1980 as civil conflict devastated his homeland.
Whatever the truth of the claim to be the first English-language Afghan novel, Hosseini is certainly the first Afghan novelist to fictionalise his culture for a Western readership, melding the personal struggle of ordinary people into the terrible historical sweep of a devastated country in a rich and soul-searching narrative.
Over the last three decades, Afghanistan has been ceaselessly battered by Communist rule, Soviet occupation, the Mujahideen and a democracy that became a rule of terror. It is a history that can intimidate and exhaust an outsider's attempts to understand, but Hosseini extrudes it simply and quietly into an intimate account of love, honour, guilt, fear and redemption that needs no dry history book or atlas to grip and absorb.
Amir is a privileged member of the dominant Pashtun tribe growing up in affluent Kabul in the Seventies. Hassan is his devoted servant and a member of the oppressed Hazara tribe whose first word was the name of his boy-master. The book focuses on the friendship between the two children and the cruel and shameful sacrifice the rich boy makes of his humble, adoring alter ego to buy the love of his own distant father. 'I ran because I was a coward,' Amir realises, as he bolts from the scene that severs his friendship with Hassan, shatters his childhood and haunts him for the rest of his life. 'I actually aspired to cowardice.'
The book charts Amir's attempts to flee culpability for this act of betrayal, seeking asylum from his hellish homeland in California and a new life buried deep in black velvet portraits of Elvis. Amir's story is simultaneously devastating and inspiring. His world is a patchwork of the beautiful and horrific, and the book a sharp, unforgettable taste of the trauma and tumult experienced by Afghanis as their country buckled.
The Kite Runner is about the price of peace, both personal and political, and what we knowingly destroy in our hope of achieving that, be it friends, democracy or ourselves.
Amelia Hill
Sunday September 7, 2003The Observer
The Kite Runnerby Khaled HosseiniBloomsbury £12.99, pp324
In this, apparently the first Afghan novel to be written in English, two motherless boys who learn to crawl and walk side by side, are destined to destroy each other across the gulf of their tribal difference in a country of dried mulberries, sour oranges, rich pomegranates and honey.
It's a Shakespearean beginning to an epic tale that spans lives lived across two continents amid political upheavals, where dreams wilt before they bud and where a search for a child finally makes a coward into a man.
The Kite Runner is the shattering first novel by Khaled Hosseini, an Afghan doctor who received political asylum in 1980 as civil conflict devastated his homeland.
Whatever the truth of the claim to be the first English-language Afghan novel, Hosseini is certainly the first Afghan novelist to fictionalise his culture for a Western readership, melding the personal struggle of ordinary people into the terrible historical sweep of a devastated country in a rich and soul-searching narrative.
Over the last three decades, Afghanistan has been ceaselessly battered by Communist rule, Soviet occupation, the Mujahideen and a democracy that became a rule of terror. It is a history that can intimidate and exhaust an outsider's attempts to understand, but Hosseini extrudes it simply and quietly into an intimate account of love, honour, guilt, fear and redemption that needs no dry history book or atlas to grip and absorb.
Amir is a privileged member of the dominant Pashtun tribe growing up in affluent Kabul in the Seventies. Hassan is his devoted servant and a member of the oppressed Hazara tribe whose first word was the name of his boy-master. The book focuses on the friendship between the two children and the cruel and shameful sacrifice the rich boy makes of his humble, adoring alter ego to buy the love of his own distant father. 'I ran because I was a coward,' Amir realises, as he bolts from the scene that severs his friendship with Hassan, shatters his childhood and haunts him for the rest of his life. 'I actually aspired to cowardice.'
The book charts Amir's attempts to flee culpability for this act of betrayal, seeking asylum from his hellish homeland in California and a new life buried deep in black velvet portraits of Elvis. Amir's story is simultaneously devastating and inspiring. His world is a patchwork of the beautiful and horrific, and the book a sharp, unforgettable taste of the trauma and tumult experienced by Afghanis as their country buckled.
The Kite Runner is about the price of peace, both personal and political, and what we knowingly destroy in our hope of achieving that, be it friends, democracy or ourselves.
Review of "The Kite Runner"
Khaled Hosseini's quietly powerful debut novel The Kite Runner fulfills the promise of fiction, awakening curiosity about the world around us, speaking truth as the lessons of history echo down the years.
The themes are universal: familial relationships, particularly father and son; the price of disloyalty; the inhumanity of a rigid class system; and the horrific realities of war.
In Afghanistan, young Amir's earliest memories of life in Kabul are blessed with a cultural heritage that values tradition, blood ties and a deeply rooted cultural identity. Upper class Pashtuns, Amir enjoys the luxury of education, material comfort and a constant playmate, the son of his father's longtime Hazara servant, Hassan.
Twice in his lifetime Amir is morally tested in his relationship with Hassan. The first time, a victim of his own arrogance, Amir fails his companion. Hiding behind the superiority of class, Amir chooses the path of least resistance, but the scar of betrayal cuts through his soul and never heals. That first failure dictates Amir's inner dialogue throughout his life, even in America, until he is offered another chance at personal redemption. Returned to his homeland at the request of an old family friend, the second challenge is equally perilous, and Amir recognizes the very real implications of his decision. This internal struggle is the underlying theme of the novel, which spans Afghani history from the peaceful 70's to the repressive rule of the Taliban in the late '90s.
Played out on the world stage, a desperate battle to preserve the cultural heritage of Afghanistan spans Amir's life in Kabul and America. While Amir and his father reside safely in America, their homeland is decimated by constant warfare -- streets lined with beggars, fatherless children whose future is marginalized by poverty:
"There are a lot of children in Afghanistan, but little childhood." The sweet simplicity of youthful winters spent "kite running" with Hassan seem light years away, illuminated by the boys' unfettered innocence.
Against this stark landscape, the adult Amir is challenged as never before, charged with the protection of a young life already scarred by the random violence visited upon the disenfranchised. With inordinate compassion and stunning simplicity, Hosseini portrays Amir's impossible dilemma. Complications abound, but the answer lies in humanity's capacity for kindness. The grace of acceptance heals the wounds of brutality, for with forgiveness anything is possible, even the wild joy of soaring kites against a winter sky.
Originally published on Curled Up With A Good Book at www.curledup.com. © Luan Gaines, 2003
The themes are universal: familial relationships, particularly father and son; the price of disloyalty; the inhumanity of a rigid class system; and the horrific realities of war.
In Afghanistan, young Amir's earliest memories of life in Kabul are blessed with a cultural heritage that values tradition, blood ties and a deeply rooted cultural identity. Upper class Pashtuns, Amir enjoys the luxury of education, material comfort and a constant playmate, the son of his father's longtime Hazara servant, Hassan.
Twice in his lifetime Amir is morally tested in his relationship with Hassan. The first time, a victim of his own arrogance, Amir fails his companion. Hiding behind the superiority of class, Amir chooses the path of least resistance, but the scar of betrayal cuts through his soul and never heals. That first failure dictates Amir's inner dialogue throughout his life, even in America, until he is offered another chance at personal redemption. Returned to his homeland at the request of an old family friend, the second challenge is equally perilous, and Amir recognizes the very real implications of his decision. This internal struggle is the underlying theme of the novel, which spans Afghani history from the peaceful 70's to the repressive rule of the Taliban in the late '90s.
Played out on the world stage, a desperate battle to preserve the cultural heritage of Afghanistan spans Amir's life in Kabul and America. While Amir and his father reside safely in America, their homeland is decimated by constant warfare -- streets lined with beggars, fatherless children whose future is marginalized by poverty:
"There are a lot of children in Afghanistan, but little childhood." The sweet simplicity of youthful winters spent "kite running" with Hassan seem light years away, illuminated by the boys' unfettered innocence.
Against this stark landscape, the adult Amir is challenged as never before, charged with the protection of a young life already scarred by the random violence visited upon the disenfranchised. With inordinate compassion and stunning simplicity, Hosseini portrays Amir's impossible dilemma. Complications abound, but the answer lies in humanity's capacity for kindness. The grace of acceptance heals the wounds of brutality, for with forgiveness anything is possible, even the wild joy of soaring kites against a winter sky.
Originally published on Curled Up With A Good Book at www.curledup.com. © Luan Gaines, 2003
Short review The Kite Runner
In The Kite Runner, Amir and Hassan grow up together in Afghanistan like brothers, although they couldn't be more different.
Amir is the son of a wealthy businessman, a Sunni Muslim, a Pashtun, and he's educated and reads voraciously.
Hassan's father is a servant to Amir's father, and Hassan is a Sh'ia Muslim, a Hazara, he's illiterate, and he has a harelip.
But neither boy has a mother and they spend their boyhoods roaming the streets of Kabul together. Amir, though, continually uses his superior position to taunt or abuse Hassan, and one day hides in fear as Hassan is beaten mercilessly by bullies.
The Soviet invasion of Aghanistan sends Amir's family to the United States, but he returns there as an adult during the Taliban rule to atone for his sins to Hassan.
Khaled Hosseini is an Afghan émigré living in San Francisco and his debut novel has received mostly good reviews. The Denver Post says The Kite Runner "ranks among the best-written and provocative stories of the year so far."
Amir is the son of a wealthy businessman, a Sunni Muslim, a Pashtun, and he's educated and reads voraciously.
Hassan's father is a servant to Amir's father, and Hassan is a Sh'ia Muslim, a Hazara, he's illiterate, and he has a harelip.
But neither boy has a mother and they spend their boyhoods roaming the streets of Kabul together. Amir, though, continually uses his superior position to taunt or abuse Hassan, and one day hides in fear as Hassan is beaten mercilessly by bullies.
The Soviet invasion of Aghanistan sends Amir's family to the United States, but he returns there as an adult during the Taliban rule to atone for his sins to Hassan.
Khaled Hosseini is an Afghan émigré living in San Francisco and his debut novel has received mostly good reviews. The Denver Post says The Kite Runner "ranks among the best-written and provocative stories of the year so far."
March Choice at the Book Club
In March we will discuss
“The Kite Runner” by Khaled Hosseini............Happy reading
Vernon
“The Kite Runner” by Khaled Hosseini............Happy reading
Vernon
Wednesday, February 6, 2008
Calling all you writers ~ even if you don't have time......
We'll be brief: Hemingway once wrote a story in just six words ("For sale: baby shoes, never worn.") and is said to have called it his best work.
So I'm asking you to take a shot yourself.
My attempt: "A beginning, a middle, an End!"
So I'm asking you to take a shot yourself.
My attempt: "A beginning, a middle, an End!"
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