Zendagi Migzara
I don’t know how to write this post other than to say that The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini is simply astounding! He presents life with a taste of reality, not the complete tragedies of Shakespeare nor the utter bliss of Jane Austen (though I do love both). For the characters of his novel, life is “not a Hindi movie,” as a character says in the book. Life does not stop at the moment of a happy ending, but continues on for eons to come.
I personally feel that the blending of cultures creates a masterpiece of extraordinary intricacy and beauty. Yes, we all know the “works of art” that consist of purely one panel of color, but compare those to the alluring complexity of Van Gogh’s Starry Night or the mind boggling works of pointillism, such as those of Georges Seurat. So I feel Hosseini did with The Kite Runner. Every now and then, he would use his native tongue, Farsi, for nouns and phrases amidst his writing. Half of the time I already knew the words, the other half of the time, I learned new words. At one point, Hosseini used the phrase "Zendagi migzara." I knew that zendagi meant life and that the second word was a verb in the present tense, though I didn’t know what it meant. Oh, I felt the joy of learning more than the story line!
Amidst his story, Hosseini includes politics, a subject that cannot be left out for a novel set in the geography of Afghanistan. The politics presented, however, was not the American perspective of how “we saved the world,” but the Afghani, first hand experience of the turmoil of an oppressed and neglected people. You do not simply hear about the genocides and public stonings on television as we hear periodically on the evening news, but you witness them as through the eyes of a man torn between the wretched state of his homeland and two decades of living in American security.
And while politics was apparent, the true story was of the inner turmoil of betrayal versus loyalty, what the ties of brotherhood should do and fail to do. Yet even through the bleakest times, opportunities of redemption can still be grasped. Life can be very bitter sweet, but it goes on – zendagi migzara – but life goes on.
I personally feel that the blending of cultures creates a masterpiece of extraordinary intricacy and beauty. Yes, we all know the “works of art” that consist of purely one panel of color, but compare those to the alluring complexity of Van Gogh’s Starry Night or the mind boggling works of pointillism, such as those of Georges Seurat. So I feel Hosseini did with The Kite Runner. Every now and then, he would use his native tongue, Farsi, for nouns and phrases amidst his writing. Half of the time I already knew the words, the other half of the time, I learned new words. At one point, Hosseini used the phrase "Zendagi migzara." I knew that zendagi meant life and that the second word was a verb in the present tense, though I didn’t know what it meant. Oh, I felt the joy of learning more than the story line!
Amidst his story, Hosseini includes politics, a subject that cannot be left out for a novel set in the geography of Afghanistan. The politics presented, however, was not the American perspective of how “we saved the world,” but the Afghani, first hand experience of the turmoil of an oppressed and neglected people. You do not simply hear about the genocides and public stonings on television as we hear periodically on the evening news, but you witness them as through the eyes of a man torn between the wretched state of his homeland and two decades of living in American security.
And while politics was apparent, the true story was of the inner turmoil of betrayal versus loyalty, what the ties of brotherhood should do and fail to do. Yet even through the bleakest times, opportunities of redemption can still be grasped. Life can be very bitter sweet, but it goes on – zendagi migzara – but life goes on.
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posted by bellevoce | 3:53 PM
5 Comments:
the kite runner was one of the best books i've ever read! i won't bother trying to explain how the book made me feel and all that, cos its all in your post! haha.
i recommend it to everyone i meet...its a must read! ps- so's lord of the rings =D haha
iman rashyd,
thanks! i agree with you on LOTR as well!
Thanks for the book review, I've added Kite Runner to my list of fall books to read. I love the idea of your previous post "Off The Wall" I was also trying to figure out if I needed to separate the journal from the blog. I'm thinking writing is writing--take me or leave me.
Julee Ann,
Thanks! Writing that post was kinda intense. We'll see if I can work up the courage to write something similar again.
To All,
I just wanted to add in this thought: An Afghan friend and I were chatting the other day and The Kite Runner came up in the conversation. He said that he didn't enjoy book at all. He felt that it cast a bad shadow on the Afghan people and he didn't want the oblivious reader to feel that all Afghans were the same as many of the characters in the book. I encouraged him that I did not take that from the book, but that I felt compassion for a people going through such trauma.
An interesting perspective. I think that we should all remember that within our entire world, there are people of every country that seek destruction, but there are also myriads of people who seek good.
The Kite Runner was a good book, and this is a good review.
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