Recently I finished reading the book I was planning to read quite a long time ago. The book titled “The Kite Runner” tells a story of Amir, Pashtun boy who spend his childhood in Afghanistan, then migrate to the US when the war with Soviets broke out and finally visiting Afghanistan again during Taliban’s regime.

The story starts with describing main character’s childhood in pre-Soviet era Afghanistan. Amir and his servant Hassan grew up together in the same house and are best friends. Their childhood was just normal childhood anyone could expect, they spend most of their time together playing, telling stories, running kites. And one day bad incident happens with Hassan and even though Amir was there he did not have courage to help Hassan. Amir could not forgive himself that betrayal for the most part of his life and distances himself from Hassan eventually separating them forever. Then the war broke out and under terrible conditions Amir managed to escape Afghanistan to Pakistan then migrate to the US with his father. Then they slowly adapt to new country and in a few years his father passes away due to cancer. A bit before that he marries Afghan girl who had also migrated to the US during Soviet war. After decade or so Amir was contacted by his father’s best friend Rakhim Khan and he urged Amir to go to Afghanistan to escape Hassan’s son. Book describes terrible conditions of Afghanistan after the Soviet war and later Taliban regime with the eye of Amir. By risking his life and near death experience he manages to escape Hassan’s son and bring him back to the US.

There were a few interesting points in this book for me:

• Even though this is a fiction, but it describes real situation in Afghanistan. One can learn how Afghanistan looked like before Soviet war (it was pretty modern state with king’s ruling), and how Soviet’s destroyed the state, and later how awful was the ruling of Talibans.
• I found particularly interesting that the Pashtun’s native language (Pashto) has lots of similar words to two languages belonging to Turkish group that I know: Karakalpak and Uzbek languages, like “naan”, “saratan”, “sher jangi”, “chapandaz”, “watan”, “quwat”, “tashakor”, “chapan”, “shorawi”, “ahmaq”, “namoos”, “moalem”, “ghazal”, “ihtiram”, “nika”, “shorwa”, “samosa”, “tashweesh”, “bichara”, “sabagh”.

I would recommend this book with fascinating plot and you can have more insight about Afghanistan from the eye of narrator.