The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

By Q on June 23, 2024

The fun(?) thing about a depressing book is you never know how it's going to be depressing.

It's like that quote where all happy families are alike and all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way.

With those rom-com books, I know how it's going to go very early. I know the beats.

But a depressing book? No, that'll keep you on your toes.

The Kite Runner follows a relatively well-off boy from Kabul as he grows into a relatively well-off man in San Francisco, and the pit of despair he has to go through in the middle.

There's a plot, and there's some good connections made throughout, but the plot isn't the point. This isn't an adventure. This isn't a quest, even if there is a quest that shows up in the middle. This is a book about sins and letting go of one's sins.

This is one of those books where you could almost argue the book isn't really about the characters. It's about the geography (or that the geography is the main character). The locations provide as much to the story as any of the characters. Kabul would be the main character, but you have the surrounding areas, Afghanistan as a whole, Pakistan, and Northern California all showing up to provide context for who the nominal protagonist would become.

This was a book club read, but I can't say it's a book I wouldn't have read eventually on my own. A Thousand Splendid Suns is sitting on my shelf right now (and has been for a while). This was just the book that got assigned.

It was beautiful but depressing. And sometimes that's how life goes.

And since I've read a lot of depressing books of late, let's look at how they compared.

The Kite Runner feels like a sibling of The Goldfinch. There are pockets of good things, but over and over bad things are going to be thrown in the protagonist's face.

Then you have the next tier for things like When Women Were Dragons and pretty much every Fredrik Backman book. Things are quite as depressing, there's going to sort of be a happy ending. But only sort of.

Then after that you have books where bad things are happening but clearly just to set up overcoming adversity and getting to that happy ending after all. And these are fine, but they never feel dangerous in the same way. This is basically the entirety of genre fiction.