HELIOLITH

For the first time in I can’t remember how long, I was able to finish a novel. What a wonderful thing! Praises to time off from teaching. I would summarize it ever-so-briefly, but I am conditioned not to. The main character, Amir, explains that in America if you give away the ending (of a movie), “you will be scorned and made to apologize profusely for having committed the sin of Spoiling the End. In Afghanistan, the ending was all that mattered.” I can’t seperate myself from that taboo, so I won’t give you any sort of synopsis of the story, but I will share some impressions… (If you click the front cover image, it will take you to the front cover (where you can begin to read) on amazon rather than the page where people ruin it for you by summarizing!)

The story was harsh and very saddening at times, yet I passed parts of the book lacking a strong empathetic bond with the main character simply because he seemed to often do what you would hope he wouldn’t. Strangely, that didn’t make the read any less fully engaging- on the contrary, I was consumed with it. My empathetic involvement was so real that I had to put the book down at times and do something else for a while until I could process my disappointments with certain events. There was also little chance to release the emotional tension prevalent throughout most of the story. I found myself in tears once during a simple phone conversation (between the characters). It was as if the slightest opening in a relentless surge of difficult situations were enough for me to collapse into.

Amir and Hassan are the principal characters, and Khaled Hosseini is the author. Kaka is a prefix of respect (literally uncle) often put in front of the names of elders in Amir’s language hence the title of this entry (which I believe to be Dari (my hunch since he does distinguish when something is spoken or written in Farsi or when something is said in Pashtu). The author does a wonderful job of imbuing much of the experiences with vibrant detail, even though, as someone that knows very little of Afghan culture, I couldn’t recreate for example the “smell of garlic and morgh kabob.” Still, the imagery and sense-richness worked for me, and as long as I saw through Amir jan’s eyes, I felt comforted by the things that comforted him. It’s truly a beautiful novel, full of magical synchronicities, and it makes me fall in love with reading again in a way that restores surpressed memories of delight from when I was younger.