టైటిల్ మాత్రమె తెలుగు , రివ్యూ మొత్తం ఇంగ్లీషా ? అని తిట్టుకోకండి . అప్పుడప్పుడు ఇలా కూడా రాస్తే బావుంటుంది అనిపించింది. అందుకే పోస్ట్ చేస్తున్నను. ఈ పుస్తకం నాకు చాలా చాలా నచ్చింది .
హృదయాన్ని కదిలించే నవల, అందరూ చదవదగ్గ నవల అనిపించి పోస్ట్ చేస్తున్నాను .
“For me America was a place to bury
memories. For Baba, a place to mourn his”. Amir.
I cannot really write anything in praise of
this master, who is at his best when wielding words! (A doctor whose scalpel is
Pen…)
I read
earlier “A Thousand Splendid Suns” written by the same author and like every
one I was moved by the story and the way it unfolded. It was like watching a
movie with subtitles – you can see the words weave themselves into images and
move across the mental frame…one reel after the other.
But this book is totally mind boggling!
What dramas we indulge in, in our day to day
lives, just to get that small pat from someone we love? What grave emotional baggage we carry, to get
that small look of appreciation from our dear ones? Mr.Khalid Hosseini holds
the strings of your heart and as the story unfolds, we travel with him through
the myriad cervices of our internal being! The real persona behind the mask…the
real, raw, brutal, self protective defense mechanism that we apply to walk out
of unnerving situations! Pure love and friendship slipping away from between
the fingers pitted against the life issues makes us wince at the unfairness of
life. We are desperately trying to hold on to it and release it, all at the
same time. Hassan and Amir are not characters out there. They are in our hearts
and amidst us, and we see them every day in our lives. They are our representatives,
our emotions and our fears and conflicts portrayed out there. They make us
smile, question us, scare us and we shed tears for them, because somewhere deep
down we know we can relate to them, one way or the other. They are so natural
and truthful.
Amir shocks us with his personality. He is not
a killer or a murderer. He shocks us with his ruthless meanness, his insomniac shame,
his craving for father’s love, his displeasure with himself - his “not so
manly” identity, his fears, his affections…..in drastic and dark contrast to
the delightfully natural sunny side of Hassan. Hassan with his cleft lip
breaking into a grin at the slightest reason…as if his heart is eternally
broken into a smile.
One cannot resist and no one cannot keep the
book down - the story is so beautifully told, and yet at the same time we tend
to keep the book aside just to feel the brutal truthfulness and honesty of it
all….the departure of Hassan and Ali in the sheets of rain “Slithering beads of rain sliced my window”
sinisterly imposing and “I stepped back and all I
saw was rain through window panes that looked like melting silver.”
This is not a film, there are no superhuman, idealistic emotions here as the
author rightly says. Life is real, courage is real, and fear of losing place in
someone’s heart (especially if it is parental love that’s in question) is real.
Amir goes through various situations craving for his father’s love, and a
picture of sibling rivalry runs as an undercurrent throughout the novel, when
he feels threatened that his servant “hazara – Hassan “ may be loved more by
his father than himself. (The writer never allows us to guess the truth. The story glides so
beautifully that we will not presume anything.)
Amir’s feeling of inadequacy to fulfill the untold desire of his father,
to be a picture perfect “man” in his father’s eyes always haunts him. His
failure to be an athlete, a sportsman, a fighter in true spirit, brave and bold,
gnaws Amir along with his instinctively feminine nature of being poetic, dreamy,
lost in books attitude taunts him. The masculine and feminine aspects (Amir
Looks at it with a child’s eye) are at loggerheads throughout his childhood. We
empathize with Amir’s untold emotional traumas, but the meanness of him stops
us from being too sorry for him. He never tries to do anything to prove his
mettle …..Probably that is life in its general, normal way. There are no heroes
here. There are only human beings.
While Baba seeks to protect a women
co-passenger fleeing to Pakistan,
from the Russian soldier, Amir says to himself: “Do
you always have to be the hero? Can’t you
just let it go for once? “And later on he thinks, “Sometimes, I too wondered if I was really Baba’s son.”
The eternal confusion that Amir Faces with reference to his own personality is
etched out through what Amir thinks about Baba vis-à-vis himself.
When they leave their native land to a safer
place leaving behind everything, Amir feels sorry for his father and the writer
puts it wonderfully: “My eyes returned to our
suitcases. They made me sad for Baba. After everything he’d built, planned,
fought for, fretted over, and dreamed of, this was the summation of his life:
one disappointing son and two suitcases. “Amir’s disgust and
unhappiness with himself is constantly brought to the fore by the author.
Either through the eyes of Amir himself or through Amir’s interpretation of
what his Baba thinks about him. Baba never openly says anything negative about
Amir. The play of the characters is subtly portrayed.
The way Amir finally tries to take care of
Hassan’s son, is the ultimate liberation for him, ultimate liberation from his
nagging, taunting conscience that he failed to be a true friend of Hassan. One
can write volumes about each and every character in this book. Baba, Rahim
Khan, Hassan, Amir ….each and every character is amazingly sketched. Undoubtedly
a “must read” kind of a book. It is no wonder so many people are eagerly
waiting to read Khaled’s next book “And
the Mountains Echoed”.
I plan to watch the movie too, and I will post
the review of the same soon…..the film review will be in Telugu!!!
