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The Kite Runner ペーパーバック – 2004/4/27
The New York Times bestseller and international classic loved by millions of readers.
The unforgettable, heartbreaking story of the unlikely friendship between a wealthy boy and the son of his father's servant, The Kite Runner is a beautifully crafted novel set in a country that is in the process of being destroyed. It is about the power of reading, the price of betrayal, and the possibility of redemption; and an exploration of the power of fathers over sonstheir love, their sacrifices, their lies.
A sweeping story of family, love, and friendship told against the devastating backdrop of the history of Afghanistan over the last thirty years, The Kite Runner is an unusual and powerful novel that has become a beloved, one-of-a-kind classic.
- 本の長さ400ページ
- 言語英語
- 出版社Riverhead Trade
- 発売日2004/4/27
- 対象読者年齢18 歳以上
- 寸法13.51 x 2.69 x 20.6 cm
- ISBN-101594480001
- ISBN-13978-1594480003
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商品の説明
レビュー
"A moving portrait of modern Afghanistan."—Entertainment Weekly
"This powerful first novel...tells the story of fierce cruelty and fierce yet redeeming love. Both transform the life of Amir, Khaled Hosseini's privileged young narrator, who comes of age during the last peaceful days of the monarchy, just before his country's revolution and its invasion by Russian forces. But political events, even as dramatic as the ones that are presented in The Kite Runner, are only a part of this story. In The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini gives us a vivid and engaging story that reminds us how long his people have been struggling to triumph over the forces of violence—forces that continue to threaten them even today."—The New York Times Book Review—The New York Times Book Review
"A powerful book...no frills, no nonsense, just hard, spare prose...an intimate account of family and friendship, betrayal and salvation that requires no atlas or translation to engage and enlighten us. Parts of The Kite Runner are raw and excruciating to read, yet the book in its entirety is lovingly written."—The Washington Post Book World
"An astonishing, powerful book."—Diane Sawyer
著者について
抜粋
December 2001
I became what I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid overcast day in the winter of 1975. I remember the precise moment, crouching behind a crumbling mud wall, peeking into the alley near the frozen creek. That was a long time ago, but it’s wrong what they say about the past, I’ve learned, about how you can bury it. Because the past claws its way out. Looking back now, I realize I have been peeking into that deserted alley for the last twenty-six years.
One day last summer, my friend Rahim Khan called from Pakistan. He asked me to come see him. Standing in the kitchen with the receiver to my ear, I knew it wasn’t just Rahim Khan on the line. It was my past of unatoned sins. After I hung up, I went for a walk along Spreckels Lake on the northern edge of Golden Gate Park. The early-afternoon sun sparkled on the water where dozens of miniature boats sailed, propelled by a crisp breeze. Then I glanced up and saw a pair of kites, red with long blue tails, soaring in the sky. They danced high above the trees on the west end of the park, over the windmills, floating side by side like a pair of eyes looking down on San Francisco, the city I now call home. And suddenly Hassan’s voice whispered in my head: For you, a thousand times over. Hassan the harelipped kite runner.
I sat on a park bench near a willow tree. I thought about something Rahim Khan said just before he hung up, almost as an afterthought. There is a way to be good again. I looked up at those twin kites. I thought about Hassan. Thought about Baba. Ali. Kabul. I thought of the life I had lived until the winter of 1975 came along and changed everything. And made me what I am today.
Two
When we were children, Hassan and I used to climb the poplar trees in the driveway of my father’s house and annoy our neighbors by reflecting sunlight into their homes with a shard of mirror. We would sit across from each other on a pair of high branches, our naked feet dangling, our trouser pockets filled with dried mulberries and walnuts. We took turns with the mirror as we ate mulberries, pelted each other with them, giggling, laughing. I can still see Hassan up on that tree, sunlight flickering through the leaves on his almost perfectly round face, a face like a Chinese doll chiselled from hardwood: his flat, broad nose and slanting, narrow eyes like bamboo leaves, eyes that looked, depending on the light, gold, green, even sapphire. I can still see his tiny low-set ears and that pointed stub of a chin, a meaty appendage that looked like it was added as a mere afterthought. And the cleft lip, just left of midline, where the Chinese doll maker’s instrument may have slipped, or perhaps he had simply grown tired and careless.
Sometimes, up in those trees, I talked Hassan into firing walnuts with his slingshot at the neighbor’s one-eyed German shepherd. Hassan never wanted to, but if I asked, really asked, he wouldn’t deny me. Hassan never denied me anything. And he was deadly with his slingshot. Hassan’s father, Ali, used to catch us and get mad, or as mad as someone as gentle as Ali could ever get. He would wag his finger and wave us down from the tree. He would take the mirror and tell us what his mother had told him, that the devil shone mirrors too, shone them to distract Muslims during prayer. “And he laughs while he does it,” he always added, scowling at his son.
“Yes, Father,” Hassan would mumble, looking down at his feed. But he never told on my. Never told that the mirror, like shooting walnuts at the neighbor’s dog, was always my idea.
The poplar trees lined the redbrick driveway, which led to a pair of wrought-iron gates. They in turn opened into an extension of the driveway into my father’s estate. The house sat on the left side of the brick path, the backyard at the end of it.
Everyone agreed that my father, my Baba, had built the most beautiful house in the Wazir Akbar Khan district, a new and affluent neighborhood in the northern part of Kabul. Some thought it was the prettiest house in all of Kabul. A broad entryway flanked by rosebushes led to the sprawling house of marble floors and wide windows. Intricate mosaic tiles, handpicked by Baba in Isfahan, covered the floors of the four bathrooms. Gold-stitched tapestries, which Baba had bought in Calcutta, lined the walls; a crystal chandelier hung from the vaulted ceiling.
Upstairs was my bedroom, Baba’s room, and his study, also known as “the smoking room,” which perpetually smelled of tobacco and cinnamon. Baba and his friends reclined on black leather chairs there after Ali had served dinner. They stuffed their pipes -- except Baba always called it “fattening the pipe” -- and discussed their favorite three topics: politics, business, soccer. Sometimes I asked Baba if I could sit with them, but Baba would stand in the doorway. “Go on, now,” he’d say. “This is grown-ups’ time. Why don’t you go read one of those books of yours?” He’d close the door, leave me to wonder why it was always grown-ups’ time with him. I’d sit by the door, knees drawn into my chest. Sometimes I sat there for an hour, sometimes two, listening to their laughter, their chatter.
The living room downstairs had a curved wall with custom-built cabinets. Inside sat framed family pictures: an old, grainy photo of my grandfather and King Nadir Shah taken in 1931, two years before the king’s assassination; they are standing over a dead deer, dressed in knee-high boots, rifles slung over their shoulders. There was a picture of my parents’ wedding night, Baba dashing in his black suit and my mother a smiling young princess in white. Here was Baba and his best friend and business partner, Rahim Kahn, standing outside our house, neither one smiling -- I am a baby in that photograph and Baba is holding me, looking tired and grim. I’m in his arms, but it’s Rahim Khan’s pinky my fingers are curled around.
The curved wall led into the dining room, at the center of which was a mahogany table that could easily sit thirty guests -- and, given my father’s taste for extravagant parties, it did just that almost every week. On the other end of the dining room was a tall marble fireplace, always lit by the orange glow of a fire in the wintertime.
A large sliding glass door opened into a semicircular terrace that overlooked two acres of backyard and rows of cherry trees. Baba and Ali had planted a small vegetable garden along the eastern wall: tomatoes, mint, peppers, and a row of corn that never really took. Hassan and I used to call it “the Wall of Ailing Corn.”
On the south end of the garden, in the shadows of a loquat tree, was the servants’ home, a modest mud hut where Hassan lived with his father.
It was there, in that little shack, that Hassan was born in the winter of 1964, just one year after my mother died giving birth to me.
From the Hardcover edition. --このテキストは、絶版本またはこのタイトルには設定されていない版型に関連付けられています。
登録情報
- 出版社 : Riverhead Trade; Reprint版 (2004/4/27)
- 発売日 : 2004/4/27
- 言語 : 英語
- ペーパーバック : 400ページ
- ISBN-10 : 1594480001
- ISBN-13 : 978-1594480003
- 対象読者年齢 : 18 歳以上
- 寸法 : 13.51 x 2.69 x 20.6 cm
- Amazon 売れ筋ランキング: - 116,515位洋書 (洋書の売れ筋ランキングを見る)
- - 2,368位Contemporary Literature & Fiction
- - 4,350位Literary Fiction
- カスタマーレビュー:
著者について
著者の本をもっと発見したり、よく似た著者を見つけたり、著者のブログを読んだりしましょう
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トップレビュー
上位レビュー、対象国: 日本
レビューのフィルタリング中に問題が発生しました。後でもう一度試してください。
The product matched the description on Amazon.
Prefect.
Fascinating novel!
物語は1970年代から2000年代までの、あるアフガニスタン人を中心に展開する。主人公のAmirは裕福な家庭に生まれたごくごく普通の少年。物語の開始時点では彼は12歳。Amirの家には召使いがいて、Hassanという同い年の男の子がいる。Amirの父BabaとHassanの父Aliは、二人が幼い時から生活を共にしており、主人と召使いという関係性を超えたもので結ばれている、その子供同士である、AmirとHassanの関係性も単なる主人と召使いのものではないのだが、少し複雑になっている。HassanはAmirのことを主人としてだけでなく、友達に近い感情、あるいはそれ以上に大切な人、守るべき人という感情を持っている。一方でAmirは、Hassanを友達ではないと言い切っているし、時にちょっとした意地悪をしたりもする。AmirはHassanが自分の良き理解者ではあると思ってはいるが、彼の父であるBabaがHassanに時たま見せる愛情に嫉妬を感じてしまう。AmirはBabaに愛されたい、認められたいと強く思っているが、それがなかなか叶わない。そんなある日、Kite TournamentでAmirは優勝することができ、やっとBabaに認めてもらえる、愛情を独占することができると思っていた矢先に、Hassanに大きな悲劇が起こる。この悲劇が、AmirとHassanの運命を大きく変えることになるのだが、、、
この物語はAmirとHassanの友情がテーマになっていると思うのだが、その二人の「友情」を形容する言葉がうまく見つからない。美しい友情、悲しい友情、儚い友情。全てを合わせた感じ。HassanのAmirに対する友情は、美しい。そして悲しい。Hassanは、おそらく心の底からAmirを愛し、尊敬し、再び会うことができる日が来ることを願っていたが、それは叶わなかった。一方で、Amirはとことん陰気くさい。苦笑。Hassanを救うことができなかった罪の十字架を背負い続け、もがく姿は読んでいるこちらの心に深く刺さった。Hassanの息子であるSohrabに、“For you, a thousand times over”と言う言葉を投げかけた時、その十字架がAmirから外れたのではないかと感じた。
約400ページの分量は読み終えると短く感じた。後半はpage turnerで読み絵終えるのが寂しく感じた。単語は一部難しいものもあるが、繰り返し出てくるものも多いので、さほど苦労はしないはず。この本の舞台となったアフガニスタン、パレスチナに行ってみたいと思ったが、現状はかなり厳しそうだ。約20年前に出版された小説だが、色々な人に読んで欲しいと思う一冊。
読後感にも独特のものがある本なので、今度はもっとゆっくり、もう一度読み直してみています。無理のない、でもスケールの大きいストーリー展開なので、不自然でなく気づくと涙が湧いてきてしまいました。オススメです!!!
初版は2003年に出ているので、9.11の同時多発テロ後のアフガニスタンに和平が訪れ、明るい未来を予感させる書き方で終わっているのですが、再びこの小説に出てくるような悲劇が繰り返される(すでに起こっている)と思うと読後に何とも言えないやりきれなさを感じます。
とにかく小説のプロットが優れており、舞台をどこにおいても、タリバンをどこかの国のやくざに置き換えても、それだけで感動的な小説になるのだろうとは思います。そこに、ソ連の侵攻、ジハード、タリバンの圧政といったアフガニスタンの近代史が見事にマッチし、類まれなものすごい作品になりました。著者自身が若い頃にアフガニスタンからアメリカへ逃避しているので、小説という形を借りて、一人でも多くの読者に真実を知ってほしいという思いが非常に強くこめられています。その思い、そして著者の祖国に対する郷愁が全編を通じてあふれ出ており、読者の心をつかんで離しません。英語の文章表現も、誰かが手伝ったのかもしれませんが、繊細で機知に富んでおり、何回も読みかえしたくなります。英語が読める方は、ぜひ原書でこの感動を味わってほしいです。
やはり登場人物として胸を打つのは、主人公の腹違いの兄弟、ハッサンです。過酷な運命をありのままに受け入れ、他者への思いやりにあふれ、どこまでも従順に正義感とともに生きていく姿勢には涙が止まりません。自分が死んだ後も、その魂で(自分の息子を通じて)主人公を助け、「君のためなら千回でも」を本当に貫き通したのです。架空の人物とは言え、私を含めた読者の心に生き続ける人物となるでしょう。
他の国からのトップレビュー
Concurrently I have just read two novels by Zia Ahmad , “Finding Danyal - A love Story” and “The One Hundred.” I recommend these wonderful story experiences equally as good as "The Kite Runner"
A most gratifying reading marathon of these three novels likened to my typical Netflix series binging where I resist ear marking the last page from being so engrossed in finding out what next. Especially during the fast pace of the disturbing scenes of conflict, torture and meanness inflicted on the principal characters contained in all three novels. I grew up with the influx of Pakistani refugees arriving in Toronto Canada in the early 60s, but I did not know anything of why or the scope of their plight or struggles. Zia Ahmad’s writing has inspired me to know more of political devastating disparities of the Anglo Afghanistan wars and Russian penetration.
I must say reading these three books one after the other has heaped my head blending, overlapping each story’s’ similar conflicts, betrayals, and flirting friendships to the point of having difficulty keeping them distinct each to its own. Nevertheless, here at my desk writing, recalling, fiddling with the scenes they individually start to filter through.
“Finding Danyal”, it was clear from first reading Zia Ahmad’s second published novel that yes, it is a love story. I cried at the end. An indication I felt the emotions the storyteller crafted. Characters evolve from plot twists and disturbing betrayals showing us a controversial unescapable gay love story. All at odds within religious and oppressive constraints of the Arab world in Lahore Pakistan. I relate to Zia’s writing. My own experience discovering love took place in Canada, a different supposedly more tolerant world. But I too struggled with self-identity and societal acceptance confronting the turbulences of coming of age as a gay man. The ending “Finding Danyal” was read causing a feel-good sensation still with me.
“The One Hundred”, Zia Ahmad’s first published novel is a different story exposing a historical tragedy in such a way achieving Zia Ahmad’s objective of memorializing the one hundred victims showing a world tolerance and acceptance are human qualities we should honor. But the frantic pace of the scenes with violence, bullying, beating the characters to a pulp was frightening, very real, virtually wanting to cover my eyes. A challenge to read calmly. High drama ending in a tale to be told one “hundred times”. I can see where Zia Ahmad utilized this background to write his second novel “Finding Danyal” with a theme of love.
“The Kite Runner”, chosen by our Book club which I read after those of Zia Ahmad. Another reading challenge to cope with the violence, the class conflicts, a brutal rape of a boy, the “running away” of Amir the protagonist, the contrast of righteous Hasan and Amir’s cowardice, test of loyalty and trust, the Taliban cruel enforcement, intense control throughout the story resulting in the blood bath of the Hazaras, - but redemption is achieved when Amir becomes in the end the kite runner. Many plot twists and surprises lead to an unexpected ending far from the outset of the principal characters. I can see why Zia Ahmad studied this book in preparation for his own writing.
If you have enjoyed reading “The Kite Runner, I recommend you read Zia Ahmad’s two novels, “Finding Danyal- A love Story” and “The One Hundred”. Both authors equally provide an emotionally haunting, thought-provoking thrilling story experience producing as forceful a message of what it means to be human.
I thoroughly enjoyed reading Zia Ahmad’s two novels He is an impressive competent talented writer with engaging story telling style and showing descriptive flow. I truly believe “Finding Danyal” is worthy of a Netflix movie. It is comparable if not better than some I have watched. Well done, Zia Ahmad!
My first book was a gift and was on the shelf for along time , whenI finally got round to reading It I couldn’t put it down it is by the same author and the title is “A Thousand Splendid Suns” . I have read this twice a thoroughly brilliant Novel.
I high recommend this Author , for me a lesson to appreciate the Country I was Born in England and the Liberty that allows us to speak our mind and the freedoms travel at will.