A Room of One's Own: 二月 2008

2008年2月20日星期三

Journal---Chapter one

The beginning of the story is brief. The narrator just told his unforgettable memories on the alley. The phone call from Pakistan made the narrator remind of his father, his friends and his past life in hometown. The sight of twin kites let him think about Hasson who said:" For you, a thousand times over." to him. I also got the information that the narrator called Hasson the kite runner, so I would put more attention to the character--Hassan. Though I have no idea what the relationship between these characters, the sentence actually touched me a lot.

Another significant sentence in chapter one I think is:" There is a way to be good again.", which reveals that there must be something important happened in the past.

Meanwhile,the narrator repeated almost the same words both at the beginning and in the end. The opening remarks of the chapter is: I bacame what I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid overcast day in the winter of 1975. The ending words of the chapter is: 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. Why the narrator showed the same meaning for twice, which arouse my interest in what had happened in the winter of 1975.

Khaled Hosseini From Wikipedia

Biography
Hosseini was born in Kabul, where his father worked for the Afghanistan Foreign Ministry and his mother was a Farsi and History teacher at a girls high school. In 1970, Hosseini and his family moved to Tehran, Iran, where his father worked for the Embassy of Afghanistan. In 1973, Hosseini's family returned to Kabul, and Hosseini's youngest brother was born in July of that year. Several months later, the former King of Afghanistan, Zahir Shah, was ousted from power in a bloodless coup that was orchestrated by Zahir's cousin, Daoud Khan. In 1976, Hosseini's father obtained a job in Paris and moved the family there. They chose not to return to Afghanistan because communists had seized power through a bloody coup. Instead, in 1980 they sought political asylum in the United States and made their residence in San Jose, California. Having left Afghanistan with only the clothes on their back, they were forced to subsist on welfare and food stamps for a brief period. Hosseini graduated from Independence High School in San Jose in 1984 and enrolled at Santa Clara University, where he earned a bachelor's degree in biology in 1988. The following year, he entered the University of California, San Diego, School of Medicine, where he earned his M.D. in 1993. He completed his residency in internal medicine at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles in 1996. He practiced medicine until a year and half after the release of The Kite Runner. Hosseini is currently a Goodwill Envoy for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. He lives in Northern California with his Afghan-American wife, Roya, and their two children.
Influneces
When Hosseini was a child, he read a great deal of Persian poetry as well as Persian translations of novels ranging from Alice in Wonderland to Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer series. Hosseini's memories of peaceful pre-Soviet era Afghanistan, "I have very fond memories of my childhood in Afghanistan" [3] as well as his personal experiences with Afghanistan's Hazara people, led to the writing of his first novel, The Kite Runner. One Hazara man, named Hossein Khan, worked for the Hosseinis when they were living in Iran. When Hosseini was in third grade, he taught Khan to read and write. Although his relationship with Hossein Khan was brief and rather formal, Hosseini's fond memories of this relationship served as an inspiration for the relationship between Hassan and Amir in The Kite Runner.
Novels
The Kite Runner (ISBN 1-59448-000-1) is the story of a young boy, Amir, juggling to establish a closer rapport with his father and coping with memories of a haunting childhood event. The novel is set in Afghanistan, from the fall of the monarchy until the collapse of the Taliban regime, and in the San Francisco Bay Area. Its many themes include ethnic tensions between the Hazara and the Pashtun in Afghanistan, and the immigrant experiences of Amir and his father in the United States. The novel was the number three best seller for 2005 in the United States, according to Nielsen BookScan.The Kite Runner was also produced as an audiobook read by the author. The Kite Runner has been adapted into a film of the same name with a release date in December, 2007.
Hosseini's second novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, the story of two native women of Afghanistan, Mariam and Laila, whose lives become entwined, was released by Riverhead Books on May 22, 2007, simultaneous with the Simon & Schuster audiobook. Movie rights have been acquired by producer Scott Rudin and Columbia Pictures.

SOURCE CITATION

Khaled Hosseini
Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 2008. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Gale, 2008. http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/BioRC

Characters

๑۩۞۩๑Amir — protagonist and narrator of the novel, said to be born in 1963, in Kabul, who begins as a well-to-do boy in monarchical Afghanistan and later migrates to America following the downfall of the monarchy. Amir is Hassan's half brother; however, Amir does not learn of their relationship until much later in his life. Hassan never learns of the relationship.
๑۩۞۩๑Hassan — a childhood friend of Amir, although Amir never explicitly admitted to this. Hassan is first thought to be the son of Ali (Baba's servant and inexplicit childhood friend) and Sanaubar; later in the story, Hassan is revealed to be the illegitimate son of Baba and Sanaubar. Hassan died without ever knowing about this fact.
๑۩۞۩๑Assef — a sadistic teenage rapist (and later notorious pedophile) from Amir's neighborhood in Kabul, antagonist. As a teenager, he rapes Hassan. As an adult he sexually assaults Hassan's son, Sohrab, and numerous other young children of both genders. Assef is the son of a German mother and Afghan father. He is a Nazi sympathizer and a has hatred of Hazaras, giving a book about his "idol" Adolf Hitler to Amir for his thirteenth birthday. Many years later, he becomes a Talib-executioner and pedophile. Sohrab severely damages one of Assef's eyes during Assef's fight with Amir.
๑۩۞۩๑Baba — The father of Amir and Hassan. He is said to be born in the year 1933 (when the Afghan king begins his 40-year reign). He is described as a big, strong, healthy looking man with wild brown hair and beard. Baba is depicted to be of about 1.96 meter (6'5") in height. He is a bit of a party-maker, and known for his strength. (He is said to have fought with a black bear and won the fight, in his younger years). During the book, Baba seems to be a bit disappointed in his son Amir, who he wishes to be as much as a man as he is (but his son only reads books and lets others fight off bullies for him). After leaving Afghanistan for America, he ages quickly and dies at fifty-three, in 1986, of cancer. He lives long enough, though, to see his son Amir marry a young Afghan woman called Soraya. Many people attend his funeral.
๑۩۞۩๑Ali — Baba's servant and inexplicit childhood friend. He is initially thought to be the father of Hassan. Before the events of the novel, he had been struck with polio, rendering his right leg useless. He is killed by a land mine.
๑۩۞۩๑Rahim Khan — Baba's business partner and best friend in Afghanistan, later he was the one who tells Amir about Hassan's actual father. Amir liked him as a child, and Rahim Khan is also the one who invited Amir back to Afghanistan to pick up Sohrab. Later in the story, Rahim Khan goes off alone leaving a letter to Amir telling him not to find him. He dies peacefully knowing he has successfully made Amir the man Baba wanted him to be.
๑۩۞۩๑Soraya — an Afghan woman living in Fremont, California. She marries Amir. Soraya wants to become a teacher. Before marrying Amir, she ran away with an Afghan boyfriend in Virginia, which according to Afghan tradition made her unsuitable for marriage, but because Amir also had his own regrets, loved and married her anyway.
๑۩۞۩๑Sohrab — son of Hassan, traumatized and sexually abused by the Assef; Rahim Khan contacts Amir later in life in an attempt to get him to come back to Afghanistan to find Sohrab. In the end, he is adopted by Amir.
๑۩۞۩๑Sanaubar — Ali's wife who gives birth to Hassan as a result of an affair with Baba. She then leaves home to pursue the life of a gypsy. She later returns to Hassan in his adulthood, providing a grandmother figure for Sohrab.
๑۩۞۩๑Farid — bitter driver who is initially abrasive toward Amir but later befriends him. Farid's two daughters were killed by a land mine years back. Farid is Amir's means of transport, information, and knowledge of current Afghanistan when he returns.

A Room of One's Own

2008年2月20日星期三

Journal---Chapter one

Khaled Hosseini From Wikipedia

SOURCE CITATION

Welcome to my room

The kite runner

Characters

Khaled Hosseini

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