《The Kite
Runner追风筝的人》是一个阿富汗作家的处女作,霸占了美国两大权威畅销书排行榜《纽约时报》排行榜、《出版商周刊》排行榜长达80余周,声势超过红透全世界的丹·布朗的《达·芬奇密码》。
著名作家伊莎贝拉·阿连德说:“这本小说太令人震撼,很长一段时日,让我所读的一切都相形失色。文学与生活中的所有重要主题,都交织在这部惊世之作里:爱、恐惧、愧疚、赎罪……”而媒体更是好评如潮。《华盛顿邮报》认为:“没有虚矫赘文,没有无病呻吟,只有精炼的篇章,细腻勾勒家庭与友谊,背叛与救赎。作者对祖国的爱显然与对造成它今日沧桑的恨一样深。故事娓娓道来,轻笔淡描,近似川端康成的《千羽鹤》。”
From Publishers Weekly
Hosseini''s stunning debut novel starts as an eloquent Afghan
version of the American immigrant experience in the late 20th
century, but betrayal and redemption come to the for
內容簡介:
《The Kite
Runner追风筝的人》是一个阿富汗作家的处女作,霸占了美国两大权威畅销书排行榜《纽约时报》排行榜、《出版商周刊》排行榜长达80余周,声势超过红透全世界的丹?布朗的《达?芬奇密码》。这本小说太令人震撼,很长一段时日,让我所读的一切都相形失色。文学与生活中的所有重要主题,都交织在这部惊世之作里:爱、恐惧、愧疚、赎罪……——著名作家伊莎贝拉?阿连德
★一个阿富汗作家的处女作
★一部以史诗般的历史景观和荡气回肠的人性故事,深深地打动全世界各地亿万读者心的文学经典
★美国《纽约时报》、《出版商周刊》等九大畅销书排行榜榜首图书
★英国《观察家报》2005年度最佳图书
★台湾诚品书店、金石堂书店、博客来书店销售冠军
★连续80余周雄踞《纽约时报》畅销书排行榜,声势超过红透全球的丹?布朗的《达?芬奇密码》
“许多年过去了,人们说陈年旧事可以被埋葬,然而我终于明白这是错的,因为往事会自行爬上来。回首前尘,我意识到在过去二十六年里,自己始终在窥视着那荒芜的小径。”
《华盛顿邮报》认为:“没有虚矫赘文,没有无病呻吟,只有精炼的篇章,细腻勾勒家庭与友谊,背叛与救赎。作者对祖国的爱显然与对造成它今日沧桑的恨一样深。故事娓娓道来,轻笔淡描,近似川端康成的《千羽鹤》。”
12岁的阿富汗富家少爷阿米尔与仆人哈桑情同手足。然而,在一场风筝比赛后,发生了一件悲惨不堪的事,阿米尔为自己的懦弱感到自责和痛苦,逼走了哈桑,不久,自己也跟随父亲逃往美国。
成年后的阿米尔始终无法原谅自己当年对哈桑的背叛。为了赎罪,阿米尔再度踏上暌违二十多年的故乡,希望能为不幸的好友尽最后一点心力,却发现一个惊天谎言,儿时的噩梦再度重演,阿米尔该如何抉择?
小说如此残忍而又美丽,作者以温暖细腻的笔法勾勒人性的本质与救赎,读来令人荡气回肠。
Book Description
Twelve-year-old Amir is desperate to win the approval of his
father and resolves to win the local kite-fighting tournament, to
prove that he has the makings of a man. His loyal friend Hassan
promises to help him - for he always helps Amir - but this is 1970s
Afghanistan and Hassan is merely a low-caste servant who is jeered
at in the street, although Amir still feels jealous of his natural
courage and the place he holds in his father''s heart. But neither
of the boys could foresee what would happen to Hassan on the
afternoon of the tournament, which was to shatter their lives.
After the Russians invade and the family is forced to flee to
America, Amir realises that one day he must return, to find the one
thing that his new world cannot grant him: redemption.
關於作者:
作者:胡赛尼Khaled Hosseini
卡勒德·胡赛尼(Khaled
Hosseini),1965年生于喀布尔,后随父亲逃往美国。胡赛尼毕业于加州大学圣地亚哥医学系,现居加州执业。《The Kite
Runner追风筝的人》是他的第一本小说,因书中角色刻画生动,故事情节震撼感人,出版后大获好评,获得各项新人奖,并跃居全美各大畅销排行榜,目前正由梦工厂改拍成电影。
Khaled Hosseini was born and raised in Kabul, Afghanistan, the
son of a diplomat whose family received political asylum in the
United States in 1980. He now lives in Northern California, and is
a physician. The Kite Runner is his first novel.
One
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.