I had serious issues with this book. There might be spoilers below, if you're super-picky. But I'm not going to tell you about how Amir is actually, unbeknownst to the reader, the ghost of the patron saint of Afghanistan the whole time, or anything. Oh, damn.

I hated the narrator's guts nearly immediately, and only partially got over that over the course of the novel. I'm fine with narrators I dislike--I LOVE Notes from the Underground, and that guy's the king of skeezes--but only if their voices are interesting enough to counterbalance whatever it is about them I despise.

My problem with Amir is that for the boyhood section of the book, he's weak, cowardly, cruel, and dull. He's unapologetic about his really ugly personality, but he also completely fails to take any responsibility for himself. It seemed at times like he was boring himself with his own pettiness. If you're going to be an unpleasant person, I guess, at least take some pride in it. Enjoy your moral decrepitude. Own it. Amir cringes nonstop.

Then there were the gratuitous Farsi vocab lessons. No one speaks the way Amir does, first in his native language, then translating for the invisible audience who only knows English. The author used language as a bland condiment instead of allowing for the slightest bit of mystery--part of the book's appeal is that it's about a place and groups of people about which we're woefully ignorant, but I thought allowing for that instead of belaboring every exchange between two Afghani men with explanations for the clueless Americans might have made it a stronger book. I'm OK using context clues once in a while, or wondering what nang and namoos are, besides silly words when I take them out of context.

I don't have any complaints about the very moving and human drama that unfolds when Amir goes back to Afghanistan. The story kept me curious enough to keep reading through to the end even when the characters had exasperated me. The parallelism was so heavy-handed, though (GET IT??? His lip was SPLIT IN TWO! That's somehow FAMILIAR!) And I did think Amir managed finally to redeem himself, which is good, because I would have felt a Da Vinci Code sense of betrayal had he not, then thrown the book at the nearest wall.

I'm looking forward to the movie. I hadn't realized the same director as Finding Neverland and Stranger Than Fiction was doing it, and I like his work.