12歲的阿富汗富家少爺阿米爾與仆人哈桑情同手足。然而,在一場風(fēng)箏比賽后,發(fā)生了一件悲慘不堪的事,阿米爾為自己的懦弱感到自責(zé)和痛苦,逼走了哈桑,不久,自己也跟隨父親逃往美國。
成年后的阿米爾始終無法原諒自己當(dāng)年對哈桑的背叛。為了贖罪,阿米爾再度踏上暌違二十多年的故鄉(xiāng),希望能為不幸的好友盡最后一點(diǎn)心力,卻發(fā)現(xiàn)一個(gè)驚天謊言,兒時(shí)的噩夢再度重演,阿米爾該如何抉擇?小說如此殘忍而又美麗,作者以溫暖細(xì)膩的筆法勾勒人性的本質(zhì)與救贖,讀來令人蕩氣回腸。
As confided to a neighbor's servant by the garrulous midwife, who had then in turn told anyone who would listen, Sanaubar had taken one glance at the baby in Ali's arms, seen the cleft lip, and barked a bitter laughter.
"There," she had said. "Now you have your own idiot child to do all your smiling for you!" She had refused to even hold Hassan, and just five days later, she was gone.
Baba hired the same nursing woman who had fed me to nurse Hassan. Ali told us she was a blue-eyed Hazara woman from Bamiyan, the city of the giant Buddha statues. "What a sweet singing voice she had,"he used to say to us.
What did she sing, Hassan and I always asked, though we already knew--Ali had told us countless times. We just wanted to hear Ali sing.
He'd clear his throat and begin:
"On a high mountain I stood,
And cried the name of Ali, Lion of God.
O Ali, Lion of God, King of Men,
Bring joy to our sorrowful hearts."
Then he would remind us that there was a brotherhood between people who had fed from the same breast, a kinship that not even time could break.
Hassan and I fed from the same breasts. We took our first steps on the same lawn in the same yard. And, under the same roof, we spoke our first words.
Mine was "Baba".
His was "Amir". My name.
Looking back on it now, I think the foundation for what happened in the winter of 1975—and all that followed—was already laid in those first words.