What came first, the word or the image?

The Kite Runner was a book that was notable for a number of reasons. Firstly, I happened upon it quite by accident at the shop while accumulating newspapers and jelly babies.

Secondly, it just so happens that the movie is currently showing on circuit, synchronising very nicely with my current trip to the schizophrenic, gold and mean streets of Jozi.

The book takes an average kid in Afghanistan born on the privileged side of the tracks with a friend who just so happens to be the servant living on the property in a hut away from the main house. Sounds familiar doesn’t it.

A kind of generic plot in many stories about South Africa. This book however, takes off from there on a journey traversing many different levels and layers of guilt, suppression, ideological and political cruelty and corruption, new world versus old and lastly a ghastly moment of indecision and inaction being filled with something approaching a form of redemption and closure.

The most irritating thing for me about reviews is that they give away too much without actually spoiling the plot. They give away enough to mould and shape how the book will be read by the reader of the review and how the book is read ultimately shapes the readers final opinion.

Reviewers are a critical lens, almost a prism, because they are the defining portal through which a society sees culture and debates culture, takes culture on board for historical perspective and ultimately finds a niche, nook or cranny for the individual to be happy, fulfilled and protected from the infidels outside the walls of their own culture haven. It really builds an “us and them” reality for every person on earth, the reviewers are just different depending on individual perspective and culture.

I have not seen the movie despite intending to on at least three excursions to the Rosebank Mall. The book left disturbing images and conflicting ideas in my headspace regarding the possible differences between the book and the movie as media that do not quite complement each other leaving the director too much space as an ego that can get out of control.

A movie can quite easily smash the structure build in the imagination like a dream city created brick by brick and wreck any desire to reread the book and return to that secret,isolated location revisiting the structure and maybe tweaking it slightly, polishing it and adding subsequent insights gleaned from re-readings, pondering and just thinking as well as real life as the reader knows it.

The more I think about it and dwell on the dangers and possible unintended consequences the more I need to defend ground gained in my journey through life and if that means denying myself the visual and instant gratification of a diluted pseudo/quasi reading filtered through the eyes and mind of a director with ulterior motives, than so be it.

With all the human frailty and unintended consequences, all the human weaknesses that are contained in this well written, thoughtfully constructed and provocative book, there is no space in my head for a director hellbent on reinventing the camera. The kind of director who takes the book as a guideline for what to avoid on screen. It’s a gamble I won’t take today, but tomorrow is not here yet.

The intrepid reader will immediately raise the question of whether I would see things differently if movies were my first love and my answer would be yes. It’s all relative and I make no apologies for that.

Attention to detail is something that happens to most people only when calamity strikes and this excerpt captures a moment of crisis by getting wrapped up in the detail.

“In the daytime, the hospital was a mass of teeming, angled hallways, a blur of blazing-white overhead fluorescence. I came to know its layout, came to know that the fourth-floor button in the east wing elevator didn’t light up, that the door to the men’s room on that same floor was jammed and you had to ram your shoulder into it to open it. I came to know that hospital life has a rhythm, the flurry of activity just before the morning shift change, the midday hustle, the stillness and quiet of the late-night hours interrupted occasionally by a blur of doctors and nurses rushing to revive someone.”

There is a peace and a harmony in detail, it becomes a fundamental basic, something to be relied upon when the world has crashed around one. It becomes not only important but quietly impressive and indeed minimalistic without any extraneous features.

The movie can wait for another day, I need time apart to reread this book and an opportunity to survey my mental imagery second time around without unwarranted and unjustified intrusion.

Addendum; This review was written prior to the viewing of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. That disastrous experience should not be taken as proof that the decision taken about this movie was in any way a correct one.
These words could fit as a finale to that review, "there is no space in my head for a director hellbent on reinventing the camera. The kind of director who takes the book as a guideline for what to avoid on screen".