Book Review: The Bookseller of Kabul

The Bookseller of Kabul on amazon.com


Reader Rating = ******** (7.5-8.0/10)
Date: November 5, 2004 1:31:57 PM GMT+04:00

Salaams! Just finished up another book with some very good insights into Afghans/Afghanistan: The Bookseller of Kabul, by Norwegian journalist Åsne Seierstad. Reading Rating: 7.5-8.0/10

There are limitations to her portraits that should be taken into consideration, of course: she was only in Afghanistan for a total of 4 months and lived with this family for 3 months, she does not speak Dari/Farsi, and she is a young, blonde westerner/outsider (& journalist). As one reviewer mentions below, I sometimes questioned the author's descriptions of the character's internal thoughts, but this "documentary as novel" approach does make for a very readable writing style. Given these limitations, though, I think she does a fairly good job at giving one a "behind closed doors" peek at an urban (and fairly well-to-do) Afghan extended family. Would that we in our sub-region had many of these "life inside the local community" careful observers and recorders!

Some of the insights I appreciated: marriage arrangements, male/female relationships, the sadness/complications arising from multiple wives, father/son & employer/worker relationships, and the aspirations of the younger generation who can often feel overly controlled and claustrophobic. I think what's missing in the book is a better explanation for the cultural framework that guide and determine much of the way things are. Some of this can definitely be picked up by readers who already have an understanding of the cultural context. I'm afraid your average American/European, though, is just going to be encouraged to maintain his/her slanted, prejudiced, western-freedom-loving-everything-should-go-as-long-as-none-are-hurt, culturally-superior attitude. Women will be thought of as "enslaved," rather than seen as being protected and accorded respect/regard in the midst of an environment beset with dangerous pitfalls (with extremely damaging and life-long consequences) around every corner. Not that there aren't things that are in need of being transformed/redeemed...just like there are in our culture!

Good book that I recommend. But, be ready to see the darker and difficult side of life and culture...and for good balance (as the last reviewer below points out), to remember that there is also much to be admired and incorporated into our lives/culture from the family/community-minded Afghans.

A few different reviews below to tickle your reading senses (and I recommend "Books & Culture" if you haven't seen/read it yet):

------ from Christianity Today's "Books & Culture" ------
Books & Culture's Books of the Week: Remember Afghanistan?
By Albert Louis Zambone | posted 11/10/2003

The Bookseller of Kabul
By Asne Seirstad
Little, Brown
320 pp.; $19.95

In opinion pieces and editorials, it has become almost obligatory these days to say that Afghanistan has been forgotten by U.S. policymakers since their attention turned to Iraq. But recent events seem to indicate that Afghans are doing their best to enter the Western world. No, I don't mean that they are building new roads, opening up to the forces of globalization, and overcoming the last remnants of the Taliban. It's that they are learning the pleasures and benefits of litigation.

For her part, Seirstad seems to have delved deeper than her subjects liked. A journalist seemingly without fear, the blond Norwegian reporter was one of the brigade of media that invaded Kabul along with the forces of the Northern Alliance in November of 2001. There she met an urbane bookseller, Sultan Khan (as she re-names him in the interests of his privacy).

Seirstad was fascinated by a man who had been arrested three times by the Communist regime for selling banned books; whose bookstore had been repeatedly ransacked by the Taliban; who was passionately committed to Persian poetry, to Sufi mysticism, and to the preservation of the culture of Afghanistan. When she told him that she wished to write a book about him, he simply said "Thank you" and, in Seirstad's words "opened his family to me." She joined the Khan household and found herself living in a strange dual world of man and woman. While she slept with the women and heard their complaints and their dreams, she was also allowed to eat with the men and speak with them. Even in the family of a liberal Moslem like Sultan Khan, this was something that no Afghan woman was allowed to do.

It was Seirstad's juxtaposition of the "liberal" Khan, committed to selling the best in books and in preserving the culture of Afghanistan, and the "traditionalist" Khan that led to a lawsuit against her by "Khan" in the Norwegian courts. The bookseller claimed that he had been slandered; clearly the pseudonyms Seirstad employed in her narrative couldn't hide the identity of such a distinctive figure.

Seirstad describes in detail, for example, how Khan took a second wife when his first grew too old for him; it is a living example of polygamy that leaves a bitter taste in the mouth of the reader. (And, by the way, the best example I can imagine of why Jesus says to the crowds that Moses allowed divorce "because of your hard hearts.")

This story, among others, led to Khan's lawsuit, as well as many questions about the veracity of Seirstad's account, and the "correctness" of a Westerner "judging" non-Western traditions. These questions are undoubtedly helped along by what can only be described as Seirstad's Ultra New Journalist Style. She describes the innermost thoughts of her subjects, so that what purports to be a journalistic account often reads like a novel.

----- from amazon.com ------
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
After living for three months with the Kabul bookseller Sultan Khan in the spring of 2002, Norwegian journalist Seierstad penned this astounding portrait of a nation recovering from war, undergoing political flux and mired in misogyny and poverty. As a Westerner, she has the privilege of traveling between the worlds of men and women, and though the book is ostensibly a portrait of Khan, its real strength is the intimacy and brutal honesty with which it portrays the lives of Afghani living under fundamentalist Islam. Seierstad also expertly outlines Sultan's fight to preserve whatever he can of the literary life of the capital during its numerous decades of warfare (he stashed some 10,000 books in attics around town). Seierstad, though only 31, is a veteran war reporter and a skilled observer; as she hides behind her burqa, the men in the Sultan's family become so comfortable with her presence that she accompanies one of Sultan's sons on a religious pilgrimage and witnesses another buy sex from a beggar girl-then offer her to his brother. This is only one of many equally shocking stories Seierstad uncovers. In another, an adulteress is suffocated by her three brothers as ordered by their mother. Seierstad's visceral account is equally seductive and repulsive and resembles the work of Martha Gellhorn. An international bestseller, it will likely stand as one of the best books of reportage of Afghan life after the fall of the Taliban.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

---------- from salon.com -----------
The hypocrite of Kabul
Norwegian journalist Asne Seierstad parachuted into Afghanistan and told the West exactly what it wanted to hear about that nation's women. The truth, as usual, is more complicated.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Ann Marlowe

Nov. 17, 2003  |  There's only one country foreigners write more self-righteous, intellectually assured rubbish about than Afghanistan: ours. To any American who's been asked overseas whether we all -- depending on gender -- wear miniskirts or carry guns, the lurid colors and broad brushstrokes of most journalism about Afghanistan should look familiar. Afghan men, we've been reminded over and over, are savage warriors, jealous of their honor, harsh to their long-suffering women, fanatically religious. And Afghan women -- forced to wear the burqa and be virtual slaves to their husbands -- deserve our pity.

The reality, when I made two trips to Afghanistan in 2002 to teach English and buy supplies for schools, was otherwise. From schoolboys at play to university students, Cabinet ministers to legendary commanders, Afghans were quieter, gentler and more self-contained than Americans. One young man confided that to him and his friends in northern Afghanistan, Americans' body language and loud voices seemed exaggerated, like the gestures of stage actors.

It was hard to pity the women when I lived with an extended Uzbek Afghan family in Mazar-i-Sharif and Maimana for a couple of weeks. A withered 80-year-old widow sat bala, or at the head of the room, and she was the only person who smoked. The family's resources were lavished on a bright teenage daughter, who had her own room and computer and was preparing for her university entrance exam. And the men were tender with their children and treated their wives, sisters and mothers with dignity. I felt at home more quickly than I ever have in an American household, and the fondness and respect I saw between young and old and men and women gave me new yardsticks for my own life...