The Bookseller of Kabul
Two weeks after September 11th, award-winning journalist Asne Seierstad went to Afghanistan to report on the conflict there. In the following spring she returned to live with an Afghan family for several months. For more than 20 years Sultan Khan defied the authorities – be they Communist or Taliban – in order to supply books to the people of Kabul. He was arrested, interrogated and imprisoned by the Communists, and watched illiterate Taliban soldiers burn piles of his books in the street. He ev
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Review by Peggy Vincent for The Bookseller of Kabul
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…but Sultan Khan had his head in the clouds if he thought he was going to emerge from this journalist’s immersion in his family’s life looking like a benevolent god. He’s suing her, as the book-reading world knows by now, for something like defamation of character. I’m sure he thought she would extol his virtues; instead, she wrote honestly of the fiercely patriarchal Afghanistan/Muslim traditional family structure that keeps his tyranny intact and subjugates all women, regardless of their educational level or social status.
The Bookseller of Kabul reads more like good New Journalism. It’s not great literature; it’s great reportage. But it gives a voice to the women in the extended Family (meant in the broadest sense of the word), a voice that speaks for millions of women in the Middle East, a voice that must be heard. Especially heartbreaking is the fate of Leila, sister of Sultan Khan, educated, literate, bright – but unable to speak up for herself to escape a lifetime of servitude.
Review by A. Lord for The Bookseller of Kabul
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Sierstad has written an outstanding book—her writing is lyrical (or at least the translation is!) and the subject is fascinating. Contrary to what other reviewers have said, Sierstad never claims that her family is representative of the Afghani people (in her introduction, she notes that she picked the Khan family because she found them and their stories compelling—she says, however, that the family is by no means typical as they are literate, middle class and urban).That said, the book does provide a penetrating look at a complex and complicated family forced to live under horrific conditions. Within the context of his society, Sultan Khan is an enlightened and liberal man. No fundamentalist, he reads widely and believes in freedom of thought and speech. But for all that Khan is a liberal man in a conservative society—he is still a product of a highly conservative society. As such, he is a polygamist and a man who forces his sons to bind to his will.Khan is not a likeable man but his story, which the author tells in great detail, goes a long way in explaining who he is and why he acts as he does. As a bookseller, Khan was tortured first by the Soviets and then by the Taliban. Not surprisingly, he seeks, above all, to protect himself and all he owns (which for him, includes his family) from the ravages of war. This means, of course, that Khan forces the members of his family to do his bidding (his sons are taken from school and forced to work in his businesses etc.). Khan is a despot. His actions toward his two wives, his children, his siblings and his nephews all reflect his desire to control his fate in a society which has allowed him no control over his own life. That doesn’t excuse him, of course. As a westerner reading the book (and as a woman), I was appalled by Khan’s horrific treatment of his wives—I found it fascinating that Khan could easily reject those aspects of Islam which he found demanding (praying five times a day) while adhering to those which work to his benefit (polygamy and the right to a teenage wife when he is in his 50s).The book isn’t a simple man–bad, woman-good type of book. Look closely at the female characters (Khan’s mother is as much a despot as Khan himself is)—their lives are equally complex and they are deeply nuanced individuals. On the flip side (and this can’t be denied), women in Afghanistan suffer under the hands of men. I strongly recommend this book!
Review by Daniel B. Clendenin for The Bookseller of Kabul
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In November 2001, after the fall of the Taliban, the Norwegian journalist Åsne Seierstad befriended a bookseller in Kabul who invited her to his home for dinner. Before long they agreed for her to live in Sultan Khan’s home for three months in order to write a book about about his family. The Bookseller of Kabul, an international bestseller translated into thirty languages, and the most successful nonfiction book in Norwegian history, chronicles Seierstad’s first person narrative about her experiences of Afghan gender roles, education, politics, religion, and culture.
At first Seierstad thought she had met a remarkably liberated Afghan man. Sultan was an ardent bibliophile who loved books and ideas. In a country where three-quarters of the population is illiterate, he had amassed a collection of 10,000 books, including rare manuscripts, that he had squirreled away around town. He survived the Soviet communists and the Islamic fundamentalists, and spent time in jail for anti-Islamic behavior. He despised the Taliban who burned his books. His family was wealthy by local standards, his opinions about women appeared liberal, he bought his wife western clothes in Iran, and derided the burka as a symbol of his beloved country’s backwardness and oppression.
At home Seierstad discovered an altogether different Sultan, and for the most part her narrative reads like a cultural expose. She begins by telling the story of how Sultan took sixteen-year-old Sonya as his second wife, much to the grief of his first wife Sharifa. At home Sultan was an unapologetic tyrant toward everyone in his family. His two wives and daughters slaved away at cooking and cleaning. He consigned his twelve-year-old son to sell candy in a dark and dank stall that he called “the dreary room.” When a poor carpenter stole some post cards from his shop to feed his seven children, Sultan was merciless. The book alternates between describing the particular abuse in Sultan’s home, and that in broader Afghan culture. A first-grader, for example, learns the alphabet by memorizing the following: “I is for Israel, our enemy; J is for Jihad, our aim in life; K is for Kalishnikov, we will overcome; . . . M is for Mujahedeen, our heroes; . . . T is for Taliban. . . ”
The Bookseller of Kabul captures everyday life in a country ravaged by twenty years of war and characterized by deep cultural conservatism. In an ironic postscript to the book’s wild success, Sultan has sued Seierstad and her publisher for libel in a Norwegian court. He insists that his hospitality was abused, his personal life was slandered, and that his family has been endangered, so he has, in good western fashion, demanded what his lawyer has called “redress and compensation.”
Review by kattepusen for The Bookseller of Kabul
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After having read this book in the original language (Norwegian) as soon as it came out, and then reread it in the English translation, the conclusion remains: this is an intriguing account of an atypical Afghan family’s life presented in simplistic and a bit mundane language. The author, Asne Seierstad, is foremost a journalist who has shown a remarkable sense of bravery and an admirable disregard for her snobbish literary critics (she was quickly belittled in her native Norway by fellow writers and critics). Her book, however, is an important contribution to the contemporary literature on Afghan life, culture, women, and even Islam.
The strength of the book lies is her observations of the individual family members through her modern feminist Western eyes; however, at times this is also its weakness since it becomes quite obvious that the more “unsympathetic” (male) members of the family do not get quite the nuanced descriptions as the more symphatetic (female) members. The bookseller himself, Sultan Khan, is the most obvious example. Seierstad is not quite able (perhaps understandably so) to portray with conviction his more admirable sides – it is as if his chauvinistic and self-important characteristics cannot coexist with a more complex, idealistic and interesting personality. Sure, she tries to explain that she was grateful to him for his hospitality, and she makes some half-hearted attempts to describe his heroic efforts in his resistance to the Taliban’s censorships of his beloved books; however, she is not quite able to convey the bookseller’s real and heartfelt motives for doing so. In addition, when referring to his passion for literature (espcially poetry), it seems almost as if it constitutes just a sidenote in Sultan’s personality.
Luckily, in her introductions she has included a note about her enraged feelings as a Western female when she says that she has never been so angry as when she was living with this family and that she has never had such desire to hit someone. This “confession” is important because it shows her honest and unavoidable bias in her portrayals.
One of the best parts of the book is her descriptions about Mansur’s pilgrimage on which she is allowed to travel. Another memorable account is the devastatingly heart-wrenching tale about the postcard thief. The most sympathtic character in the book is Leila, Sultan’s youngest sister, and with whom the author had the closest relationship. Knowing the bond that formed between these women, it does not feel overly contrived when Seierstad “goes inside” this girl and describes her dreams and disappointments. Through Seierstads Western feminine portrayal of Leila, she becomes the ultimate representative of victimized womanhood under Islam.
Finally a note about the translation: overall it does the book justice. The book in its original language is not a literary masterpiece and the language is often riddled with overly simplistic expressions. This might present a dilemma for the translating process since a translator can not allow herself to improve on the original language. And when translating a certain cliched phrase, it can be hard to find a representative substitute in the new language; however, to be true to the original feel of the text, it might be necessary to include such a phrase. That said, this book should be read for its content and not for its prose. In addition, I recommend this book as a part of a wider representation of Middle Eastern contemporary books such as The Kite Runner, Reading Lolita in Tehran and West of Kabul, East of New York.
Review by Professor Joseph L. McCauley for The Bookseller of Kabul
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.. of the the dismal servanthood (should we say slavery?) of women under Islam. Written in the context of the life of the women of and near to a relatively modern and tolerant Afghan who loves books, and who survived both the Russians and the Taleban. Accounts of the hospitality and lives of men under Islam are quite sympathetic (see the fantastic books of hiking, mountain climbing, and adventure by Wilfred Thesiger and Eric Newby, and also the more recent one by Jason Elliott), but the lives of women, not told in those books, are lives of repression and servitude.
Some have written that Aasne Seierstad is ‘ungracious’ to her bookseller host, and I agree that she is, but her story is of the women too important not to have been written. On might tend to discount her account for ‘lack of understanding’ because she’s Norwegian, and Scandinavia (thank God!) is the home of male-female equality, of feminism in its best form. However, there is also Siba Shakib’s (earlier) parallel account of the misery of Islamic women (“Nach Afghanistan kommt Gott nur noch zum Weinen”), following the life of a dirt-poor refugee and her growing family, and Shakib is Iranian. I recommend that you read both books and judge for yourself. Shakib points out that Kabul girls were forced by the Russians either to go to school to learn to read and write, or go to prison, and that that was effectively an act of long-term liberation for the women. It made them rebellious. The ideal in Afghanistan apparently is that of a servile, uneducated woman who does not question the man. That standard was applied severly by the outrageous pre-medieval fundamentalist rules imposed by the Taleban. One would have to go back to medieval Europe for the phenomenon of profiting from daughters by selling them to old men for marriage. See, e.g., Liv Ullmann’s film of Sigrid Unset’s “Kristin Lavransdatter” for a scene of a wailing teenager being carried off on horseback behind a toothless geezer.
A list of the puritanic rules imposed by the Taleban is given in one of Seierstad’s chapters. For an entire book that takes the outlawing of kites as its theme, see “The Kite Runner”, also first rate literature, written by an Afghan-American.
This review is based on the Swedish translation, “Bokhandlaran i Kabul” (bought at a gas station while travelling north on E-6 this summer), is fascinating, and is closest to the Norwegian original. Maybe the books by Seierstad, Shakib (see amazon.co.uk or amazon.de for an English translation of Shakib from German), and Khalid Hosseini are three of the most informative books in our era of terrorism by religious fundamentalists against freedom loving peoples.
A note: the author’s name is spelled Aasne or Åsne, not Asne, and is pronounced more or less ‘Oasne’ (the last ‘e’ is always pronounced in Indo-Germanic languages, excepting English, including Dari, spoken in Afghanistan).