Åsne Seierstad - The Bookseller of Kabul

For more than twenty years Sultan Khan defied the authorities - be they communist or Taliban - 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 even resorted to hiding most of his stock - almost ten thousand books - in attics all over Kabul.
But while Khan is passionate in his love of books and his hatred of censorship, he also has strict views on family life and the role of women. As an outsider, Asne Seierstad found herself in a unique position, able to move freely between the private, restricted sphere of the women - including Khan's two wives - and the freer, more public lives of the men.
It is an experience that Seierstad finds both fascinating and frustrating. As she steps back from the page and allows the Khans to speak for themselves, we learn of proposals and marriages, hope and fear, crime and punishment. The result is a genuinely gripping and moving portrait of a family, and a clear-eyed assessment of a country struggling to free itself from history.

Comment: I brought this book from the library because of the title. The idea of a bookseller in Kabul seems as exotic as flying pigs because of how things are currently there, politically and socially. It's just difficult to imagine people can still maintain any sort of normalcy with what is going on and with so much death and war... so, the title intrigued me and since it wasn't a big book, I decided to try it.

This is a non fiction book by a Norwegian reporter who got to experience something unique: she lived for three months among an Afghan family with the pretext to focus on the bookseller who had a passion for books and share knowledge but deep down, the experience is also about his family and what is expected of a traditional afghan family, with all their values and cultural marks, so different from the countries we call "western".

Asne, the reporter, lived there for three months after 9/11. She was able to be inside the bookseller's house but also got to know about several other things she wouldn't if she had been restricted to stay just there. The result is a very promising story but that I felt was not done well.

As I've said, this is a non-fiction story for it's based on the work and experience of a reporter and what she saw while there. I think the first problem I found (which was avoidable) relates to how she reporter/writer chose to present the narrative. She turned her work into a novel, as if we're reading something that happened to those people but the narrator is never a part of things. This made the story quite impersonal, because we don't get to have the opinion of the author.

For this purpose, why not sticking with a documentary sort of tale? What's the point of being there if you are going to stay out of focus too? There are only a few sentences about what the narrator thinks and that is not enough.

The title, which is why I felt like trying the book, is also a little misleading. Yes, the main character is a bookseller but even though we get to see he takes his job seriously and he does think people should have access to information, he is a man of his country and that made it too difficult to like him as a person. For, of course, "people" in his POV means "men" and not women at all.

I admit I expected a story about a man ahead of his time, compelling, aware of the issues in his country, stuck in a place he couldn't change but in his heart he would be approachable, he would have a different opinion on everything because he was well read and he wanted his country to be an educated one, one that would care about its citizens.

What a fall to reality! Yes, he sells books but he also is portrayed as just caring for himself, he is not the affectionate father figure I imagined: his travels are more about his comforts than the actual love for books, he still sees the difference between men and women in his country as acceptable. By the end of the book he was probably the "character" I disliked the most.

Perhaps this might have been a more engrossing story to read if the author had been a participant of it. Since she chose to tell this as a novel, she is out of focus, we don't get to see how her presence among those women, with such strict and punishing rules of existence, was an issue. How did they see the author there? Yes, she was a woman but working, doing a completely different type of job they would never dream of being able to do as well. I found this dichotomy the most interesting thing and it was not a part of the tale.

Therefore, this story is based mostly on the stories of the family, who they marry, how and why their souses are chosen, how frustrating it is for women to live in a society that doesn't allow them any kind of power nor influence unless in some specific situations and still they are at fault for everything anyway. It's very, very annoying to think we cannot just get there and explain what life is out of that way of existence. And to think real people live like this in contemporary times.

Ideology aside, cultural clashes aside, this story could have been much more intriguing but I'm afraid the lives described or referenced here were as sad as the state of this novel. I feel I should help them understanding there are choices out there but of course they don't have that choice. I think the way the author told this novel was not the best and that, more than the frustrating details of the content, are why this wasn't such a good read for me.

Grade: 4/10