The Bookseller of Kabul
Åsne Seierstad
(Reviewer - Rebecca Brown)
2003 Little, Brown & Co.
ISBN: 0316734500

Life in an Afghani family after the fall of the Taliban.

Gleaning, as only a woman reporter can in a world dominated by men, Åsne Seierstad brings to us the stories of one man's extended family, his struggles to keep selling books under repressive tides of fundamentalist Muslim clerics, & the lives of his two wives, one in Kabul & the other across the mountains in refugee-crowded Pakistan.

In order to protect the innocent, the author has changed the names, however, the basis of these tales is pure fact. Åsne Seierstad lived, intimately, within Sultan Khan's family, cared for by wives & daughters. Ate, slept, talked & traveled (beneath a burka) wherever the bookseller went.

So, put aside your newly acquired political correctness & venture into another society where you will see life from a man's point of view. You will also know what it is like from inside the cage of gender.

Men controlled about how they wear their hair, what they will wear, when they will pray, what music they will hear & what books they will read.

Women contained within households, behind full-body veils, married to suitors decades their senior, forbidden to learn, to work, to teach. Learn the history of wearing the burka, & take a walk inside one on a shopping trip through the bazaar, the day before your wedding.

As when public expressions of sexuality are totally suppressed it goes underground with tales & poems of the ancients (all men of course) rife with a pornography of indulgent complicated plots where women are the objects of scorn & titillation in the rawest of images.

Incarcerated within their homes, within relentless prohibitive social mores, & bartered for as young virgins, women's lustiness comes out sideways, fulfilling the men's chauvinistic prophecies. If you are eager for marriage you are a whore, if you can't stand the proposed suitor you are a moral woman -- an oxymoron in that world. With no outside interests & no other purpose than to serve their husbands & their sons & their husbands' other wives, & marry off their daughters, these women's minds are under-used & over-wrought.

The Bookseller of Kabul is a powerful read. I was fascinated & repelled, enchanted & horrified. & when I had turned the last page of this little book, I thought about it for days & days, looking anew at my own life's path.

In Åsne Seierstad's Foreword, she explains how she, a Norwegian journalist, came to Afghanistan & met the bookseller of Kabul. While it is written as fiction, this book is entirely based on what she observed, how the family talked with her & what she learnt. She also alerts us of how very different things are in a society from another time, & writes a little of about her reactions.

The Bookseller of Kabul is one of the best of reads. It took me to another society, let me see how the people there live, what makes them tick. It gave me much insight into both my own society & the ways of Muslim men & the society of their women.
(11/02/03)

Rebecca