The Bookseller of Kabul

I'm torn when it comes to books like this. I do realize the importance of having 'unbiased' people coming into an oppressive regime like the one in Afghanistan, and making the world aware of such an important political situation, but at the same time I cringe at the thought of all the pre-judging

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that such a person would do, and the ramifications it has on readers who don't know anything about Afghani culture and religion. I much prefer books by people who actually lived the life they write about, and although Asne Seierstad did live it for months, there's a difference between her living and the living of people who suffer through the trials and fears of living under a Taliban regime, such as Khaled Hosseini's "Kite-Runner".

In any case, any book that helps to shed light on a darkened part of the world is a book that I hope will bring people closer together in understanding each other, rather than backing up old prejudices.

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Fascinating to read, but at the same time depressing. Explains better than any politician could, just why it is so important to strive for a society that is liberal, tolerant and not at the mercy of religious fundamentalism. Also seems to clearly indicate that on the whole women are less than happy

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with their subjugation in this particular Islamic world.

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I thought this book was going to be fiction, but it is an unblinking look at real life in Afghanistan. It was heart breaking. My Western, modern sensibilities were outraged at how a patriarch and a wealthy man, no matter his education and business sense, could be so heartless and cruel. His family

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sacrificed everything so he could be educated but he won't do anything to give his children that freedom. The author admits her surprise in the afterword; she had asked to live with his family because he had expressed such liberal views when they were talking in his shop. But at home in real life, he was a tyrant ruining the live of his children and dependents for the sake of money and power. The most disturbing part was how women (young women) must suppress all emotion about their lives. To want something else out of life beyond what you already have is to be ungrateful and is a sin. Only men can have ambition and only when they are in charge of the family. The seclusion and poverty of spirit were devastating.

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Parts of this book just seemed to drag on and on for me, and other parts were actually very interesting. It kind of seemed odd to me that the author would portray Sultan in a bad light. The man who invited her to dinner with his family and agreed to make room for her to live in his house so she

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could observe his family. Of course, she shouldn't write anything but the truth, and yet I wonder if Sultan knows what was written about him and his family.

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Interesting family story mixed with Afghan history and present. It's sad to read about the state of affairs and especially what happens in the name of religion and tradition. But it's interesting to get a glimpse into the reasoning and into the dynamics that perpetuate the situation.

Asne Seierstad is a journalist who spent some time living with a Afghan family in Kabul. This book is the product of her observations depicting different facets of the lives of an Afghan family.

Sultan is a bookseller, a liberal in an otherwise orthodox society, ambitious, hard working and

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interested in the preservation of the literature of the Afghanistan. He lives with his wife, mother, sister, brother and few children. He is the head of the family and his word is the rule. He in time take a new wife half his age.

In the course of the book we get insight into the lives of all the members of the family, their inner and outer trials and turmoils.

The author has exactly pinned the interpersonal relationships in the family. A compelling read.

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Good read, if a bit claustrophobic. I remain unsure if this is the real story of Ms Seierstad experiences in Kabul , mostly fiction or a mixture of the two.

-This mesmerizing portrait of a proud man who, through three decades and successive repressive regimes, heroically braved persecution to bring books to the people of Kabul has elicited extraordinary praise throughout the world and become a phenomenal international bestseller. The book is startling

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in its intimacy and its details – a revelation of the plight of Afghan women and a window into the surprising realities of daily life in today’s Afghanistan. One cannot deny the access that Seirstad had and the information that she relates as to the workings of an Afghani family is fascinating. She also has an undeniable agenda and her feminist tendencies are annoying at times, contrary to her subject matter at others. The selection of source material for the book is questionable and serves only to prove her point. Her gathering of the information from only those family members that spoke English also casts a shadow on the veracity of the story and blends the tale with possible fiction or speculation. It cheapens her access and lessens the impact, making it like other modern prolific profiles of Afghani social life. Okay but the book defeats its purpose.

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The title is completely misleading. I thought this was going to be a true story about a book seller in Afghanistan. Instead it is a true account of how a white woman from a first world country interprets/views the lives of the booksellers family members. It was interesting from a cultural education

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perspective, but dull beyond that.

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I felt the title of this book to be a bit misleading, as the story centers more around various members of the bookseller's family & didn't particularly focus on books, & only briefly touched on the impact books had on the people of Kabul & surrounding areas. However, that didn't particularly bother

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me. But this was yet another eye-opening book about Muslim culture. The more I read, the angrier I get. I've noticed a difference in male/female authors, as the oppression of women is much more evident when the book is written by a woman, as this one is. There was not so much a single plot to this story -- it was more like a sliver of the lives of various members of an extended family. I had trouble keeping some of the names straight, but that may just be me (& the fact that I read this on audio, which makes referencing back more difficult). All in all a very good read, although disturbing & unsettling.

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Asne Seierstad is a Norwegian journalist who lived for months with an atypical Afghani family in Kabul, during the spring after the Taliban fell. The family was atypical in that some members were literate, and could read and write; most had some degree of education; and the family was well-off by

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Afghani standards – they always had money and never went hungry.

Nevertheless, despite the seeming urbanity and cosmopolitan attitude of the head of the Khan family, uncomfortable cultural differences soon become apparent, and though Seierstad goes to extraordinary lengths to keep her own narrative voice to a minimum, she admits that she found the ingrained Afghani and Muslim “belief in male superiority” very hard to deal with.

And her ultimate judgment that most women in Afghanistan live lives of seclusion and domestic slavery, at the complete mercy of their husbands, fathers, and sons, is hard to refute. Story after story pours forth on these pages, told in spare prose, in the women’s own voices. Even for favored sons, life in a patriarchy is not easy. Sultan Khan, the head of the Khan family and the bookseller of the story’s title, runs his family with an iron fist. He does not send his own sons to school, despite his own educated status, because he trusts no one else to work in his bookstore or help him conduct his many business enterprises. Besides, as he tells Seierstad, family members must learn to obey the head of the family unquestioningly – or the family will devolve into chaos just as Afghanistan itself has. Sultan often makes comparisons between his control of his family and the need for a strong Afghani government.
This was an exceptionally well-written book, and Seierstad’s ability to present each family member’s story in her/his own voice adds remarkable depth to an important work that allows Westerners a glimpse into an alien culture.

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So my fiance is deployed to Afghanistan for the next however many months, and I decided, silly though it may sound, to read a few books set in Afghanistan as a way of feeling just a little bit nearer to him.

I couldn't have picked a better first book. While I am vaguely aware of some disapproval

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over the author's technique (she lived with a family in Afghanistan, and then wrote a book about their lives, but removed herself entirely from the story), I just don't feel riled up about it. Sure, there may be some legitimate objections to a Western woman telling the story of an Afghan family; her perspective can't help but be a little bit biased. But that's no reason not to write the book -- it's more an instruction for the reader to think about the author's intentions, same as you might with any other book.

I learned quite a bit about Afghanistan's cultural and political history, and even its geography. In fact, I'm pretty outraged by the destruction of many of Afghanistan's irreplaceable historical artifacts at the hands of the Taliban -- can you imagine someone taking over Greece in modern day and destroying what's left of the Parthenon?

I also became thoroughly engrossed in this family's story, felt lots of irritation at and sympathy for various characters, and basically just enjoyed myself throughout the whole thing.

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This book had me torn, it reads more like fiction than fact, chopped and changed between characters and depressed the hell out of me about the treatment of women and their own apparent connivence with it. The mindless acceptance of the treatment they got was heartbreaking, the assumptions of the

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men, particularly Sultan was scary. You could see how, through peer pressure and assumption people could perpetuate the tragedy of both sexism and terrorism. How easy it is to keep a partially educated population afraid and how ignorance could be literally dangerous for all involved.

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Great book ... really interesting - to learn about this family and even though she says in the beginning it is not a typical family, the culture of the area I think probably is very typical.
Of course, it was hard to read about that culture and all that went on, especially with the women - and yet,

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at the same time, I think it's important to know what is happening. It does make me appreciate what I have more and makes me want to go out and change the world!

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Deeply depressing book. The oppression of women is condonned by other women as well as men. Young women are completely devoid of any control over their own lives, considered as property to be bartered

I first read this book in the original language (Norwegian) as soon as it came out, and after having reread it in the English translation, my conclusion remains: an intriguing account of an atypical Afghan family's life presented in simplistic and often cliched language. The author, Asne Seierstad,

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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 self-important and envious(?) critics). Her book is in my view 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 my favorite parts of the book is her descriptions about Mansur's pilgrimage on which she is allowed to travel. Another part 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 I think it does the book justice. The book in its original language is not a literary masterpiece and the language is often riddled with cliches and 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 cliche 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. On that aspect, I recommend this book as a part of a wider representation of Middle Eastern contemporary books. Other books that should be read as companion books include The Kite Runner, Reading Lolita in Tehran and West of Kabul, East of New York.

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I need to re-read this, there is much I don't recall. I do remember enjoying it and learning much about Afgan life and the women who live there.

In the heart of an Afghan family. Unbiaised depicting of daily life in one of the most mysterious country in the world. Magic, discreet.

An good insight into the familial patterns in such a patriarchal and male dominant society. I certainly wouldn't have lasted in such an atmosphere.

Even though very interesting, this book was disturbing to me on many levels. The poverty is disturbing, the patriarchal, hierarchical family structure, the oppression of women and child labour, the way the book is written, and above all, the way Seirstad used the family, are all very unsettling to

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me.

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The author of this book is a journalist who has been based in Afghanistan. Fascinated by the lives of Sultan, a bookseller she meets, she spends time living with him and his extended family.

Through their eyes and experiences she writes about life in Afghanistan both before, during and after

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Taleban rule. It is a fascinating inside view, although the number of characters ca, be rather confusing. Maybe I just wasn't concentrating, but list of characters or Khan familt tree might have helped me keep track.

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Part of its appeal is the fact that it opens a door on a world that is totally alien to us, and part is because it shows a world (that of the family) that is so familiar.

The Bookseller of Kabul, although it is non-fiction, definitely reads like a novel. Asne Seierstad changed the names of the characters in the book, but even with that, it was obvious to Afghanis who the bookseller was. When the book was translated into English, the real bookseller was outraged. He

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has even tried suing Seierstad and her publisher, and he has also written and published his own version of events. None of which had much impact in her home country of Norway.

Life for many Muslim women is difficult, and that is clearly portrayed in this book. However, before I give a plot synopsis I would like to caution potential readers of the book to not think that ALL Muslim women are in this predicament. I stayed in a Muslim country in the Middle East for three months and have talked with local women and girls myself to hear their views. I have seen Muslim couples and how they interact. It’s not all bad. All families are different in how they interact with each other, whether they be Afghani, American, Chinese, or Russian. I’m sure there are some families even in non-Muslim America who treat women in a similar way that these women are treated. That said, this book will do a good job opening your eyes to the plight of (some-not all) women in non-Western areas of the world.

Sultan is the bookseller whose word is law. He is the leader of the family and even his brothers must obey him, let alone his mother, wives, and children. He rules his family with an iron fist, all the while telling himself he is a progressive, modern-minded man. He replaces (technically, adds to) his 50-something wife with a young teenager. His son Mansur resents and fears him, all the while treating his mother and aunt deplorably. This aunt, Leila, Sultan’s sister, is basically a slave to the entire family and is treated like one. I felt particularly sad for her story.

Rape, forced “prostitution” of widows, and brothers’ suffocation of their sister are only a few of the awful events in this book. In reading of these, I did question how the author would know about some of them. I was also worried about the safety of some of the family members after the book’s publication. In the end, it does reveal that part of Sultan’s family left to live with another male family member. I was very relieved to know that. I’ve thought of these characters often because they’re not just characters. They are real people.

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The Bookseller of Kabul was an excellent, excellent read! I loved it. The writing style was suprub and I loved the story line. It was great getting a different view point from different memebers of the family each chapter. It ceses to amaze me how people of different parts of the world live in such

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different ways and believe such different things.

I also find it very interesting that Seierstad is being sued by "sultan". I suppose it's not very surprising, as I am sure that he thought this book was probably going to be taken in a different angle than it was... but still fascinating...

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