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The Bookseller of Kabul Asne Seierstad Ingrid Christophersen 9780316159418 Books

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The Bookseller of Kabul Asne Seierstad Ingrid Christophersen 9780316159418 Books

This is a well written book but the material is very very sad, after reading a few chapters each night I would have to go online and find something funny to watch just to get disturbing images from the book out of my head.
It is not violent but the oppression of women, the poor,the helpless, its just too depressing.
The story revolves around this one gentleman who sells books in Kabul, what quickly comes across is that even though he sells books, that doesn't make him more enlightened or open-minded. Instead he rules his home like a dictator, gets a young wife because he is a disgusting old man (though no one in the family says that), allows his first wife and children to treat his mother and sisters like slaves, denies his sons education. Its just terrible and yet so indicative of what we hear about life in Afghanistan. This awful meanness seems to spread from father to son and no one has the courage or thinking to break the cycle.
I believe its a book people should read (wonderful for book clubs), but be aware, its not easy reading this tale.


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The Bookseller of Kabul Asne Seierstad Ingrid Christophersen 9780316159418 Books Reviews

A friend of mine lent me her copy of this book and the first question I asked her was, was it good? She said, yes, and it is definitely thought-provoking. As soon as I finished reading another book for a book club, I picked this one up and finished it in two days. I literally could not put the book down. It is very well-written and tells a story of a man and his family in Afghanistan just after 9/11, during the Taliban times and after the fall of the Taliban. She claims she wrote it in a novel form based on true stories of what she heard told to her while visiting Afghanistan. It definitely read as a novel, but I knew that it wasn't fiction. I also knew that it's a very small representation of what goes on in Afghanistan as it is just one man and his family's story. It is also not a very flattering picture of that man's life and as for accuracy, I am assuming that it is accurate for that family, but not necessarily accurate for the entire society as a whole.

This book literally gave me the goosebumps. Here is an educated man who loves his books more than anything in the world and he has high dreams of printing books and selling them to everyone. He is also the head of his family, one of thirteen children. His mother, three younger sisters, two wives, children all live with him in a tiny flat that used to be in middle class district of Kabul before it was destroyed by the Taliban. He puts his two sons to work instead of allowing them to go to school. Before 9/11 happened, all the women and kids were in school. After 9/11, they went into hiding. Before 9/11, the women didn't have to wear the stifling burkas. After 9/11, they did. (This author gave such explicit descriptions of what it was like to wear the burka, that I could actually visualize it.) Life has changed but despotism still reigns, even if it's just in one man's family. Women literally have no voice ~~ they cannot speak up and choose the man they might want to marry; they cannot resume their education or go back to work; they cannot walk freely in the marketplace without another woman or a male relative chaperoning her. The children are not better off either. They are at the mercy of their father's wishes.

What really broke my heart in this book is the youngest sister's story. She is an attractive and intelligent girl, but since she is the youngest, she is practically the family's slave ~~ always tending to the laundry, the cooking and serving the guests. She longs nothing more than to break away and maybe get a job as a teacher. She meets a man but her family told her to marry someone else. Even if she resisted and put up a fight, she would be killed like another friend of hers, whose brothers smothered her because supposedly "she wasn't pure and had a boyfriend while married to another guy". Women really aren't valued in that society other than to have children. It is shocking to read that even in an educated man's family, old tribal customs are still the norm. It is something that being a Westerner, I cannot grasp nor understand.

This is a thought-provoking book and one that will linger after the last page has been turned. It will definitely make you take notice of your life and the lives around you. It will definitely remind you that even though we are struggling with different issues in America, there are other women of other countries fighting for their basic survival.

5-20-07
Just after the fall of the Taliban regime, the author, an award winning Norwegian journalist, lived in Afghanistan with a middle class bookseller and his family for three months. What emerged from her intimate association with this family is a book that almost reads like a novel, so riveting is the account of life in post Taliban Afghanistan.

The bookseller, Sultan Khan, is a canny and shrewd business man, as well as a devout Muslim, who despite his love of books, seems to have learned little from the knowledge at his fingertips. He rules the roost like a patriarchal despot with a decidedly strict view of the role of women. In fact, it is through the women in his household that the reader is drawn into how truly circumscribed and stultifying life is for Afghani women, even after the Taliban is no longer in power. Khan rules his household as if it were a feudal fiefdom, with little thought, concern, or interest in the desires, hopes, and dreams of the members of his household.

The author's reporting on what life is like in post Taliban Afghanistan paints a fairly grim picture of a society fraught with ignorance and corruption. It is a society where women are merely chattel with little or no say in their future. Education is pretty much non-existent, and what passes for such is pathetic. Even that little, however, is routinely denied to the feminine gender. It was also particularly surprising, as well as ironic, that Sultan Khan, being a bookseller and purporting to love books, denied even his sons an education.

The author certainly has had an eye-opening experience by donning a burka and I, for one, am glad that she chose to share it. Despite its lack of any cogent critical analysis, this is certainly a provocative book and one that will provide much food for thought. Her birds-eye view of life in Afghanistan is truly a powerful statement and an indictment of a society so steeped in ignorance and poverty that it will take a miracle for it to enter into the twenty first century. Life in modern day Afghanistan is bleak, indeed. Those with an interest in other cultures will certainly enjoy this book.
I found this book to be quite enlightening about real life in Afghanistan. It's about a man who owns a bookstore where he makes a good living for his family. It covers some of the history of the country and the various rulers. For example, life before the Taliban was more free than after the Taliban won power and enforced an extreme form of Sharia law. It is amazing how little power people had over their own lives under that Law. I grew up here in the good old USA, and find it difficult to grasp living under Islamic rule where there is no freedom, especially for women.
This is a well written book but the material is very very sad, after reading a few chapters each night I would have to go online and find something funny to watch just to get disturbing images from the book out of my head.
It is not violent but the oppression of women, the poor,the helpless, its just too depressing.
The story revolves around this one gentleman who sells books in Kabul, what quickly comes across is that even though he sells books, that doesn't make him more enlightened or open-minded. Instead he rules his home like a dictator, gets a young wife because he is a disgusting old man (though no one in the family says that), allows his first wife and children to treat his mother and sisters like slaves, denies his sons education. Its just terrible and yet so indicative of what we hear about life in Afghanistan. This awful meanness seems to spread from father to son and no one has the courage or thinking to break the cycle.
I believe its a book people should read (wonderful for book clubs), but be aware, its not easy reading this tale.