The Bookseller of Kabul [Audio Download]

It reads like fiction -- penetrating, prejudicial and convincing but, although names have been changed, it is an honest, warts and all, account of life in Kabul. Khan, seemingly urbane, educated and liberal, is the tyrannical head of large family – mother, siblings, two wives and five children. Khan’s subjugation of the women in his family is shocking from a Western point of view: As Seierstad moves into his home, Khan takes a second wife, a sexy, uneducated sixteen-year-old, dishonouring and cutting to the quick his loyal and educated first wife: his youngest sister is treated as little more than a slave. And it is this that is the meat of the book; the personal power struggles that exist within the family – struggles which Khan will always win.

The shocking portrait of women’s lives, even under the liberalising regime of Afghan leader Karzai, is frightening, repulsive even from a western perspective, but there is nothing here to suggest that Khan is anything other than a typical head of the family. His mother, sisters, wives and daughters, seem to lose identity under the burqa, which hides not only their femininity and personality, but also their imaginations. Not here will you find justification of the regime: these women resent, in different ways, their position. Nor do the other men of the family fair much better: Khan’s 19 year old, sexually frustrated, son learns from a friend how to exploit helpless, penniless war widows, safe in the knowledge that if he caught, it will be the women who are condemned: but he too resents Khan’s iron fist, particular when it falls on a wretched carpenter who steals postcards. Khan, driven by his sense of honour, insists on full punishment, despite the fact that this will make the carpenter’s family destitute. Khan’s youngest son is forced to work 12 hours a day selling sweets in a hotel foyer when he would rather be a school, something which Khan could easily afford.

Seierstad clearly feels for the women, but also for the country: the sense of what Afghanistan was – a prosperous, beautiful land– what it became through years of strife, conflict and war, and what it could be, pervade every chapter.

No doubt this book will nestle against numerous Afghanistan travelogues in the bookshops but don’t be fooled. Reading it is a unique experience. Some will see Seierstad’s expose as disrespectable to Khan, to women, to Afghanistan and to Islam. Perhaps it is. But it nonetheless provides a unique insight into a country that has so long been closed to western eyes.

The book tells of how one woman was murdered for “honour”, how women are bought and sold in marriage, how polygyny affects women who can’t divorce for cultural reasons, how women are denied the right to work by sons or brothers, how the life of women is restricted by culture and traditions.

Don’t read this book if you are looking for a culture relativist feel-good message. Do read this book if you are interested in the realities of life inside the burqa, life behind the “iron veil”.

P.S. And you’d better hurry, because the bookseller is now threatening to sue publishers in seventeen countries, demanding the book to be censored.

However, the book appears to focus less on the "book-selling" aspect rather than his personality and family life. It is nigh on impossible to come away from the book without loathing Sultan Khan, for his pompous arrogance and selfishness. It is thus possible to see why the bookseller in question filed a lawsuit against Ms Seierstad.

My heart bled for various members of his family who were at his mercy, including his nephew, dismissed in the blink of an eye for no reason other than that Mr Khan had tired of him. Few male characters were truly likable, although Mr Khan's son was pitiable at times, primarily because he too was subject to the will of his father.

Even the most hard-hearted individual would feel for his poor sister Laila, who as the youngest unmarried daughter of the clan, is at the very bottom of the hierarchy. Hers is a truly miserable existence indeed, and she captures the essence of confinement, subservience and "eating dust".

The women suffer greatly at the hands of Sultan Khan, not least his first wife Sharifa, a qualified teacher who at the beginning of the book is subjected to the humiliation of a second wife entering her household: that too an un-educated teenager, whom she specifically must welcome into the family as her own.

The book contains vivid descriptions of the Afghan way of life. However, certain details, such as the unflattering description of Mr Khan's mother at the hammam (public baths), appeared unnecessary, serving only to lower the tone of the book.

It was refreshing to note the contrasts between the harsh existence during the Taliban regime and the liberal mentalities of the past. It was interesting to read about fashionably attired young ladies and the former customs of toasting weddings with champagne. Despite its controversy and the issues surrounding the factual accuracy of various events, the book is very easy to read. It should be recommended in the context of providing a unique narration of the lives of one particular middle-class educated Afghani family.