I had been vaguely conscious of this book for a while, having noticed it in the airport bookshop without ever quite buying it. I am not quite sure why, but I think I thought it was a work of fiction, rather than the literary reportage it actually is. In the end I picked up a second-hand copy on impulse against €1.50 in an honesty jar.
The author is a Norwegian journalist who spent spring 2002 - the period immediately following the fall of the Taliban regime in Kabul - living with a "middle class" Afghan family in their home in a much-deteriorated Soviet-style appartment in the city. She writes about the life of the family as if not there, and does not therefore herself feature in the narrative. This is literary "fly-on-the-wall", I suppose. The bookseller of the title is the head of the family, someone who is successful in business and a westernised liberal by local standards, though this is a description one learns considerably to relativise in both respects by the end of the book.
Inevitably, the book mostly sees things from the perspective of the women in the household. This is the period when most women in Kabul were still wearing the burka when outside the house - glimmers of liberalisation are starting to appear on this score by the end of the book - but it is very clear that the burka is only one, and perhaps the least important, of the symptoms of the utter subjugation of women in Afghan society, even at its liberal, middle-class end.
Both the author and the critics say that this book helps understand the nuances of this extemely traditionalist Muslim society, and helps you not to jump to easy, simplistic conclusions about how the people in it feel about their lives. This is true, but you also come out of this book feeling increasingly pessimistic about the chances of anyone's life in Afghanistan improving very much anytime soon. The power of tradition and the second-class status of women, even in the minds of the victims themselves, just seems too great. This is a place where people have nothing and lock themselves into a way of life seemingly designed to keep it that way.
Aghanistan, from being somewhere no-one very much thought about before 9/11, has of course been the focus of much interest since then. The novels of Khaled Hosseini have in the meantime told us much about life in that benighted country. Having read "The Kite Runner" and "A Thousand Splendid Suns" (particularly the latter), I felt on fairly familiar ground here, getting angry and depressed about the extraordinary waste of personal potential represented in the Afghan way of life, and the consignment of so many people to lives of little more than abject slavery. Hosseini perhaps tells it more powerfully, but this account by Seierskad adds something by virtue of being a first-hand report of everyday life, without novelistic intent. It is well-written, and 276 pages fly by very easily.
Recommendation? If you're interested at all in Afghanistan and perhaps on the background to the current situation there, then this book is definitely worth a read, even it is probably a bit out of date by now ( though I imagine much less than it should be). If you haven't read them, I would recommend the Hosseini novels too, probably ahead of this.
The author is a Norwegian journalist who spent spring 2002 - the period immediately following the fall of the Taliban regime in Kabul - living with a "middle class" Afghan family in their home in a much-deteriorated Soviet-style appartment in the city. She writes about the life of the family as if not there, and does not therefore herself feature in the narrative. This is literary "fly-on-the-wall", I suppose. The bookseller of the title is the head of the family, someone who is successful in business and a westernised liberal by local standards, though this is a description one learns considerably to relativise in both respects by the end of the book.
Inevitably, the book mostly sees things from the perspective of the women in the household. This is the period when most women in Kabul were still wearing the burka when outside the house - glimmers of liberalisation are starting to appear on this score by the end of the book - but it is very clear that the burka is only one, and perhaps the least important, of the symptoms of the utter subjugation of women in Afghan society, even at its liberal, middle-class end.
Both the author and the critics say that this book helps understand the nuances of this extemely traditionalist Muslim society, and helps you not to jump to easy, simplistic conclusions about how the people in it feel about their lives. This is true, but you also come out of this book feeling increasingly pessimistic about the chances of anyone's life in Afghanistan improving very much anytime soon. The power of tradition and the second-class status of women, even in the minds of the victims themselves, just seems too great. This is a place where people have nothing and lock themselves into a way of life seemingly designed to keep it that way.
Aghanistan, from being somewhere no-one very much thought about before 9/11, has of course been the focus of much interest since then. The novels of Khaled Hosseini have in the meantime told us much about life in that benighted country. Having read "The Kite Runner" and "A Thousand Splendid Suns" (particularly the latter), I felt on fairly familiar ground here, getting angry and depressed about the extraordinary waste of personal potential represented in the Afghan way of life, and the consignment of so many people to lives of little more than abject slavery. Hosseini perhaps tells it more powerfully, but this account by Seierskad adds something by virtue of being a first-hand report of everyday life, without novelistic intent. It is well-written, and 276 pages fly by very easily.
Recommendation? If you're interested at all in Afghanistan and perhaps on the background to the current situation there, then this book is definitely worth a read, even it is probably a bit out of date by now ( though I imagine much less than it should be). If you haven't read them, I would recommend the Hosseini novels too, probably ahead of this.
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