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Title: The Bookseller of Kabul by Asne Seierstad ISBN: 0-316-73450-0 Publisher: Little Brown & Company Pub. Date: October, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.86 (21 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Thought provoking
Comment: This book details the daily life of a middle-class family in Kabul, the family of Sultan Khan, a bookseller in Kabul. Sultan has lived through several represive regimes, all of which burned and censored his beloved books. Now with the Taliban gone, he is free to pursue his business and his dreams of turning his large collection into a library for Afghanistan.
However, this story isn't all roses and sunshine. The dark secret of his family (and of many others in the region) is the horrible mistreatment of the women in his family. The lives of women are completely controlled by men in his society. The women have to wera very restrictive clothing even after the fall of the Taliban. They can't leave home by themselves and they have no say in who they marry. They often have to marry men many years older than they are. In one situation, a girl secretly spent 30 minutes alone with a boy just walking in the park. As a result, she was severely beaten almost to the point of death, and she was locked in a room for more than a month. After reading this book, you'll cry for the women in Afghanistan. It's a little heavy, but I recommend this book for everyone, and especially for those who are concerned about the well-being of women around the world.
Rating: 5
Summary: Vivid and effective
Comment: Despite the controversy surrounding some of the factual accuracy of Seierstad's reporting, this remains a compelling and oftentimes shocking piece of writing. Seierstad allows her characters to speak for themselves in that she relates the stories of the Khan family in a narrative format of which she is not a prevalent part, and therefore expresses no personal opinion.
It is an expose of a brutal male-dominated society where even after the fall of the Taliban, women are held in bondage within the confines of their own homes - some reduced to the role of servants depending on their age and position in the household, others are sold off as little more than slaves, all are physically and verbally abused, and in some cases killed.
"The Bookseller of Kabul" is not, I believe, meant to provoke sympathy in the hearts of its readers, nor are we expected to "like" or "identify" with the people it portrays. What it does is provide us, the Western reader, with a slice of life in a world most of us will never experience. Despite a decade-plus of invasion, war, and revolution, it's amazing to me that any form of life is sustained here at all.
The descriptions are vivid - particularly of young Mansur's "pilgramage" to Mazar-i-Sharif and the vast topography of Afghanistan itself.
As such, this book serves as an effective complement to the more traditional journalistic coverage of the war in Afghanistan and its people.
Rating: 3
Summary: very good writer, but an ungracious guest
Comment: Surely in the 3 months that the author lived in his home, Sultan Khan did at least ONE good thing for someone else!!!! But it isn't mentioned. She also paints everyone in this family as very base, as if everyone in her native Norway is so upstanding.
Sultan is the elderly patriarch of a multigenerational extended family, which includes his two wives. He is a bookseller in Afghanistan, a country where 2/3 of the population is illiterate. Sultan sees himself as protecting the history and legacy of his country from before the Taliban took over in 1996. He sees these books and hard work as what the country needs to do in order to rise above the abject poverty brought about by the Taliban and the war that deposed them.
The women in Sultan's family have it the worst -- they cook and clean and are generally enslaved as household servants, unworthy of respect from the men for whom they do everything. Not that they have anywhere to go if they decided they wanted to stop. In addition, women of certain age and marital status can lord (or is it lady?) it over other females. One feels for young Leila who wants freedom, as well as the 12-year-old son Aimal who can't go to school, the way he wants to, but must instead work in one of his father's shops instead.
I am a first-generation Muslim female and have seen a lot of these scenarios played out time and again among people I have known in Pakistan as well as the USA (luckily, I have never known of an adultress being killed while her murderers, in this case her own brothers, are excused, but I have no doubt that it happens.)
I do think another side of the story is worth telling -- my Muslim father insisted all the girls get university educations and encouraged us to go on for graduate studies and get jobs. Such Muslim men, brought up in Islamic republics, DO exist in strong numbers.
It would have been nice if the Khan family had been written about in a more balanced view. They are just depicted as one-dimensional -- and that dimension is very unflattering indeed.
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Title: Storyteller's Daughter by SAIRA SHAH ISBN: 0375415319 Publisher: Knopf Pub. Date: 16 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.00 |
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Title: The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini ISBN: 1573222453 Publisher: Riverhead Books Pub. Date: 29 May, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: The Swallows of Kabul : A Novel by YASMINA KHADRA ISBN: 0385510012 Publisher: Nan A. Talese Pub. Date: 17 February, 2004 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
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Title: Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi ISBN: 081297106X Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks Pub. Date: 30 December, 2003 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: The Sewing Circles of Herat : A Personal Voyage Through Afghanistan by Christina Lamb ISBN: 0060505265 Publisher: HarperCollins Pub. Date: 03 December, 2002 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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