What, you are bound to wonder, is all the fuss about? What is there in this slim, delicately packaged volume that’s made it, first, Norway’s bestselling non-fiction book of all time and, then, a runaway international success? And really, isn’t the story of the book more interesting than the narrative it contains? In a way, aren’t the endlessly banal passages in the book redeemed by the legal, clash-of-civilisations debate being fought over its publication? In late 2001 Asne Seierstad, Norway’s leading war correspondent, rolled into Kabul with Northern Alliance cadres racing in to fill the vacuum left by the Taliban. One of her first acquaintances in the city was a bookseller who had endured through the varying censorious ways of the country’s ever changing regimes. Over introductions to old texts, he began telling her his story, about how he had struggled to not just protect his collection of rare manuscripts in attics all over Kabul, but also to trawl far-flung bazaars for new acquisitions. It was truly a magnificent feat of preservation. ‘‘First the Communists burnt my books,’’ he told her, ‘‘then the Mujahedeen looted and pillaged, finally the Taliban burnt them all over again.’’ Soon their conversations shifted to his house and as she shared feasts with his large family, an idea for a book was born. Could she, Seierstad enquired, move in with them for a few months and write a book based on her experiences. The bookseller nodded, and a bestseller was born. It documents the bookseller, Sultan Khan’s love of books and literature. But while a fragile glasnost offers immense freedoms for his trade, little has changed for the women in the house. They are still imprisoned by old orthodoxies. The Taliban may be gone, but burqas remain; in their city of abundant sunshine, they wilt from fatigue due to vitamin D deficiency. An international coalition may have fought a war to free the women of Afghanistan, but in the Khan household they must bend to the will of male relatives. Seierstad absents herself from the narrative, preferring to be an omniscient storyteller, privy to conversations and thought balloons in Kabul as well as Peshawar. The result is a seamless narrative, with short diversions into Afghanistan’s history and politics. But it does beg the question, is this really non-fiction? And before reviewers can determine the contours of that query, the bookseller himself has added his voice to the debate. Shah Mohammed Rais — the bookseller’s real name — has decided to sue Seierstad for defamation, for defaming him and his nation. Hot on her trail, he’s hired a lawyer in Oslo and has threatened to widen his legal campaign to England now that the book is available in English translation. The authenticity of the text can only be settled between the writer and those she writes about. But as a slice of Afghan life, The Bookseller of Kabul remains unsettlingly flawed. Seierstad’s unwavering impatience with the subordination of Afghan women is admirable — but by failing to locate their plight in a societal matrix and thereby exploring an exit to liberation and equality, she appears to mock them as museum exhibits. By failing to interrogate the bookseller and his family about their patriarchal convictions, she denies her tale a critical framework.
