"The Bookseller of Kabul"

After having read the critics of the “heart of Darkness” I ended up not reading the actual story. It is not he first time I decide to read it but at the last minute decide not to.

Instead I read “The Bookseller of Kabul” by Asne Seierstad.

The Bookseller of Kabul” is written as a novel and not as a documentary even though the author, who is a woman, writes is the account of what she has either seen or recorded when the member of the family talked to her. The narrative style makes it an easy read which amazing considering the subject.

The book tells the story of one particular family, the family of the bookseller and their life in Kabul the first spring after the Taliban withdrew. Because the author also recorded what the family members told her the book does not limit itself to this particular time period which makes it a lot more interesting. We are not thrown suddenly into a family we know nothing about. The book starts by telling the story of how the bookseller, who is now a grand father, met his wife and proposed. In fact it seems that a lot of the book is about marriage proposals. Mostly it is about the life of women and their interaction with the men in their life, from the patriarch to the suitors. The descriptions of the way women are treated is well done. This is not an account of the mistreatment of women in Afghanistan during the Taliban regime (I first wrote "women in Pakistan" as my mind is more on Ms Bhutto right now and how amazing and brave a woman she was). It is the story of a family and how the mother, the aunt, the daughter, women who feel real to us, live. It tells us how it feels to wear a burka without going into the psychoanalysis of it. I thought it was great to read about how tight it feels around the head and gives a headache, how heavy the material is so that one can smell one's own breath, how the grid effects the vision and makes choosing things like lace impossible, how women are then described as burka (as in a “a pregnant burka”) with shoes and hems. I enjoyed this book and I would recommend it to any woman at all curious to see how other women live.