Bookseller of Kabul
SynopsisPlot
This mesmerizing portrait of a proud man who, through three decades and successive repressive regimes, heroically braved persecution to bring books to the people of Kabul has elicited extraordinary praise throughout the world and become a phenomenal international bestseller.
Story
About this book
Norwegian journalist Asne Seierstad first traveled to Afghanistan shortly after September 11, 2001, to cover the conflict. She returned the following spring and lived for several months with the family of Sultan Khan, a Kabul bookseller who had spent more than twenty years defying successive regimes to keep selling books. Under communist rule he was arrested, interrogated, and imprisoned. Under the Taliban he watched soldiers burn stacks of his inventory in the street and resorted to hiding volumes in attics scattered across the city.
Khan is a figure of real contradiction. His commitment to books and opposition to censorship sit alongside strict views on family life rooted in his Muslim faith. Seierstad, as a foreign woman living inside the household, could move between the private quarters of Khan's two wives and the public sphere of the men. The book maps proposals, marriages, and the uneven distribution of power within a single extended family.
The portrait that emerges is specific rather than symbolic. Seierstad records domestic routines, small negotiations, and tensions that arise when personal authority goes unquestioned. Afghanistan's recent political history forms the background, but the foreground belongs to the ordinary pressures of the household and the people navigating them.
