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The Bookseller of Kabul by Åsne Seierstad
The Bookseller of Kabul by Åsne Seierstad









The Bookseller of Kabul by Åsne Seierstad

“We search blindly for a holy man, and find a lot of hot air.” But he is also hidebound by notions of honor and his repressive attitude toward women-not just repressive from a Western perspective, Seierstad points out, but stifling to the women’s own aspirations, which she portrays with a grim vividness. On the one hand, Sultan puts himself in harm’s way to save a few bits of Afghan heritage and to fight against Afghanistan's more obtuse traditions: “All we know is how to scream, pray and fight,” he declares. It’s easy to both admire and to loathe this complex character.

The Bookseller of Kabul by Åsne Seierstad

On the home front, however, he’s an ingrained patriarch. of the opinion that everyone had the right to be heard,” and he paid the price for his beliefs. When it comes to literature, Sultan is “a freethinker. While covering the Northern Alliance’s push south into Kabul after routing the Taliban, the author made the acquaintance of Sultan Khan, a bookseller who had been thrown into jail under both the communist and Taliban regimes. Norwegian journalist Seierstad casts light on the difficult, sometimes dreary, often (still) dangerous life of a bookseller in the Afghan capital, not neglecting the equal but very different tribulations of the women in his family.











The Bookseller of Kabul by Åsne Seierstad