Rating: 
Summary: Convincing account ...
Review: .. of the the dismal servanthood (should we say slavery?) of women under Islam. Written in the context of the life of the women of and near to a relatively modern and tolerant Afghan who loves books, and who survived both the Russians and the Taleban. Accounts of the hospitality and lives of men under Islam are quite sympathetic (see the fantastic books of hiking, mountain climbing, and adventure by Wilfred Thesiger and Eric Newby, and also the more recent one by Jason Elliott), but the lives of women, not told in those books, are lives of repression and servitude.
Some have written that Aasne Seierstad is 'ungracious' to her bookseller host, and I agree that she is, but her story is of the women too important not to have been written. On might tend to discount her account for 'lack of understanding' because she's Norwegian, and Scandinavia (thank God!) is the home of male-female equality, of feminism in its best form. However, there is also Siba Shakib's (earlier) parallel account of the misery of Islamic women ("Nach Afghanistan kommt Gott nur noch zum Weinen"), following the life of a dirt-poor refugee and her growing family, and Shakib is Iranian. I recommend that you read both books and judge for yourself. Shakib points out that Kabul girls were forced by the Russians either to go to school to learn to read and write, or go to prison, and that that was effectively an act of long-term liberation for the women. It made them rebellious. The ideal in Afghanistan apparently is that of a servile, uneducated woman who does not question the man. That standard was applied severly by the outrageous pre-medieval fundamentalist rules imposed by the Taleban. One would have to go back to medieval Europe for the phenomenon of profiting from daughters by selling them to old men for marriage. See, e.g., Liv Ullmann's film of Sigrid Unset's "Kristin Lavransdatter" for a scene of a wailing teenager being carried off on horseback behind a toothless geezer.
A list of the puritanic rules imposed by the Taleban is given in one of Seierstad's chapters. For an entire book that takes the outlawing of kites as its theme, see "The Kite Runner", also first rate literature, written by an Afghan-American.
This review is based on the Swedish translation, "Bokhandlaran i Kabul" (bought at a gas station while travelling north on E-6 this summer), is fascinating, and is closest to the Norwegian original. Maybe the books by Seierstad, Shakib (see amazon.co.uk or amazon.de for an English translation of Shakib from German), and Khalid Hosseini are three of the most informative books in our era of terrorism by religious fundamentalists against freedom loving peoples.
A note: the author's name is spelled Aasne or Åsne, not Asne, and is pronounced more or less 'Oasne' (the last 'e' is always pronounced in Indo-Germanic languages, excepting English, including Dari, spoken in Afghanistan).
Rating:
Summary: More Like A Novel
Review: ........A strange but well written book which reads more like a dime store novel, but manages to grip you anyway. It's sometimes hard to understand where the author reported factual information and where she may have fit the characters into her own idea's of Kabul life. Unlike some of the other reviewers I dont see it as a "men bad, women good" kind of story. All the books character's are prisoners of the crippling theology known as Islam. Where else, but in Islam, and it's, repressive Sharia laws, do you find a people so afraid of any emotions and feelings; where even children's dolls were seen as threats to their image of god. More and more I see Islam as a threat and this book convinces me that those who believe in religious freedom must confront Islam, either with ideas, or with force.
Rating: 
Summary: No wonder the man is upset
Review: ...but Sultan Khan had his head in the clouds if he thought he was going to emerge from this journalist's immersion in his family's life looking like a benevolent god. He's suing her, as the book-reading world knows by now, for something like defamation of character. I'm sure he thought she would extol his virtues; instead, she wrote honestly of the fiercely patriarchal Afghanistan/Muslim traditional family structure that keeps his tyranny intact and subjugates all women, regardless of their educational level or social status.
The Bookseller of Kabul reads more like good New Journalism. It's not great literature; it's great reportage. But it gives a voice to the women in the extended Family (meant in the broadest sense of the word), a voice that speaks for millions of women in the Middle East, a voice that must be heard. Especially heartbreaking is the fate of Leila, sister of Sultan Khan, educated, literate, bright - but unable to speak up for herself to escape a lifetime of servitude.
Rating:
Summary: Vivid and effective
Review: 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:
Summary: One family in Afghanistan
Review: First of all, I enjoyed the book. Secondly, it made me think. However, little of it was truly eye-opening, for me. I thought much of the misery was due to poverty and family in-fighting which could occur - to a lesser degree- in any country, including the United States. I had difficulty parsing out how much was due to Islam and how much was culture which is simply attributed to Islam. In the book "the Princess", the author states that Islam is not to be blamed for the horrors depicted, but the culture. Into the mix must be thrown the inaccessibility of obtaining an education in Kabul. As to the plight of women there, there must be some parents in that country who permit their daughters to marry for love. So I asked myself, "Did I really learn anything from reading this book?" The one thing which stands out in my mind is the chapter about the warlords. Eisner's book "Survivor of the Holocaust" also made this point, namely, that everyone is fighting everyone else. You can't win a football game without team spirit, without some cohesiveness, and respect for one's opponents. The ballot and the principle of 'may the best man win; and then live and let live' are necessary for a nation's progress. Without those, a country remains poor, primitive, uneducated, and miserable, because everyone is paranoid about the other guy and thus kills or is killed. This bookseller's family milieu is primitive and oppressive. Even though the bookseller is well-read, he has not incorporated the lessons in his books. He is the patriarch of the family and can determine to a great extent the happiness of his progeny, but he is a tyrant. The one relaxation of his tyranny is shown when he relents and allows his son to go on the pilgrimage to Mazar-i-Sharif. Well, at least female circumcision apparently is no longer practiced in Afghanistan, although there was no reference to it in this book. In summary, though the Moslems have a reputation for this kind of controlling behavior within their families, it would have been a better book if this sort of thing were put in perspective by telling something about families living there who were more liberal and permissive and what happened to the children of such families - if they stayed in Afghanistan.
Rating:
Summary: a brief tour of Afgani life
Review: For those interested in the human side of Afganistan, this book is a good introduction. The title, though, is a bit deceptive, and that deception is probably why the Bookseller of the title is contemplating a lawsuit against the author. Imagine inviting a journalist into your home, who has probably convinced you she is interested in YOU as a successful middle class merchant who has survived imprisonment, etc., and discovering the book she has written is actually about the tedious, demeaning life lived by the women under your roof! The descriptions of your overweight mother at the public bath alone would be cause for defamation. Other readers who couldn't feel connected with the characters strike me as unsympathic. All in the book are to be pitied, from the women who have no future other than cooking, cleaning, and catering to the whims of the men, to the sons who are denied an education by their supposedly worldly and educated father. The incident of the poor carpenter who stole postcards from the shop was the most horrifying account. I felt privileged to be able to READ, given that a good number of the people described in the book are illiterate. While there is certainly another side to the story, it is heartbreaking to think that the mere boys in the story, the bookseller's teenager sons, have more sway in the household than their older aunts, whom they insult mercilessly, despite the fact they are waited on hand and foot. As a Western woman it is shocking to contemplate how soul-crushing this life must be for the women. Imagine a mother being told she cannot work by her 16 yr old son! As a companion piece to the awesome book The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, Westerners have a chance to see Afgani society in a way not depicted on our nightly news.
Rating:
Summary: the ugly face of totalitarian male society
Review: I couldn't help laughing when I read the paranoid editorial review of Ellen Loughran - a member of the American Library Association - who rants about "the author's strong feminist beliefs raise a few questions about accuracy of recall and of the depiction of male members of the clan", but proves so illiterate she can't even distinguish the clearly stated fact that Seierstad is a very well-known Norwegian - not a Swedish - journalist. So much for the American Library Association. But such sloppy, ignorant reviewing tends to be symptomatic of books concerned with human rights, or at least whenever the emphasis is on the half of the global population that typically is deprived any. People are blinded by the fact that the same dehumanising values that pollute the Afghani patriarchy pollute the rest of the world. Seierstad writes a brilliant and very, very disturbing account of a totalitarian imbecile male society in all its woman-hating glory, where people are incarcerated in their father's backyard until married off at 15 to some gross, toothless 40-year old coot to continue life imprisoned in his backyard sentenced to be treated like cattle and produce new males. It's convenient to dismiss this nightmare as a retarded curiosity or even question the facts, but one does not need to travel to Afghanistan to get a testosterone overload in this world and experience the horrors of the hysterical patriarchy. Men's hatred of women is the most profitable of men's markets, and yet, the accuracy of Seierstad's book has been questioned by aggressive, militant male reviewers even in reputable papers expressing concern how she exposes the male bookseller and puts his "reputation" at risk in a society where privacy is everything. In post-Taliban Afghanistan men threaten and kill human rights activists fighting to alter the constitution to grant citizenship also to Afghan women and, clearly, many Western males support Muslim males in their bloody quest. To men, the issue of women enjoying human rights men take for granted in any part of the world is subordinated saving the public faces and demented egos of vain tyrannous males. Seierstad's book is a must for anyone who can think and read at the same time.
Rating: 
Summary: Despite unsophisticated language, a worthwile read
Review: I first read this book in the original language (Norwegian) as soon as it came out, and after having reread it in the English translation, my conclusion remains: an intriguing account of an atypical Afghan family's life presented in simplistic and often cliched language. The author, Asne Seierstad, is foremost a journalist who has shown a remarkable sense of bravery and an admirable disregard for her snobbish literary critics (she was quickly belittled in her native Norway by self-important and envious(?) critics). Her book is in my view an important contribution to the contemporary literature on Afghan life, culture, women, and even Islam.
The strength of the book lies is her observations of the individual family members through her modern feminist Western eyes; however, at times this is also its weakness since it becomes quite obvious that the more "unsympathetic" (male) members of the family do not get quite the nuanced descriptions as the more symphatetic (female) members. The bookseller himself, Sultan Khan, is the most obvious example. Seierstad is not quite able (perhaps understandably so) to portray with conviction his more admirable sides - it is as if his chauvinistic and self-important characteristics cannot coexist with a more complex, idealistic and interesting personality. Sure, she tries to explain that she was grateful to him for his hospitality, and she makes some half-hearted attempts to describe his heroic efforts in his resistance to the Taliban's censorships of his beloved books; however, she is not quite able to convey the bookseller's real and heartfelt motives for doing so. In addition, when referring to his passion for literature (espcially poetry), it seems almost as if it constitutes just a sidenote in Sultan's personality.
Luckily, in her introductions she has included a note about her enraged feelings as a Western female when she says that she has never been so angry as when she was living with this family and that she has never had such desire to hit someone. This "confession" is important because it shows her honest and unavoidable bias in her portrayals.
One of my favorite parts of the book is her descriptions about Mansur's pilgrimage on which she is allowed to travel. Another part is the devastatingly heart-wrenching tale about the postcard thief. The most sympathtic character in the book is Leila, Sultan's youngest sister, and with whom the author had the closest relationship. Knowing the bond that formed between these women, it does not feel overly contrived when Seierstad "goes inside" this girl and describes her dreams and disappointments. Through Seierstads Western feminine portrayal of Leila, she becomes the ultimate representative of victimized womanhood under Islam.
Finally a note about the translation: overall I think it does the book justice. The book in its original language is not a literary masterpiece and the language is often riddled with cliches and simplistic expressions. This might present a dilemma for the translating process since a translator can not allow herself to improve on the original language. And when translating a certain cliched phrase, it can be hard to find a representative cliche in the new language; however, to be true to the original feel of the text, it might be necessary to include such a phrase. That said, this book should be read for its content and not for its prose. On that aspect, I recommend this book as a part of a wider representation of Middle Eastern contemporary books. Other books that should be read as companion books include The Kite Runner, Reading Lolita in Tehran and West of Kabul, East of New York.
Rating:
Summary: More than just about women
Review: I found this book extremely fascinating and disturbing. I thought the author was a most courageous woman and I was intrigued by her ability to obtain such intimate entry into the life and throughts of the Khan family. I would like to comment, however, for the benefit of those who have not read this book and who might be influenced by some of the other reviews, that this is hardly just an expose of how badly WOMEN are squelched in Afghan society. I was equally disturbed by the manner in which many of the MEN were squelched and made to suffer, and in my opinion they did not enjoy a much better life than the women in spite of their significantly greater freedoms.
For example, Sultan never allowed his son Mansur to pursue any of his dreams either, and forced him to work in his store instead, against the young man's wishes. An impoverished employee of the store who embezzled a few postcards was handed justice that by Western standards is horrific, and largely at the hands of Sultan's son Mansur, who was much opposed to the thief's treatment but whose hand was forced, against his personal principles, by his domineering father. In addition, the romantic love of men for women was as thwarted as that of the women, and the rules and restrictions regarding suitors was barbarically stringent.
I wish the reviewers had not focused so wholly on the book's portrayal of the constraints on women, for I felt that the treatment of men and women alike in this family was appalling, and I sympathized equally with some of the men, who suffered as well.
Rating: 
Summary: unlikeable
Review: I have just finished this book and cannot recommend it to anyone. I suppose the political history is reasonably accurate, but there is not one single likeable character. I had to keep reminding myself this was not a novel. I had the impression that the author must have loathed her time in Afghanistan, except for the well-described journey to Mazaar el Sharif. I suppose I was meant to sympathize with the women, and of course I do, but yet their willingness to go along with the chauvinism of the father and their brothers is astounding. Seirstad gives the reader no reason to sympathise since one never for the most part gets to know them as people, with hopes and dreams and complications. Instead, they are objects, symbols. Knowing of my interest in Afghanistan and that part of the word generally, a friend had passed the book on to me; she had been unable to finish it, finding it trash. I agree and can't understand why it is so successful: it seems to me to be superficial and shallow, a wasted opportunity to convey an understanding of a society so very different from our own.
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