Real! The book was hard to put down because it was hard to believe that somewhere in the 21st century people live trapped in their own lives due to no circumstances that they have any control. How the Taliban was able to completely detroy a country and culture and still have fanatics that believe it is the way, is so beyond my comprehension.

Más que una novela, El librero de Kabul es un conjunto de crónicas sociales, cada una centrada en algún miembro de la familia del protagonista.
Uno de esos libros necesarios para conocer culturas tan distintas y alejadas de la nuestra, en países marcados por guerras y regímenes autoritarios, por fanatismos religiosos y jerarquías familiares en las que la mujer no tiene voz ni voto.

Algunos capítulos son más interesantes que otros pero con todos aprendes algo de las costumbres del país y el hecho de tener de telón de fondo y punto común la librería le da un toque distinto a otros libros parecidos que se hayan podido leer.

"Una mujer reza a Alá para que en su próxima vida le deje ser una piedra antes que una mujer."

IL FALÒ DELLA VERITÀ



Åsne Seierstad è una giornalista norvegese corrispondente dai fronti di guerra (Kosovo, Cecenia, Afghanistan). All’epoca in cui uscì questo libro aveva trentadue anni. All’epoca in cui lo scrisse solo qualche mese di meno: perché si tratta del classico “instant book”, cotto-e-mangiato (a novembre 2001 Seierstad arriva a Kabul, vive con la famiglia di Sultan Rai i primi cinque mesi del 2002, il libro esce in Norvegia il 2 settembre dello stesso).
Presente a Kabul quando gli americani occuparono la capitale nel novembre del 2001 (due mesi dopo le Torri Gemelle), ha passato qualche mese nella casa e con la numerosa famiglia del protagonista, il libraio di Kabul, in veste di ospite.
I padroni di casa sapevano che Seierstad stava con loro per raccogliere materiale e scrivere un libro: quello che non sapevano è che tipo di libro sarebbe stato pubblicato.



Nella prefazione Åsne Seierstad spiega di aver optato per una forma narrativa invece che per un classico reportage. E questa scelta è la madre di tutti i suoi errori (anche se, nonostante quelli che per me sono errori, il libro è stato un successo, best seller in patria, quarantadue traduzioni, tuttora citato): perché scegliendo di romanzare i suoi fatti trasforma in dialoghi e riflessioni dei personaggi fatti e pensieri che ci si chiede come abbia potuto ascoltare e presenziare. Considerato anche che lei non parlava la lingua del posto e comunicava in inglese, lingua che non tutti i personaggi padroneggiavano.
E così facendo, smarrisce la “giusta distanza” e fa nascere spontaneo il sospetto di un eccesso di colore, di belletto, di arricchimento artificioso (e davvero non ce ne sarebbe stato bisogno). Di non oggettività. Di falsità.



Avendo vissuto cinque mesi insieme a loro, alla grande famiglia di Sultan Khan (nome fittizio, i nomi veri sono stati evitati), avendoli sommersi di domande e avendo ascoltato con attenzione le loro risposte (ma spesso senza registrarle o annotarle, affidandosi alla sua memoria), Seierstad si sente giustificata a scrivere come se fosse nella testa dei suoi personaggi, attribuendogli pensieri sentimenti ed emozioni senza il normale filtro della sua voce di narratrice, proprio come se stesse scrivendo un romanzo. E ritiene di aver così raggiunto l’oggettività.
Il che mi pare piuttosto dubitabile.
Ci sono momenti in cui è automatico pensare che l’episodio o è inventato di sana pianta o è comunque molto artificialmente ricostruito.



Ma l’operazione è traballante non solo per questo punto di partenza che secondo me è alquanto criticabile e rischioso: è traballante anche perché Seierstad non riesce a tacere il suo punto di vista, come vede e valuta fatti e persone si percepisce forte e perennemente giudicante, la sua indignazione di donna bianca occidentale finisce con l’appiattire il racconto.
Ma è un confronto che non regge quello tra una donna norvegese, alta, bionda, giornalista, dinamica, indipendente, moderna accanto e a confronto con un mondo governato da gente che ambisce riportare indietro l’orologio della Storia di un millennio e mezzo, al tempo di Maometto. Una società patriarcale nella quale la donna è più vicina a una merce che a un essere umano. Un mondo che contempla polizia religiosa (con pena di morte perfino per lapidazione e varie altre pene corporali) e il Ministero per la Repressione del Vizio e la Promozione della Virtù. Un mondo che impone di eliminare qualsiasi immagine di essere vivente, sia esso animale che umano (le strappavano anche dai libri).



Nell’edizione italiana, almeno quella che ho letto io, manca un episodio che appare invece in altre edizioni: la descrizione fisica di una donna dell’entourage familiare all’hammam, descrizione (molto dettagliata) di seni, pancia, pube, nella quale Seierstad non trattiene il suo senso di superiorità di fronte a questa donna e al suo corpo “impresentabile”. Forse le è stato chiesto di eliminarla, forse si è autocensurata comprendendo d’essersi spinta troppo oltre nel carpire l’intimità di quelle persone, intimità e vita privata che vengono abbastanza vergognosamente calpestate in nome di presunta cronaca, giornalismo, verità.
Last but not least, Mrs Seierstad scrive così così, per non dire malino, e confeziona un libro che a me è risultato irritante.



Shah Muhammad Rais, il vero Sultan Khan, e la sua seconda moglie hanno fatto causa alla Seierstad: si sono sentiti diffamati dal suo libro. Il processo è durato a lungo, otto anni mi pare: se nel primo giudizio la giornalista norvegese era stata condannata a una pena pecuniaria, nel secondo – e credo definitivo – è stata assolta.
Adesso dice che sì, forse è vero, avrebbe dovuto fargli leggere prima quello che stava per pubblicare, farglielo approvare per iscritto. Intanto il libro è fuori da quasi vent’anni, in decine di edizioni, il danno fatto rimane, il bene è tutto e solo per lei Åsne Seierstad.

This book titled "The Bookseller of Kabul" and the blurb suggests defying Taliban & co by a bookseller for his love of books, was actually a (honest) portrait of Afghan society. And it had little to do with books n reading. So, there was a feeling of being cheated.
Secondly, having read Hosseini's brilliant novels on Afghan society, non-fiction written in a grim, matter-of-fact style was boring. And have read travelogues on d region (though not Afghanistan).
Will repeat though that her writing was honest n full of empathy. May try another book of her's on a topic I havent read bcoz of these qualities.

Over two decades Sultan Khan sold books in defiance of the authorities. The authority changed from Afghans to communists to Taliban, but the persecutions remained the same; imprisonment, arrest, beatings and regular interrogation. He suffered watching illiterate Taliban thugs burn piles of his books in the streets of Kabul, so he hid them. His collection and stock was secreted across attics and rooms across the capital. Whilst he abhorred censorship and was passionate about all things literary he was also an Afghan man. He had strict and immovable views on family life, the role of women in society and the home and how he treated people and expected them to treat him with due deference.

It is into this family that Seierstad comes. In her unique position as a Western woman, she is able to move between the two hemispheres of male and female life in the home and the city, something that no male journalist would have been able to achieve. It is a time of huge change too, she arrived in 2002, just after the Taliban had be routed by the Americans, and whilst society had thrown of some of the shackles, many cultural norms still remained. In this she takes a step back and lets the Khans speak for themselves, and you see a very private life inside an Afghan family.

It is not the easiest book to read, not because it isn’t well written and translated, but because the society and culture that she describes is so very different to ours. It is brutal at times, heavily restricting women in what they can do, say and achieve in society, as well as having tribal fighting, harsh justice, precious little infrastructure and at times no hope. They have decades of oppression there and to make steps towards a society that has those opportunities that we take for granted will take many years and need deep fundamental changes to political and culture to bring it about. I had hoped that it would be more about the perils of the book business there, and whilst it made for a fascinating account, didn’t live up to what I had hoped for.

This book is not about books or the selling of books – its much more about the inner life of a middle-class family in Afghanistan shortly after the Allied invasion in October of 2001.

The author visited a bookstall in Kabul and after striking up a conversation with the owner asked if she could spend time with his family and this request was accepted. She lived with them for a few months and this book encapsulates her observations of their lifestyle and interactions. It is somewhat similar to an anthropological study.

What we experience from reading about this family is patriarchy a l’extreme. Women have no voice – they cook and they clean. They cannot go out of the house without being accompanied by a male. What their desires and wishes are is of little consequence. They are verbally abused by the male members of the family. Their lives appear helpless with very little in the way of choice.

So, this makes for rather depressing reading. In another book I read (The Taliban Don’t Wave) about Afghanistan a Canadian soldier described it as: “If the commercials are true and Disneyland is the happiest place on earth, and if everything in life must have an opposite, then the saddest place on earth must be Afghanistan.”

The family that the author lived with is middle class by Afghanistan standards. Some are literate and have a knowledge of English. The author acknowledges that because her bookseller sponsor ran a bookstore (mostly selling a variety of books in Persian) she had assumed that he was “enlightened and liberal” – but she quickly realized how false this assumption was once she entered the inner sanctum of the household. Among other customs the bookseller (he was the oldest male) would choose, negotiate and approve who both his sons and daughters would marry – in the case of his daughters this would be to much older men.

And of course, for any of his daughters or sisters to have any type of social contact with males prior to marriage was forbidden. We are provided with examples of some of these transgressions in the book.

This book is a compelling ground level look at a family in Afghanistan. I doubt much has changed since this was written in 2002. Perhaps more men and women have had access to and received an education. We are also provided with a view to the poverty surrounding the household – lack of electricity, heating, drinking water… all within a corrupt bureaucracy. Safety is a constant issue, more so for women.

Like the author I felt hostility to the male members –their privileged and dominant position went unchallenged.

This is a searing and sad book giving an inside view of an Afghan household.

I understand people might be skipping this because it used to be, perhaps still is, a bestseller. I have heard this title a while ago, and until recently
Final note: my rationale for reading this was to find a book that would complement The Handmaid's Tale on my curriculum; the match is so good I am afraid it is too good, we will see what my students make of it) never felt the urge to read this, because of an underlying suspicion that it might be a bestseller of the 'paint-by-numbers' variety. This isn't the case.

Seierstad's specialty are, according to Wikipedia, "accounts of everyday life in war zones – most notably Kabul after 2001, Baghdad in 2002 and the ruined Grozny in 2006". She has seen things; she skilfully avoids naivete, sensationalism or indifference, and is better than many other journalists in removing herself from the picture (it is mainly in the scenes when she describes the physical realities of wearing a burka, for example, when one understands this was her own bodily experience). She has a good writing style, alternates between viewpoints - of females and males of the family she describes, but also sometimes adopting a 'neutral narrator' stance, gives a good amount of detail, varies her writing (I liked the short chapter which quotes female love poetry, and another, in which she 'accompanies' women doing their shopping in burkas).

The themes that stand out for me are the power of the family as the ultimate policing mechanism in this very restrictive society (it is important to note that she describes the plight of men as well as the plight of women), the kind of 'fake power' that women may gain, with some luck, over their family members, and the terrible capriciousness that one's family might have on one's life, despite of your gender, as everything is ultimately decided upon by very powerful, very capricious family members.

My only qualm re: this book is that while she gives quite a lot of political background, she gives very little of the religious background. I think this book could use an explanation that there are different factions of Muslims, more conservative and more progressive ones, and the explanation of the religious factor in conflicts she represents. On the whole, however, I would recommend this book.

(Note: you may want to read about how the head of the family Seierstad describes in the book took her to court for untrue and innacurate representation of the thoughts and story of his second wife, humiliating his first wife, and misrepresenting him as capricious and domineering). https://www.theguardian.com/theguardi... (Interestingly, this seems to be the first case when a person described in a book of journalism focusing on a 'less developed' country takes the matter to court.)

First, I felt misled by the "premise" of this book. It's called "The Bookseller of Kabul" not "Gee, it Sucks to be an Afghan Woman." So when I find that the story is hardly about the Bookseller of Kabul at all, well, it's like being told that you're going to get a story and then having a "moral lesson" being crammed down your throat.

The author is completely missing from the work. She claims to have spent a solid chunk of time living with the family and says in her introduction that she had quite a few arguments with the family while living with them, that she hadn't been that mad before. Well, I guess she turned her anger into this book, or at least that's probably what she thinks she did. What she did write was an outsider's view of life in Afghanistan. By writing herself out of the narrative, the reader gets no sense from the author that she interacted with this family, instead it's as if they were zoo creatures that were stealthily observed. In choosing to write the book this way, the women of the story are given no voice beyond what appears to be the author's assumptions on what they would think or the author's thoughts projected into their situations. It seems as though the author is doing exactly what she's trying so hard (so very, very hard; so hard that it shows through every aspect of the book) to condemn.

The book was readable and I finished it in a few days; however, I would not recommend it, unless you're looking for a case study on how not to write an Anthropological novel.

Rating 5 out of 5 | Grade: A; Misogyny, Chauvinism, Tribalism

Some of the things which're mentioned in this book, they make your blood boil and make you sick to the core. Even more so, when reading in 2022, when the Taliban has retaken rule over the region.

Many of the events and anecdotes they require time for me to unwind. Will write a more detailed review at a later date.

But will definitely recommend for those who wish to learn the on the ground reality of a war-torn nation suffering from dictatorship, foreign invasion, fundamentalism, in addition to the litany of domestic issues.

Από το blurb στο οπισθόφυλλο πίστευα ότι θα διάβαζα ένα nonfiction, μια δημοσιογραφική μελέτη/έρευνα για τη ζωή αυτού του βιβλιοπώλη στην Καμπούλ.
Πώς είναι να ζεις σε μια χώρα που λογοκρίνει και καίει βιβλία διότι δεν συμβαδίζουν με τα πιστεύω της εκάστοτε δύναμης, κομμουνισμός, μουτζαχεντίν, ταλιμπάν.


Αντιθέτως διάβασα μια Αφγανική σαπουνόπερα όπου έμπλεξα τα μπούτια μου με τα σόγια του βιβλιοπώλη. Τρεις γυναίκες καμιά δεκαριά παιδιά σύνολο, συγγενείς, μπατζανάκηδες, συμπέθεροι, τα προβλήματα της μιας γυναίκας, τα προβλήματα της άλλης, τα προβλήματα της ερωτευμένης κόρης, η απελπισία του γιου που βαρέθηκε το σπίτι του, κουτσομπολιά, κατιναριό, ε και μέσα μέσα μας μιλούσε και για το βιβλιοπωλείο που ήταν και η ουσία ας πούμε του βιβλίου ή του τίτλου. Ούτε το ένα τρίτο του βιβλίου δηλαδή.

Ξενέρωσα αφάνταστα διότι εγώ περίμενα nonfiction και διάβασα οικογενειακές ιστορίες made in Afghanistan.

Πριτς


Ένα εξαράκι και πολύ του είναι.
Διαβάστηκε γρήγορα αλλά, άλλα έλεγε στο οπισθόφυλλο και άλλα διάβασα.
Να 'ναι καλά το μάρκετινκ
Δηλαδή αγόρασα γουρούνι στο σακί
Άσε που στο Αφγανιστάν είναι μουσουλμάνοι και το χοιρινό δεν το τρώνε
Τραγική ειρωνεία

Βαθμολογία: 6/10

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1511311.html

The more I hear and read about Afghanistan, the more I realise I don't know. I recently attended a conference of experts where a full day was taken up with discussions of how quickly, and with how much dignity, Western troops can realistically be withdrawn; this not being one of my areas of expertise, I mostly sat and listened.

Seierstad's book rather adds to my confusion. The book purports to be her interpretation of the lives of the Afghan family she lived with in Kabul for three months, anonymised and told through their viewpoint rather than hers. She vividly depicts an intensely patriarchal society, religious in observance rather than belief, traumatised and decapitated by years of war; much along the lines of what I have read in Khaled Hosseini's novels, though restricted in time to those few months of 2002 shortly after Karzai first came to power (and reminiscences of earlier periods).

But is it accurate or fair? Her host vehemently protested the fairness of her depiction (and her utter failure to disguise his identity adequately) and the latest news is that his younger wife has won damages for what the book says about her. And the fact that the details are so intensely disputed by those in a position to know about them makes one suspicious about the extent to which Seierstad has got the big picture right.

We all bring our own baggage to our interpretation of what is going on in other people's lives, and I suspect that Western journalism - or perhaps more broadly, the instinct to tell a story which is interesting to a Norwegian or European audience - may not be the best way of letting the voices of Afghans themselves be heard where it matters. My own feeling (which of course reflects my own biases of intellectual formation and professional experience) is that anthropologists, more than other commentators, have quite a lot to offer in helping the understanding of situations like Afghanistan, certainly more than journalists who drop in (let alone the 'military experts' who tend to dominate domestic discourse in the West). I don't know of any such work on Afghanistan itself, but if I ever need to work up a more detailed knowledge of the country, I will start there, rather than with any more books like this one.

Loved