Book 16 toppled – a true story of tradition, patriarchy and family.

I picked up The Bookseller of Kabul by Asne Seierstad (translated from the Norwegian by Ingrid Christophersen) in the Oxfam bookshop and I bought it because the blurb on the back seemed to tell me that it was about the preservation of ancient Arabic texts like those in Mali (see my review of The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu here). Although Sultan Khan, the bookseller of the title, has preserved books deemed sinful or evil by a number of different regimes in Afghanistan, often at considerable personal cost, this book is actually about his family rather than his business.

The author is a journalist who spent some considerable time in the country after the fall of the Taliban and the victory of the Americans and their allies. This was a time in which people could reclaim freedoms they hadn’t had for many years but also when many people still held to the strict belief system of their recent rulers. It’s set at the same time as this book which is fiction. The situation in Afghanistan has changed significantly since the book was written and the Taliban are now, once again, in control and I suspect that many of the freedoms explored in this book no longer exist.

The author lived with Sultan and his family for some months. She is clear that every event in the book was verified with participants and that she saw much of this for herself. The narrative includes many of Sultan’s very extended family including both his wives, his mother, his siblings, his nieces and nephews, and his children. Each chapter tells a story about one person and, because this is about real people, the events are often messy and occasionally horrific. The lifestyle and moral code of these people is very different from that in the Western world and the use of patriarchy to enforce the decisions of the father figure seems unassailable.

The author is clear that this is not a typical family because they are middle-class and own a thriving business. For Sultan the business drives all of his decisions and the family exists to provide a workforce for the bookshops and his descendants to whom he can pass on the fruits of his labour. Sultan’s word is law and the book outlines some situations where this means that his family members are unable to live the life that they want because he won’t allow it and they feel unable to challenge him without dire consequences. Quite a lot of the people in this book are unhappy and many are unfulfilled.

The second factor determining the life of the family members is tradition and religion. This especially applies to how women are treated and how they are allowed to live their lives – there is a terrible incident near the beginning of the book where men make a decision on what should happen to a young women who has transgressed and the older women are complicit in what then happens. Although the situation of women in Afghanistan is not unknown in the West this book is powerful in conveying what that actually means for females because it is written about real people.

This is not an uplifting book, although it is amusing in places. It is a powerful tale of how tradition, religion and power imbalances can blight the lives of so many and of the price that is paid for respectability and acceptance. There are no villains here, although Sultan is not a man I would like to know, but people trying to live the best lives they can within many limitations. I am glad that I read it.

I have decided not to keep my copy, as I can’t keep all the books I read, so it is off back to Oxfam to find a new home.