The Bookseller of Kabul by A Seierstad is not a huge work either in size or literary stature. It is however a written work that was worth putting into the public domain for its perspective on a particular Afghani family. It brings insights into social and cultural orders. The manner in which the various political and religious influences have been mirrored into one family's dynamics lead the reader to easily conclude that this must be a process being repeated throughout that immediate society.
The reader is required to cut themselves off from their own learned morals and norms, else it would be difficult to compare and contrast and comment rationally on what is described in this book.
The writer illustrates the subjugation of women who have no personal will over the way they are used as commodities, it is a system the older generations of women collude with when, as 'senior family members' they obtain a perverse power through it, that helps to perpetuate the process.
Male supremacy and hypocrisy is highlighted. Convenient rule and convention breaking can be tolerated if, for example, the price is right to suit the lisciviousness of the suitor. There are clearly different rules of engagement and punishment for men, with women inevitably suffering the harsher outcomes. Men sit in comfortable judgement on what they have devised as controls to bind and imprison the existence of their girls and their women. These same controls protect the supremacy of the men's existence.
Domestic despotism sharply divides the men in this family. Knowledge is power and this lesson has been well learned by the senior male. Could it be that this is a way of protecting the younger male members of the family from the vagaries of the political regimes they have lived under and those that might return? I question that query. I feel from my understanding of events that despotism reigns under the guise of desired family cohesion.
The book has been translated into many languages. This is a translation that at times, I felt was stilted. There were segments of the book that I skimmed as they were unnecessarily repetitive and did not flow; the language did not live. Other sections were a delight and magnetising. Could some of these sections have reflected the writer's intimate first hand knowledge and narration, rather than a reporting of events that would of necessity have had to be written up as reportage because of their content and location?
