Bookseller of Kabul

While my thoughts towards Bookseller are bound to change as I progress further into the work, I believe I have a pretty good sense of what the rest of the work will be like. Like my fellow readers, I find myself constantly drawing parallels between Bookseller and A Thousand Splendid Suns. Whereas ATSS was a total pity story, carefully calculated to tug at the reader's heart strings through the watered-down caricatures of real life "characters", Bookseller journeys into an ocean of moral ambiguity. Seierstad employs a distant, detached, matter-of-fact voice in her recounting of the Bookseller's story, not surprising given her history as a journalist. Her style emphasizes the total lack of moral judgement that each character receives in the book, and affirms the idea that in reality, there is no black or white, good or bad, but rather, varying shades of grey. Seierstad makes her point most apparant through the character of the Sultan, a rare walking paradox in the realm of literature but no doubt all-too-common in every-day life, especially in Afghanistan. Seierstad's totally-non-judgemental-whatsoever voice is meant to tell us, the reader, that we too are not meant to pass judgement on the going-ons of her work, but to simply accept the work as an exploration of a completely alien society.

No character in Bookseller represents the classical antagonist or protagonist that we all yearn for; rather, i believe there are two broad "characters" in the novel: society, and the actual person-characters. We are not passing judgement on either of these "characters", merely exploring the affects a seemingly-cruel society has on its constituents. Seirstad's "asides" giving us broader info re: Afghani society at large especially emphasizes this point. For example, our first instinct is to hate Jamila's family for murdering their own kin and blood. Yet, Seirstad then, in her total calm matter-of-fact detached way, informs us that Afghan society views love as a sin, honor as the supreme ranking of one's worth, and Jamila's action as a veritble crime, and thus, in a society where everyone is ingrained to think in such a way since birth, is there truly any other logical option but for Jamila's family to kill her? It seems incredibly cruel to us, but that is why Seirstad wrote her work, to bring us some grain of understanding of such a totally alien society.

It is this very lack of antagonist that perhaps angers or puts off so many of my fellow classmates. As human beings, it is our natural desire to despie any perceived evil, to believe that there is some source of this evil that can easily be blamed away. Seirstad, with her lack-of-judgement, has presented us with a society in which there is no one person to blame for the perceieved-evil, no source for this seemed depravity which we believe has enveloped the country, and I believe it angers us as readers that there is no easily expendable source, but rather that the malevolence just is, floating in the air.

....this is what happens when you stay up the whole weekend working on your junior thesis and then write a blog post at 2 in the morning