Eh

Not to give away the ending to anyone who hasn't read it, but DON'T get excited! I really liked the book in the beginning, I love cultural and travel books, and I thought the author did a really good job of presenting the story objectively. Without any further explanation, I was infuriated and or sympathetic to the actions of the characters. I appreciated the anecdotal style of the plot, but I feel that the stories lacked transitions, and sometimes the purpose for the stories is lost. Not to mention, the ending (or lack thereof)! Coming before the age of Kite Runner and A Thousands Splendid Suns, the book is an impressive breakthrough to Middle Eastern novels, but having read the others, I was slightly disappointing.

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

The Bookseller of Kabul

So far, I like the book. I think it does a good job establishing certain themes within the novel and it is going to develop them further through the use of rhetorical devices. One of the themes I noted was the theme of freedom and democracy. Especially when it comes to gender roles, this theme plays an important role in the novel. For instance, polygamy and arranged marriages appear as aspects of this theme. Another theme I noticed is culture, between the comparisons between culture in Afghanistan throughout different time periods and the comparisons between Afghani culture and western culture, this is a prominent theme. The biggest theme in the book is freedom of knowledge and censorship. This plays the largest theme in the most basic plot of the book, but it also appears in smaller scenarios. I think, the rhetorical devices in the book may reflect back on this theme, in an attempt by the author to further the most basic idea of the novel.

Thoughts on The Bookseller of Kabul (Thus Far)

I'm about a 100 pages into Bookseller, and my feelings on it are mixed to say the least. It's certainly not a bad book: the prose is concise and effective, and the subject matter is very important, yet nothing in the book is truly engaging me yet. It's all very episodic in nature, which can be successful when well implemented, but is keeping me distant here. Additionally, in thinking about the book I keep coming back to the aforementioned prose. A Thousand Splendid Suns, a book very similar in both content and tone, was shamelessly emotionally manipulative, to the extent that I kept waiting for Rasheed to start sporting a pencil thin mustache to compliment his almost cartoon-like level of villainy. In Bookseller, the sparse nature of the writing seems to make the book more objective, but in hindsight it manipulates the reader in a different way. The basic, punchy sentences employed by Seierstad seem to offer unwritten commentary in the absence of anything explicit. For instance, on page 36, when the murder of the daughter is detailed, the chapter concluded with the single line, "Then they returned to the mother." (This of course refers to the boys who committed the crime in question.) The creepy matter-of-fact nature of that last line may seem to just tell the facts, but the sparseness of it does such a good job of illustrating the horror and perversity of the situation that in retrospect it's pretty manipulative. So those are my feelings on Bookseller as of now. Nothing in the book has really grabbed me yet, and ever since I recognized the subtly manipulative tone of the writing it's frustrated me, but Bookseller is certainly respectable in that it's well executed for what it is.

Bookseller of Kabul

I'm a solid 100 pages into Bookseller of Kabul as of the writing of this post (hampered, clearly, by the frenetic rush until the junior thesis is due), and I have to say that the one thing that's keeping me from truly embracing this book is the subject matter itself. We read A Thousand Splendid Suns earlier this same year, and all I feel I'm doing right now is reading a slower, less organized, less exciting version of that same book. One of the things I definitely noticed and disliked when I read A Thousand Splendid Suns was the general over-the-top qualities. Even though the fictional story was, in fact, not entirely dissimilar to real experiences for many, many Afghan women, the way it was told and the fact that it was, in fact, a work of fiction, made it hard for me to be totally invested in the lives of the women in the story. There was no male character with whom I could relate, and the end result was something I did not entirely enjoy. That said, I'm nonetheless finding myself continually intrigued by Bookseller of Kabul. I think the fact that the story is told from a variety of points of view other than the "oppressed woman" archetype lends the book more credibility, in my eyes. In fact, through the eyes and thoughts of a male character who sees the oppression of women in his country as a normal and justified activity, I am more upset by the practice than I had been previously. Additionally, I like the fact that the story is told in a series of short chapters and experiences that only loosely relate to each other. This way, I feel I can focus more on soaking up and internalizing the atmosphere and characters themselves, instead of a more direct plot that would have only resulted in a certain detachment that Bookseller of Kabul is able to avoid by being the product of a foreign journalist's own experiences.

_____seller of Kabul

Has anyone else noticed the irony of the back cover's synopsis?

"This mesmerizing portrait of a proud man who, through three decades and successive repressive regimes, heroically braved persecution..."

To me, at least, that statement seems incongruous with Seierstad's tone regarding gender equality. Although she does describe Sultan's love of books in a voice that recognizes a fellow lover of literature in Khan, she is not entirely objective towards him throughout the rest of the book.

She is selective with the emotions she chooses the characters to express.

Those at a disadvantage, such as Leila and Aimal, have the sympathy vote (Seierstad has that entire speech about Leila and dust, and Aimal and his bleeding heart)

Mansur and Eqbal are the rude, callous, rebellious teenagers that don't exactly endear themselves to the reader. Sultan's arrogance, avarice and selfishness don't win him any friends either.

These are generalizations, and there are facets to each character that can sometimes be contradictory to my depictions of them, but these are my general impressions - I'd love to hear someone else's thoughts, it would make for a very interesting discussion.

Has anyone else noticed how the landscapes/surroundings of the characters, in all different parts of the book, reflect their natures and personalities, and the Afghan culture as a whole? Seierstad's descriptions are sometimes so alien to our own personal perceptive ability that she seems to create a parallel world using verisimilitude - it is the small things she mentions that allow us to engage with the story: Aimal's Snickers and Bounty Bars makes the empty, bombed-out pool and tumbledown hotel a bit less remote.

Ending on a rhetorical note, Seierstad's exceptional use of detail is both an attempt to establish ethos and a narrative device: she is both trying to establish her authority on the subject as a witness to Afghani life, and she is trying to paint a portrait, and so she describes people, places and events in excruciating detail - she writes down all of the components of the wedding feast and their amount, in pounds.

She makes a bid to appeal to the reader's sympathy by emphasizing the hopelessness in Leila's case - while it may not be intentional (since it happened), she spends a good chunk of time expounding on Leila's psychological state regarding the marriage proposal and her situation at home, building up the suspense so that the 'let-down' has a greater emotional impact on the reader.

Fill in the blank at the top of the post if you wish to - what do you think is being sold to us, the reader? What is Seierstad trying to make us buy (into)?

Bookseller of Kabul

For me, one of the most interesting things about Bookseller is the character of Sultan. He's a very complicated person: though you think of him as liberal in that he continues printing and selling books under the Taliban rule, his family life is still very conservative. He's an odd mixture of modern ideas and traditional muslim values, and that makes his character much more rounded and his story more interesting. One of the things I disliked about A Thousand Splendid Suns was that, at times, the antagonists could seem two dimensional; they were more or less portrayed as evil oppressors and nothing more. The fact that Sultan's first wife resents him, but at the same time loves him, makes me as a reader much more emotionally invested in their interactions, and the different sides of Sultan's beliefs makes him as a character much more thought-provoking. His character really challenges the assumption that in the Middle East there exists only the radical extremists and the oppressed liberals; he is an intriguing mixture of both.