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georgereads982 's review for:
The Bookseller of Kabul
by Åsne Seierstad
I was looking forward to reading this as I don't know much about Afghanistan or the daily lives of people who live there and I do think it started out strong but somewhere along the way it lost itself. The jumping between family stories and information dumps about the history of Afghanistan was quite jarring, part of me wishes that the personal stories and the history lessons were separated.
It also became clear quite early on that the author took a lot of liberties when retelling people's thoughts and feelings, I understand that when writing about experiences that are not your own there does have to be some liberties taken, but there was almost too much detail when telling the reader things that the author simply would not know. I also felt that there was an almost constant undertone of judgement within the authors writing, to the point where certain parts were genuinely uncomfortable to read - not because of the content but because I could feel the authors opinions and judgements through her words. Which, for me, feels wrong. I think if you are to write a story about a culture that is not your own, you should be as judgement free as possible, especially when discussing such sensitive topics.
There were certain parts of the book that felt very invasive to me. Considering how important modesty and dignity is to Islam, there were multiple instances where the author described the women of the family in compromising positions, especially the older women, which felt incredibly disrespectful to me. Especially because, for the most part these passages contributed nothing to the story. For example, there was a long passage about how awful all the women smell, and then detailed descriptions of them bathing, only to then discuss how quickly the stink comes back. These particular details felt completely unnecessary and overly judgmental to me. There were also multiple mentions of how fat a lot of the women are - another disrespectful and unnecessary detail.
Also, something that I found quite interesting and did not find out until after finishing the book: the actual bookseller's family sued the author after publication for defamation. He himself wrote a book in response to the author's book and discussed how wrong her demonstration of Afghan life is.
It also became clear quite early on that the author took a lot of liberties when retelling people's thoughts and feelings, I understand that when writing about experiences that are not your own there does have to be some liberties taken, but there was almost too much detail when telling the reader things that the author simply would not know. I also felt that there was an almost constant undertone of judgement within the authors writing, to the point where certain parts were genuinely uncomfortable to read - not because of the content but because I could feel the authors opinions and judgements through her words. Which, for me, feels wrong. I think if you are to write a story about a culture that is not your own, you should be as judgement free as possible, especially when discussing such sensitive topics.
There were certain parts of the book that felt very invasive to me. Considering how important modesty and dignity is to Islam, there were multiple instances where the author described the women of the family in compromising positions, especially the older women, which felt incredibly disrespectful to me. Especially because, for the most part these passages contributed nothing to the story. For example, there was a long passage about how awful all the women smell, and then detailed descriptions of them bathing, only to then discuss how quickly the stink comes back. These particular details felt completely unnecessary and overly judgmental to me. There were also multiple mentions of how fat a lot of the women are - another disrespectful and unnecessary detail.
Also, something that I found quite interesting and did not find out until after finishing the book: the actual bookseller's family sued the author after publication for defamation. He himself wrote a book in response to the author's book and discussed how wrong her demonstration of Afghan life is.