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'It is worse now': The Bookseller of Kabul author Åsne Seierstad on returning to Afghanistan 20 years on
https://www.theguardian.com/books/article/2024/may/26/asne-seierstad-bookseller-of-kabul-the-afghans-interview-authorThe Observer
Interview
‘It is worse now’: The Bookseller of Kabul author Åsne Seierstad on returning to Afghanistan 20 years on
The Norwegian writer on meeting the Taliban, her fears for girls’ education, and the legal battle that ensued after the publication of her bestselling book
Tim Adams
Sun 26 May 2024 06.00 EDT
The author Åsne Seierstad’s cool, shaded garden, within walking distance from the centre of Oslo, seems a very long way from Afghanistan and the Taliban. But sitting there, drinking tea, she brings a vivid sense of that other dustier, more chaotic world alive.
That relationship began for Seierstad two weeks after 9/11, when, as a freelance foreign correspondent, she embedded herself with the Northern Alliance of forces that, with western support, would sweep the Islamic fundamentalist regime from power. Twenty years later, she has been among the few journalists to go back after the desperate airlift that ended US and British support for democratic government and to spend time bearing witness to the Taliban’s chilling return to power.
Her history is bookended by two intimate reports of the lives of families living through those decades of conflict and fear. The first, The Bookseller of Kabul, became a bestseller around the world. That book was more than just a literary sensation, however. It became – after the bookseller on whom the book was based sued Seierstad in Norway for defamation and invasion of privacy – a decade-long test case for all sorts of things: not least of the rights of writers to use other people’s lives as material. Her second book, The Afghans, to be published this month, is a kind of sequel (“More a stepbrother or a cousin,” she says) to that first book. Through three separate, intimate portraits, it offers a window on the present moment in Kabul, a clear-eyed and sometimes heartbreaking account of a city that has lately been pushed from the front pages, but remains a defining fault line in the world.
The thread between the two books is Seierstad’s determination to have the reader see that recent history, in particular, through the eyes of women in Kabul. Her legal problems with the bookseller were rooted in that determination. Shah Muhammad Rais (called Sultan Khan in the book) welcomed Seierstad into his family and his home for many months in 2002 after agreeing to her idea of a book. No doubt he believed the story would tell the world of his undoubted heroism in keeping open for almost 30 years a wide-ranging bookshop at the heart of one of the world’s most devastated cities, despite imprisonment and censorship and sprees of book-burning by communist and Taliban forces.
[...]
Interview
‘It is worse now’: The Bookseller of Kabul author Åsne Seierstad on returning to Afghanistan 20 years on
The Norwegian writer on meeting the Taliban, her fears for girls’ education, and the legal battle that ensued after the publication of her bestselling book
Tim Adams
Sun 26 May 2024 06.00 EDT
The author Åsne Seierstad’s cool, shaded garden, within walking distance from the centre of Oslo, seems a very long way from Afghanistan and the Taliban. But sitting there, drinking tea, she brings a vivid sense of that other dustier, more chaotic world alive.
That relationship began for Seierstad two weeks after 9/11, when, as a freelance foreign correspondent, she embedded herself with the Northern Alliance of forces that, with western support, would sweep the Islamic fundamentalist regime from power. Twenty years later, she has been among the few journalists to go back after the desperate airlift that ended US and British support for democratic government and to spend time bearing witness to the Taliban’s chilling return to power.
Her history is bookended by two intimate reports of the lives of families living through those decades of conflict and fear. The first, The Bookseller of Kabul, became a bestseller around the world. That book was more than just a literary sensation, however. It became – after the bookseller on whom the book was based sued Seierstad in Norway for defamation and invasion of privacy – a decade-long test case for all sorts of things: not least of the rights of writers to use other people’s lives as material. Her second book, The Afghans, to be published this month, is a kind of sequel (“More a stepbrother or a cousin,” she says) to that first book. Through three separate, intimate portraits, it offers a window on the present moment in Kabul, a clear-eyed and sometimes heartbreaking account of a city that has lately been pushed from the front pages, but remains a defining fault line in the world.
The thread between the two books is Seierstad’s determination to have the reader see that recent history, in particular, through the eyes of women in Kabul. Her legal problems with the bookseller were rooted in that determination. Shah Muhammad Rais (called Sultan Khan in the book) welcomed Seierstad into his family and his home for many months in 2002 after agreeing to her idea of a book. No doubt he believed the story would tell the world of his undoubted heroism in keeping open for almost 30 years a wide-ranging bookshop at the heart of one of the world’s most devastated cities, despite imprisonment and censorship and sprees of book-burning by communist and Taliban forces.
[...]
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