Misrepresentation of Afghans in Seierstad’s The Bookseller of Kabul

Abstract

After living for three months with the Kabul bookseller Sultan Khan in the spring of 2002, Norwegian journalist Seierstadpenned this astounding portrait of a nation recovering from war, undergoing political flux and mired in misogyny and poverty. As a Westerner, she has the privilege of traveling between the worlds of men and women, and though the book is ostensibly a portrait of Khan, its real strength is the intimacy and brutal honesty with which it portrays the lives of Afghani living under fundamentalist Islam. Seierstad also expertly outlines Sultan's fight to preserve whatever he can of the literary life of the capital during its numerous decades of warfare.