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After
September 11, 2001
, Asne Seierstad spent six
weeks in rural parts of
Afghanistan
with the commandos of the
Northern Alliance
, traveling on the back of
trucks and in military vehicles, and sleeping on stone floors
and in mud huts. She rode into
Kabul
with the
Northern Alliance
in November 2001. She found a
great bookstore, a place owned by an elegant, gray-haired,
Afghan man who was well-educated and loved to talk about
politics and writing. After weeks spent in the war-torn
countryside, "among gunpowder and rubble, where
conversations centered on the tactics of war and military
advance," she said, "it was refreshing to leaf
through books and talk about literature and history." So
she stopped by that bookshop often to peruse the books and to
chat with the owner, a man so passionate about books that he'd
hid them from police to prevent them from being burned during
different sieges — and had gone to prison.
The
bookstore owner invited her to a meal with his family. She
said, "The atmosphere was unrestrained, a huge contrast
to the simple meals with the commandos in the mountains. ...
When I left I said to myself this is
Afghanistan
. How interesting it would be
to write a book about this family." She visited him the
next day to tell him about her idea of writing a book about
his family. She asked if she could live with him and his
family, and follow them around, in order to write this book.
He agreed, and she moved in with his extended family in
February 2002. She stayed for three months.
The
book she wrote about his family, The Bookseller of Kabul, was a huge success. The New York Times called it "the most intimate description of
an Afghan household ever produced by a Western
journalist." It became an international best-seller,
translated into 30 languages, the subject of rave reviews and
a book club favorite.
But
the thinly disguised bookseller of
Kabul
, Shah Mohammed Rais —
"Sultan Khan" in the book — was not happy about
the way he had been portrayed, and flew to
Norway
to launch his own publicity
campaign. He wrote his own book, called Once
Upon a Time There Was a Bookseller in Kabul (2007). It's
about how two Norwegian trolls visit
Afghanistan
with preconceived notions, and
then abuse his family's hospitality in order to frame a
colorful, detail-oriented portrait to fit those preconceived
notions.
-- The Writer’s Almanac
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