The Bookseller of Kabul

This is a set of stories by Asne Seierstad, a journalist who was in Afghanistan in 2002. She lived with a middle-class family for four months, and recorded their stories. It's a slim volume, and it moves from character to character, but it's very interesting. For me, it's a mix of Iraqi and Bangladeshi cultures, with an added strictness.

The disadvantage of stories like this, focusing on how hard other people's lives are, how depressing it is for women and for others who aren't in power, is that it makes you justify any intervention to change it. I wonder whether if someone tracked a western family for four months they'd also want to bomb it into the ground as a rigid and meaningless way of life. There is no sense of joy about the lives in this story, which is perhaps because four months is a short period of time, perhaps because the Scandinavian and Afghani lifestyles are so foreign that the writer can't appreciate what the Afghans do enjoy.

There's some great moments, though, including some women's poetry about forbidden love, the tenacity of the bookseller who lives across half a dozen different regimes, descriptions of a day at the hammam. It's very readable, and really interesting, even if it's also really depressing at the same time.