KABUL, AFGHANISTAN — There's one bookstore in the world where you'll never, ever find a copy of "The Bookseller of Kabul."
That would be the Bookseller's. The epic literary feud that erupted with the book's publication more than five years ago still endures -- at least from the perspective of Shah Muhammad Rais, who hated his depiction as Sultan Khan, a liberal intellectual in public but a tyrant in his own home.
The author is Asne Seierstad, a young Norwegian journalist who had come to Afghanistan in late 2001 to cover the fall of the Taliban government. On arriving here in the capital, she encountered Rais, the erudite, English-speaking proprietor of the battered city's best bookshop, which then had a branch in a half-ruined hotel where many journalists stayed.
Seierstad asked if she could live for a time with Rais and his family to document their domestic life as the country and its people emerged from five years of harsh Taliban rule. Without hesitation, he agreed.
The result: a memorable portrait of a man who had fought for freedom of expression in Afghanistan but oppressed and repressed the women of his own family. "The Bookseller" became a runaway bestseller, a book club favorite that was translated into more than 30 languages.
Rais says that Seierstad willfully misinterpreted almost everything she witnessed, failing to take into account deep-seated social customs and the traditional roles of men and women in Afghan society. Seierstad, for her part, has said in interviews over the years that she stands by everything she wrote, and that she could not have ignored the intimate cruelties that transpired before her eyes.
Her book opens with a searing account of the suffering of the bookseller's wife of 16 years when he brings home a second bride, a comely teenager: "Sharifa cried for 20 days. 'What have I done? Why are you dissatisfied with me?' . . . Sultan told her to pull herself together."
As "The Bookseller" became an international sensation, Rais -- a figure readily recognizable in Kabul, despite the name change in the book -- became increasingly furious. He prowled the city's bookstalls, buying and destroying any copy he could find. He pursued Seierstad to her homeland, threatening legal action and demanding retractions and apologies.
The vehemence of his accusations so unsettled the author, now in her late 30s, that she agreed to meet him only with her own father present, on the theory that he would demonstrate more respect for a man older than himself than he would for her alone.
