The Bookseller of Kabul by Asne Seierstad

Culture of Shame: Excerpts from a review by Matthew Leeming at The Spectator.co.uk, book available from Amazon.com:

This is one of the most interesting and original books on Afghanistan I have read. Asne Seierstad lived for three months as a member of an Afghan family with the access of a fly-on-the-wall documentary- maker. The book is a family saga, a catalogue of births and marriages like Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks. It is written like a novel by an omniscient narrator who can see inside her characters’ heads. Their contents are so grotesque that there is no need for her to comment.

Seierstad is a formidable writer. She confines herself to describing what she sees, like a camera, and the detail is always completely convincing: naked in the hammam she notices the stretch marks on the bodies of girls who have had babies too young. She knows the way in which men can judge the attractiveness of a woman, despite the burqa, by looking at her hands and the way she walks.

She describes a society that systematically oppresses women and denies their desires. Love at first sight happens because there are no opportunities for boys and girls to meet, flirt and earth the electrical charge of adolescent sexuality. It is the world of Romeo and Juliet, where female love often issues in suicide. ”

Of the 16 billion people who have been born since homo became sapiens, I doubt if more than 500 million have lived in a world free of belief in magical causation or the threat of arbitrary imprisonment and death at the hands of religious police for thought-crimes. Afghanistan is a good place to ponder one’s good fortune in being born in the modern West and not in a culture where malaria is treated by yelling, or the best cuts of meat are reserved for the dead, or it is believed that the motions of the stars are controlled from the liver of a rogue elephant, or divine honours paid to shallow depressions in the ground. We have the Enlightenment to thank for this, the moment when the West achieved intellectual maturity (or rediscovered that of the classical world) and reduced religion to a matter of opinion and turned the mullahs into comic turns like Rowan Williams. The Orientalist witch-smellers and postmodernists at Oxford have the Enlightenment in their sights. It is a sobering thought that whole cultures and educated elites can commit intellectual suicide.