There is not much noticeable in Langezwaag that the bitter poverty that led to hunger stands among peat workers around the pre-radical century. The village where the legendary children’s book writer Hotze de Roos (sixty parts De Kameleon!) Saw the light of day in 1909, there is quiet and prosperous. It was built: not on a new ship for the twins Sietse and Hielke Klinkhamer, but on the energy -efficient single -family homes (energy label A +++) in the brand new Hotze de Roosstrjitte.
Two turns to the south offers a front gardener a glance at a rich reading. That The bookseller of Kabul Coming from possession of a true enthusiast, according to the ex Libris, which has been danced in the third page in relief. There is a lot to tell about this before you have read it. The Norwegian journalist Åsne Seierstad spent three months in the house of a bookseller who had again obtained some freedom of action after the fall of the Taliban. It resulted in a bestseller, who was partly about the man’s professional life and all the more about the unfortunate lives of the women in his family. The bookseller – Soeltan Kahn is called in the book – stated that the book made life impossible for him in Afghanistan, wrote a counter book (Once Upon A Time There Was A Bookseller In Kabul), and his second wife made a process against Seierstad. A Norwegian court certain Ultimately in 2011 that Seierstad had not unlawfully violated the privacy of the family.
So far the book that you could write about this book. This 2003 edition – the translation is by Diederik Grit – starts with the pleasant visits of the Norwegian journalist at the Kahn store, who told how each new regime burned his books: the Communists, the Mojahedien, the Taliban. Talking to him was a liberation for her, after weeks of dealing with steering soldiers in the north of the country.
She is three months embedded In the Kahn family. That this does not yield a cheerful story is already apparent in the first chapter, in which Seierstad describes how Soeltan Kahn goes in search of a second woman. He was married to Sjarifa for sixteen years and now had his eye on the sixteen -year -old Sonja. Against the will of the women in his family, he opened the negotiations with Sonja’s family – who ultimately yields to the supply of the well -to -do agent. She writes about Sonja herself: “She knew she didn’t want the man, but she also knew that she had to arrange herself to her parents’ wishes […] The money that her parents received would help her brothers to buy a good woman. ” About Soeltan’s first woman: “Sjarifa cried twenty days in a row.”
From very nearby she tells the family stories, about one of the first weddings in Kabul after the departure of the Taliban. This is accompanied by many festivities and joy, but you always come across the inhuman aspects of the social system: “A wedding is like a small death […] A daughter has lost, sold or given away. ” That is so sharp, because the bride can no longer visit her ‘own’ family, for this, as she had to arrange the marriage to another in the first part of her life.
Frits Abrahams is on vacation.