The real Bookseller of Kabul says he, and his country, are misunderstood

Shah Muhammad Rais is famous, but 'does not have a happy life'.

THERE'S one bookstore where you'll never, ever find a copy of The Bookseller of Kabul. That would be the Bookseller's.

Surviving: Shah Muhammad Rais, the subject of the novel The Bookseller of Kabul, says the author depicted him unfairly.Credit: AP

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 home.

The author is Asne Seierstad, a 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 Mr Rais and his family to document their domestic life as the country and its people emerged from 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 favourite that was translated into more than 30 languages.

Mr Rais says 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.

But Mr Rais has a literary riposte: a slim English-language volume that tells his side of the story. Stacks of the book, titled Once Upon a Time There Was a Bookseller in Kabul, are displayed front and centre in his downtown bookshop, which is crammed to the rafters with tomes on Sufi poetry and Mughal architecture.

"It is the only way I have to reply to all the things she said about me," says Mr Rais, a soft-spoken, portly man who was nursing a toothache.

Seierstad has long since moved on. After leaving Afghanistan, she covered the war in Iraq and wrote another memoir, A Hundred and One Days: A Baghdad Journal. Although critically well received, it did not approach the blockbuster status of The Bookseller of Kabul.

Mr Rais, too, has embarked on a new chapter. His family is scattered now, his first wife and three children in Canada, the second wife and two other children in Oslo. Two grown sons help Rais run the business. "It's not a happy life," he says. Although his demeanour is outwardly calm, the bitterness Mr Rais feels towards Seierstad is echoed by his disillusionment with what he sees as scant progress in Afghanistan since the US-led invasion that toppled the Taliban. After years of hardship that included jail, beatings and death threats during the Taliban era, the bookseller believes that the Western powers have squandered a chance to rebuild Afghan society.

"It's like when the computer freezes up," he says. "There is nothing to do now but reboot."

A suicide bombing nearby had shaken the building a few days earlier, but by Afghan standards, the bookshop appeared to be flourishing. Big price tags on high-end books in English, aimed mainly at a foreign audience, help subsidise schoolbooks for hundreds of students, Mr Rais says.

Customers can order books on a website, which has been running for more than a year.

Mr Rais acknowledges that The Bookseller brought him a measure of fame he would otherwise have never achieved. People who have not read the book — and occasionally, some who have — will turn up with a copy for him to autograph. He always refuses.

"What happened was that she came to this country with a picture already in her mind, and put me and my family in the frame," he says of Seierstad.

"It's like so much else that has happened here in Afghanistan. People from outside come here and think they understand things. But they don't."

AP