ACCUSATIONS THAT the author of the best-selling novel The Bookseller of Kabulinvaded the privacy of the subject family have been put to rest by a Norwegian court.
The appeal court overturned a previous ruling and cleared the author, Asne Seierstad, and her publisher, Cappelen Damm, of invading the privacy of the family she lived with and wrote about, and concluded that the facts of the book were accurate.
Seierstad, a Norwegian freelance journalist who spent months living with Afghan bookseller Shah Muhammad Rais and his two wives, said after the verdict that she was relieved the eight-year legal battle was over.
“The judgment means a lot. As a journalist, being accused of invading someone’s privacy, there is always a risk that it will stick to your name,” she said. “If my name had not been cleared, it would have been difficult, perhaps impossible, to continue as a journalist.”
Suraia Rais, the second wife of the real-life bookseller, whom he married, according to the book, when she was 16, filed the complaint against Seierstad. In a previous hearing, the Oslo district court ruled that Seierstad had invaded Ms Rais’s privacy, but Norway’s supreme court has cleared the author of any wrongdoing.
Seierstad’s lawyer, Anne Gaustad, said the court had concluded “the family was well aware of the nature of the book project”, adding that Seierstad was found “not to have acted negligently, and the content of the book was essentially deemed true”.
Seierstad said the legal process that had required her to defend “every single part” of the book had been time-consuming. “It makes you reflect on how careful you have to be as a journalist,” she said. “The judge ruled that I was not uncareful. Now, if anything, I am overly careful.”
Seierstad met Mr Rais after entering Kabul with the Afghan soldiers of the Northern Alliance two weeks after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. She got to know the bookseller, who sold books previously banned by the Taliban, at the InterContinental Hotel. Changing his name to Sultan Khan in the book, she painted a picture of a local hero who risked his life to continue working in the face of huge adversity and danger, but also of a ruthless patriarch who virtually enslaved his wives and children.
Following publication, Mr Rais flew to Norway, hired a lawyer and began a media campaign to repudiate Seierstad’s version of events. He accused her of treachery and of humiliating him, his family and Afghanistan as a nation.
Seierstad said she was no longer in touch with Mr Rais or his family, but had no regrets about the book. “I never expected anything like this. There is nothing I would change – to change it I would have had to write a totally different book.” The book had justified itself, she added.
“It is now translated into 42 languages, it is read across the world, it is on university reading lists – it has proved itself. The book came after the fall of the Taliban, it says something about Afghan family life. Those kind of stories – what happens behind the scenes on a TV screen – are important.”
– (Guardian service)