Lost & Misrepresented Voices of Afghanistan Chapter 1 Page 17

extreme harshness that Rushdie faced but one can sympathise and empathise with her experience and plight when she was merely trying to tell the truth. Steensen in The Return of the “Humble I”:

The Bookseller of Kabul and Contemporary Norwegian Literary Journalism states that: Asne Seierstad’s The Bookseller of Kabul prompted controversy in Norway, a controversy that influences the practice of literary journalism in that country to this day. (Steensen, 2013, p.61).

The novel indeed provoked the start of a completely new tale altogether. The novel allowed for the voices of the true Afghan family to be heard. Seierstad had provided the male head of the family with a pseudonym in order to provide him and his family with privacy however the: Bookseller himself, Shah Mohammed Rais….raised