Ambitious...absorbing ... Remarkable ... The details are fascinating ... Seierstad’s short, punchy sentences, ably translated by Seán Kinsella, draw readers into the narrative.
A valuable addition to the canon of literature on the country ... A sprawling epic focused largely on three figures whose lives Seierstad recounts with vivid granularity ... As well written and immersive as The Afghans is, I also began to wonder about Seierstad’s reporting. The best narratives rely on scores of interviews and documents, observations of subjects for months or years, and, given the fallibility of individual memory, a willingness to challenge people’s recollections to be able to construct the most truthful possible version ... Afghanistan is a country with a rich oral tradition, where exaggeration is practically an art form ... Intimate portraits of her subjects remain a hallmark of her work, with the effect that the very trait that makes The Afghans so appealing is also what makes it troubling to a reader who has lived among, and reported on, the people she is writing about.
Considered ... The diversity of the interviewees provides a more nuanced portrait, in which women are not exclusively portrayed as victims ... There is much lovely writing in this book, facilitated by Seierstad’s empathy with and access to Afghan women, who are severely oppressed by a combination of tradition, ignorance and violence. However, the structure of three central characters spawns a swamp of many offshoots that is, at times, hard to follow ... Sadly, the author’s attempts to provide historical context felt stale, on the one hand, and excessive on the other.
Remarkable ... Seierstad chronicles years of war and the rise and resurgence of the Taliban through the intimate, affecting portraits of three lives lived in history’s shadow.
