With The Bookseller of Kabul, Norwegian war correspondent Åsne Seierstad brought the realities of Afghanistan into cosy western livingrooms. Now she hopes to do the same with Chechnya, writes Catherine Cleary
SHE TURNED a proud Afghan businessman into a character discussed in book clubs round the world. Now Åsne Seierstad is hoping to do the same for a middle-aged Chechen woman and two of the damaged children in her care.
The Norwegian author of The Bookseller of Kabul sits on a couch in a Dublin hotel sharing her "secrets" with a calm level gaze and expressive hands. Her long unadorned fingers dance as she describes her search for the small intimate truths of war.
After four books and nearly 20 years on the road, Seierstad is happy to pass on the mantle to others, explaining the tricks of her trade so that she can step back from the lonely labour of it all. She has lived other people's lives in order to write her books, she says. Trying to burrow behind the eyes of an angry Chechen boy and his brutalised sister has left her exhausted and ready to live her own life for a while.
The idea for her latest book, The Angel of Grozny, took shape in Ohio three years ago as she walked home from a screening of a film about Chechnya and an exhibition of still photographs from the region by Heidi Bradner. "I was just thinking, I have to do something about it. I have to write about it, just tell the world what's happening in Chechnya."
At its heart is the angel, a woman she calls Hadijat, who lost her unborn child in a car accident and started a home to care for the street children of Grozny in the hellish aftermath of the war with Russia.
The book opens like a novel, with Timur, an 11-year-old boy, standing over the corpse of a dog he has just bludgeoned to death on the banks of a river. Later, we meet Liana, his older sister, who was raped daily by an uncle. She is unable to learn to read because her mind has curled in on itself, protecting her by only learning to forget.
Until Seierstad's return to Chechnya, 10 years after she first covered the conflict, it had been her nose for a story that led her to war zones. The fearless and determined second daughter of two Norwegian writers, she has been criticised for judging other cultures through her privileged western eyes. The oppression of women makes her angry, she says, and while she is older and might now have left out a few of the details in The Bookseller of Kabul, she is unrepentant about the storm that blew up around it.
The sense of fairness comes from her earliest childhood. Her mother wrote a children's book when Seierstad was a toddler. The plot revolved around young girls fighting to throw down their knitting and do what the boys were doing. It became a huge hit in Norway in the 1970s and was turned into a film and TV series. Her father is a political scientist, and her parents have always been her first and most critical readers.
Seierstad had five languages under her belt before the age of 23 and was in Moscow studying political science in 1995 when the Chechen war started. She flew on a troop plane into Grozny, a city bristling with snipers, meeting grey-faced journalists leaving in terror on her way in. She had neither a map nor a plan but was determined not to cover this war from the television screen in her Moscow basement flat.
The book relates her war adventure in those early days when she crawled on her stomach to dodge bullets and avoided a walk to the woods with a drunk Russian soldier by screaming and crying and flagging down a passing tank.
Did she experience the adrenaline rush of the war reporter and get hooked?
"I had a strong feeling that this was where people live between life and death and the edge, that this is real life and there were stronger
colours and every step you take can be decisive. Here," she says gesturing to the comfortable surroundings, "you can go through the day and nothing matters."
It was in 2003 that she became famous for her account of life inside the home of an Afghan bookseller, which became a worldwide bestseller. The bookseller was livid. Mohammed Shah Rais came to the West threatening libel actions and giving interviews attacking Seierstad. He believed she would paint him as a liberal hero saving Afghan culture from the Taliban. Instead she turned her gaze to the women in his household and put her readers underneath their burkas to smell the cooking oil and their own dry sweat.
Do men write differently about war?
"I don't know actually. I don't like that division between men writing and women writing," she says, wrinkling her nose at the idea. "People say 'oh woman writer, oh more emotional or whatever'. But it's not about me writing differently, it's about who I get in contact with as a woman. In a Muslim world, with The Bookseller of Kabul you could never have lived in that family being a man because he would just not be let in to the house as a foreign man.
"Maybe it's also about courage, to have the courage to be intimate because it's not seen as something very prestigious in journalism. Maybe it's more prestigious to write about the war and weaponry."
She has a theory why The Bookseller was such a hit. It was the ability to sit and get bored and let life happen. The war reporter works a predictable cycle, she explains. The bombs fall. People die. The journalists arrive to ask questions. Then they run out of questions and leave.
She sat with the women in the bookseller's home and calmly recorded their lives of drudgery and powerlessness. Then she wrote an unflinching account, never allowing gratitude towards the man who had welcomed her in to cloud what she had seen.
The book brought her a worldwide readership and now she wants to bring them on a new journey into a war that no one wants to talk about. "I'm not an activist or a politician or Mother Teresa trying to save the world, I'm just haunted by this little conscience and duty. It was maybe to finish a story because I'd gotten the whole story of the Chechens under my skin.
"If you destroy a childhood, that childhood is going to haunt you for the rest of your life and it will haunt others, too. With Timur, how much pain does he inflict on others? There are so many problems he makes in the orphanage. Now he's 14. He will soon be a grown-up. He's got so much hatred in his heart."
In the final chapter she describes sitting beside him on the porch steps and asking why he is behaving so badly. He replies "because I'm evil". "Later my Norwegian editor said, 'you know that's not how children talk,' and I said 'that is how children talk in Chechnya.' I spoke to a child psychiatrist who works with children of war and he has had to learn the word for evil in so many languages because it's a word that children use all the time."
SHE STARTED work on the book travelling around with Memorial, a Russian human rights organisation, hearing the stories of the murdered and disappeared. The cruel truth was that there was a terrible sameness about the stories.
When she read over what she was writing "I was thinking I'm writing an Amnesty report, maybe a bit more literary, but who was going to read it? I was about to give up." Then she got the number for an orphanage, which led her to Hadijat. "Meeting her and the children I realised this was the book."
Her ambition for this story is to get book club gatherings all over the world talking about Chechnya, harnessing the methods of a novelist and to turn real people into characters that will live in readers' imaginations.
"That's how I try to write. With Chechnya, this is not a region that we really want to read a book about. Even though I have a readership, they would not necessarily pick it up, so I was thinking how can I almost force a reader into the story." The storytelling style shifts in this book from literary to reportage. A chilling chapter describes her interview with the Putin-appointed president of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, a former Chechen warlord.
She is not surprised that in the recent coverage of Russian elections, Putin's record on Chechnya was not an issue. What does she make of the new Russian president Dmitry Medvedev? "I wonder why all the western leaders congratulate him. He looks softer and he's going to smile a lot more than Putin does, but when it comes to issues that I've seen, it's all the same." Like his predecessor, Medvedev has already shown support for Kadyrov. "This very brutal president. He's a thug, he's a bandit, he's a torturer. He's got private prisons. He's got a few years of schooling. He's a former soldier. This is the guy Putin appointed governor, and he's very limited intellectually. But his violence has no limits.
"Medvedev is going to just carry on. Putin believed in this KGB system of control and Medvedev seems more liberal so why is he where he is? I think it's just going to continue. "
The official version is that there is peace in Chechnya. "It's a stability based on terror, on fear. People are so afraid to say anything." Russian troops have withdrawn and the country is run by Chechens propped up by Moscow. "What makes this more scary is that while the Russians killed and tried to win the war, they didn't have the same culture of revenge like the Chechens have." The culture of blood feud means that a resistance fighter will not just be killed. "They will go for his brother, his uncle, his grandfather, every male in his family."
For the next few weeks Seierstad is on a book tour and in July she will have her first child. She is reluctant to talk about the pregnancy. "I'm also very humble about it. I don't know how it's going to go. Yes, it's halfway through, but I don't take anything for granted."
Her partner is jazz saxophonist Trygve Seim and they plan to live in her big house with a garden in Norway when the baby is born. She says she needs to rest anyway. There will be more books, but perhaps not war books, in her future. Seim is fascinated by Arabic culture, having lived in Cairo as a young boy as the son of the Norwegian ambassador. She might try to add Arabic to her list of languages. Until the baby is born she is unsure how this new life will unfold.
Is there a novel in the future? "No, I just find reality so exciting. So I don't think it's so interesting what happens inside my mind. But I also envy writers, especially now, because you can sit in your house. You can write and you can just take it from your own head. You don't need to do all the research, the travelling, the interviews that maybe go wrong."
Her legacy is more than just literary. The money from her books has built a school for 600 girls in Afghanistan. It paid for Leila, the bookseller's younger sister's wedding and contributed to the costs of a flat.
In Chechnya, the last touches are being put to a bakery paid for by Seierstad where the children can have a living making bread. Her other gift has been a glimpse of how they would be portrayed in the finished book. "I've read aloud their parts to them. That's mainly for their security but it's also because I didn't want to have any discussions afterwards with people saying they didn't say this or that. That's only right because I've spent so much time with them. But if I'd done that with the bookseller there would have been no book."
The Angel of Grozny, by Åsne Seierstad, is published by Virago (£12.99)