Books don’t sell magazines. Nobody buys People to find out about Tom Clancy.  So when a book generates headlines and features photo spreads of its author, doubtless there’s a story.
A second story is the libel suit that’s being prepared against Ms. Seierstad by the book’s semi-fictionalized subject.
 
The third tale is Ms. Seierstad herself: tall, blonde, attractive — and to the English-speaking world a complete enigma. Her mystery has both heightened interest in the book and increased the controversy about whether or not her account of life in Kabul is true and fair-minded.  British and American journalists interested in this latter question are stymied insofar as no one knows what sort of person she is.


This is not irrelevant.  When Sydney Schanberg reports in this week’s Village Voice that John Kerry deliberately covered-up information on U.S. POW/MIAs in Vietnam, other writers have a mental reference file on him that helps them know what to make of this.  Many of them remember him from his stints at The Times and New York Newsday.  This background is an important supplement when they strive to make a judgment about the research and documentation provided by a sincere, but troubled and guilt-ridden author who has been drifting towards the political fringe.
 
However, so far as I know, no English speaker has yet written about Asne who’s spent time with her outside of the press interviews she’s recently granted.
 
I regret to mention the way that I met Asne: I picked her up on a bright, sunny morning in Central Park a few years ago.  We then spent a day traveling around the city, attended a party thrown by an artist friend in Chelsea, and then had an argument about politics in the cab in which I was taking her home. I have not seen her since — although another friend of mine whom she met me with later spent time with her in Oslo and has reported back to me about their encounter.
 
I can’t therefore claim close acquaintance, but I did learn a few things.
 
Asne is extremely intelligent, knowledgeable about literature (Russian authors especially) and highly opinionated.
 
Her background is left-wing, and I’ve heard her quote Lenin without irony.  Her father is a Marxist political activist and her mother is a feminist author.  She spent much of her youth in France.  She speaks flawless English, and I see no reason to doubt her claim that the members of the book dealer’s family who spoke English could have relayed the whole of her book’s story to her even though she does not speak Dari, the language they themselves mostly talked in.
 
Asne has no obvious reason to be seeking money or celebrity.  She is pretty, was already reporting on Norwegian television, and, according to my friend who saw her in Oslo, is friends with the King of Norway.
 
Asne does have a temper, but that comes across, I think, in her book, as she describes what it is to have to wear a burqa - or to see one’s spouse marry another, younger woman. The woman I met was not completely at ease with herself or the world, but she also was very far from being shifty or suspicious. Quite the opposite: she seemed to me unusually forthright and direct. My guess would be that if there is an issue with the reporting in her book it is one of its slant, not its facts.