The Book Censor's Library

February 15, 2024
How dangerous can books really be? When the narrator of Al-Essa's novel is hired by his unnamed dictatorial government as its new book censor, he doesn't expect to embark on a twisted, perilous reckoning with the power of literature. He is meant simply to read books and either approve or ban them, searching for illicit mentions of queerness, democracy, the Internet, or the Old World. He is certainly not supposed to engage in literary interpretation. Despite his best efforts, however, Al-Essa's protagonist succumbs to the power of storytelling and gets sucked into the rich, sticky, unsettling, all-encompassing world of stories. Eventually, he will uncover a hidden world of book lovers and libraries and risk his career, family, and life for these books' success. In the novelist's world, language is a threat: "Language was not a smooth surface--it was a roller-coaster, a sponge, a gateway." Al-Essa, who is Kuwaiti, skillfully illustrates both the joy in stories and the discomfort they can wield--as mighty conveyors of disruptive meaning. Al-Essa's plot and prose are satirical and absurdist, blooming with metaphors and episodes so fantastical one almost forgets their societal relevance and gravity. Indeed, the paradox of Al-Essa's writing is that the parodic adventures of her prose, which make the novel so engaging, occasionally border on the farcical, in danger of spinning away from the book's moral and political center. "Books could hear, bite, multiply, have sex. They had sinister protocols to take over the world, to colonize and conquer...," but this exuberance threatens the intensity and focus of her progressive argument. An urgent, sweeping call to arms for the protection of books and book lovers everywhere.

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April 22, 2024
Kuwaiti author Al-Essa (Lost in Mecca) riffs on Kafka with this canny story of a book censor who transforms into a reader. In a dystopian future where the government can read people’s thoughts and bans literature that depicts deviant behavior, the unnamed protagonist worries his young daughter’s active imagination will get her hauled off to a rehabilitation center. Soon after starting his new job at the Censorship Authority, however, he falls in love with reading and joins the Cancers, a subversive group that tries to save books. In a scene that mirrors the opening of Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” he wakes to find his bedroom filled with hundreds of books, so many that his wife threatens to leave him if he doesn’t get rid of them. Things escalate when a colleague is caught reading at work, the censor is suddenly relocated to a suburban bookstore, and his daughter is ordered to undergo “complete reprogramming of the brain.” Throughout, Al-Essa lays out the supposed dangers of reading in coolly ironic terms (“He knew about the maladies caused by books.... He knew if he peeked inside his own head he’d find worry, depression, fury at the world”). This allegory brims with intelligence.