The men of the censorship department spend all of their working hours reading through newly published books, looking for anything that might bar them from the dwindling books throughout their dystopian country in Bothayna Al-Essa’s bleak novel, The Book Censor’s Library (translated by Sawad Hussein and Ranya Abdelrahman). Thankfully for us, the newest member of this department has discovered that reading is magically transformative after volunteering to take a look at a new edition of the very much banned Zorba the Greek, by Nikos Kazantzakis. Book censors are not supposed to fall in love with the books.
Once he reads Zorba the Greek, our unnamed narrator has been transformed. He starts to question everything. Why must they censor everything about sex? Zorba’s literal and metaphorical lust for life are deeply affirming. Why do they have to look for references to religion? Why do they have to ban history? Since people who ask these kinds of questions in the censor’s city tend to disappear, our narrator takes solace in talking to the only person who understands: a disgraced former book censor who also caught the bug.
People who love books will enjoy picking up references to Alice in Wonderland and 1984, but a lot of this book is pretty heavy going for bibliophiles. It’s hard not to worry for the censor’s daughter, who has a beautiful abundance of imagination—something that is also prohibited in this brave new world because the government has decided that imagination is the root of all evil because it leads to desires. If she can’t learn to hide her imagination, she will be sent to a re-education center (that no one returns from either). Meanwhile, our narrator is falling deeper and deeper into a clandestine world of book lovers fighting to keep as many books as possible from being burned on the annual Purification Day bonfire.
Years ago, I read Fahrenheit 451 and felt a fierce pride that there were people who were still fighting for books and literacy and stories. I feel less hopeful after reading The Book Censor’s Library than I did after finishing Fahrenheit 451. The world is a different place than it was when I was a teenager. My country has spawned all sorts of efforts to ban books for children and teens out of fear for the ideas that their kiddos might be exposed to. The censors in Al-Essa’s setting have not only taken the books away, they’ve also made it so that the books available for sale in the government-approved stores so anodyne that no one really wants to read anyway. They’ve managed to kill the desire to crack open a book and see the world through someone else’s eyes. With Fahrenheit 451 (from what I remember) it was enough to save some books for a different future because there would be someone to read them. In The Book Censor’s Library, one has to wonder if there will ever be a different world to save the books for.