This review is part of a special week of pieces here at Strange Horizons which focus on speculative fiction in translation published by US small presses. These publishers are being impacted by the Trump administration's recent revocation of a number of grants made by the National Endowment of the Arts. Rachel Cordasco has compiled a list of works appearing in recent years from these houses. The health and breadth of speculative fiction relies on the work of these presses. Please support them and their work.
The Book Censor's Library is published in the US by Restless Books.
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It’s probably not news to you that authoritarianism is on the rise globally, with concomitant attacks on humanities and the arts. In the US, for instance, book banning is surging; this review appears in a week of pieces dedicated to small American publishers under attack. Fittingly, then, Bothayna Al-Essa’s The Book Censor’s Library, translated from the Arabic by Ranya Abdelrahman and Sawad Hussain, follows a newly hired book censor in an anonymous city some time after a great social reorganization. Bothayna’s protagonist winds up falling in love with literature and being inducted into a bookish resistance movement—all while trying to keep his illegally imaginative daughter safe from government reprogramming. Though it is a tidy, fairly tight novel, The Book Censor’s Library somehow feels at once like a review of classic censorship dystopias in general and an homage to a few favorite books in particular; and like something a bit more ambiguous, leaning abruptly into its metafictional side rather than concluding traditionally. Although it sits quite comfortably in any list of anti-censorship works, the novel is quietly sophisticated in how it thinks about the issue, and particularly in how it frames the worth and goodness of imaginative literature.
Al-Essa, who’s had to navigate state censorship as a bookseller herself, does an excellent job here balancing the scope of the issue—the intentional destruction of the self-knowledge and imagination of a society—with its mundane absurdism. Small, comic human touches keep the action grounded, and the novel’s careful, sparse descriptions and intentionally pared-down society sometimes give it the feeling of a parable—with one perfectly timed exception, for example, none of the “non-fictional” characters here have names, only roles. Notably, our protagonist doesn’t encounter anything like a clear villain—it’s the system that’s burning the books and closing down dreams, and it’s the system that he works for; changing his role from censoring books to becoming their secret Guardian is not an easy or complete transformation.
Although its themes are horribly timely, then, this is a deeply playful book, winking at the reader’s knowledge of public-school canon. Works such as 1984 (1949) and Fahrenheit 451 (1953) are folded into the text in a way that contends with both the seriousness and the ludicrousness of their applicability. Despite the stakes of its narrative, and its fairly depressing story arc, The Book Censor’s Library is also quite whimsical and ludic, capturing the feel of those classic dystopias with a slightly mocking distance—it is a tragedy that we’re always having to think of them, Al-Essa seems to say, but it is also a farce. And while the novel leans heavily on the realistic and plausible aspects of its scenario, it’s also breezily metafictional, with elements of the Censor’s reading list seemingly bleeding between realities. Even before he is seduced first by literature and then by the resistance, a horde of white rabbits—eventually revealed to be of Carrollian provenance—infest the ministry’s hallways, and he later recognizes that key figures in the resistance are somehow also characters from the books he has loved. The Secretary, for instance, who inducts him into the world of reading, seems also to be the carpenter from Collodi’s Pinocchio, trying to make a real person of him.
These metafictional elements reach a crescendo in the finale of the book, after the Guardian encounters a bookseller and author who may be, in some way, Al-Essa herself. But, all throughout, the novel points to the ways that reality is metafictional, the ways ideas and stories spill between realities, and how the imagination can be suppressed but not uprooted. The Censor’s daughter has no problem daydreaming, recapitulating fairy tales in her own mind; the bookseller keeps literature alive, even if it must literally go underground for a while. In another novel about the systematic destruction and perilous pleasures of literature, Too Loud a Solitude (1976), Bohumil Hrabal wrote, “[R]eal thoughts come from outside and travel with us like the noodle soup we take to work; in other words, inquisitors burn books in vain” (p. 2). In The Book Censor’s Library, there’s something vital in the Censor’s seduction itself, in how not the revolutionary information but the mere pleasure of reading, the pleasures of the mind and body that reading whets and informs, is what leads him to oppose the machine.
One way of opposing book censorship is to insist that they’re wrong: that these books on the list aren’t dangerous, or bad; that they’re good, or at least harmless. Another way is to see that the censors are describing books accurately, and to fight them anyway: that books can be weapons, that books can be bad for you.
On the idea that books can be weapons, tools of the revolution, that’s certainly true as far as it goes. But I think Al-Essa’s book would not want us to overstate that, to pat ourselves on our bookish backs too much for our punk-warrior credentials. When the Guardian complains that the alternative to conformity is death, the Secretary tells him: “The alternative is resistance, but you’re too busy reading novels” (p. 159). Quietly, one of the strongest arguments that The Book Censor’s Library is making is that books, that culture, are worthwhile even if they’re not good for you—that literature is not in the same category of good as toothpaste or aerobic exercise.
Books can make you happy, that’s true, but great books can also make you sad. They can crush you. (A book is, as Samatar tells us, “a place of weeping, a key to a desert, a river that has no bridge” [A Stranger in Olondria (2013), p. 19]). Books can impart some wisdom, sure, sometimes, in some little measure; great books, as Al-Essa’s Censor learns, can also derange you, intoxicate you, knock your life onto a path you wouldn’t choose under sane and sober consideration.
One can believe that literature is, on the whole, good for you, and yet believe that this goodness is incidental, epiphenomenal, neither a measure of art’s worth nor an argument in its favor. To argue that literature’s key value is its healthfulness is to concede the argument to the censors, the authoritarians, the eugenicists—after all, if a book’s goodness is what matters, we’re only disagreeing about which books count as good; we should, instead, be rushing to protect the books accused of perversion, of obscenity, of corrupting the youth. The Book Censor’s Library goes out of its way to remind us of the regime-friendliness of “books that tried to teach their readers the secrets to happiness and success” (p. 131), that the system is not threatened by books that “tell you that you must be happy and that the world is beautiful” (p. 28).
The Censor’s world is not beautiful. If it’s less obviously cruel than many real-world regimes or 1984, it’s all the more chilling for how its government has realized what to target, and how: It has eliminated imagination as thoroughly as possible, and has done so not to wage “a war against books so much as a war against reading” (p. 50). Again and again, the Censor is reminded that the job is to stay on the surface, to resist interpretation, to protect society from those meanings and uncertainties.
Beneath the pavement, need I remind you: the beach. As things get ever more grim in the US, as I try to keep reading and talking about speculative fiction, I’ve been thinking a lot about surrealism and absurdism as resistance, about Zachary Gillan’s essay “Reading Weird Fiction in an Age of Fascism.” Al-Essa’s novel is a reminder that fictions, even the seemingly normie ones—the ones you have to read in school—are strange, contradictory, full of depths to drown in. They are at every moment seeping into the supposedly impermeable establishment. If the ending of The Book Censor’s Library is tragic—and it is—it’s also extremely blunt in reminding you that you’re reading: that dreams, pleasant or otherwise, can come with us when we wake.