Book Review: Bothayna Al-Essa’s “The Book Censor’s Library”
The Book Censor’s Library is translated from Arabic by Ranya Abdelrahman and Sawad Hussain. It was a National Book Award finalist for translated literature in 2024 and won the Sharjah Award for Arab Creativity in 2021.
The Book Censor’s library is an odd, fantastical trip through censorship that is most interested in the act of reading. The nameless main character, referred to as ‘the Book Censor,’ always dreamed of being a Book Inspector – but got stuck in a bureaucratic office reading dull tomes, unable to sniff out even one offensive sentence, until a copy of Zorba the Greek fell into his hands. Suddenly, reading gains a new meaning for him.
“Why did bread suddenly taste as though he’d never had bread before? And why was the air so sweet and pure, like butterflies shedding cocoons? The extraordinary emerged from hiding. The surface of his humble world was pulled back, exposing tenderness beneath… ”
It is a meta-fictional book inspired from the experiences of the author, Bothayna Al-Essa, an amateur bookseller in Kuwait. Her attempts to operate her business based out of love for literature ran up against the stubborn force of her government’s Ministry of Information, the censorship arm of the Kuwait government. It led her to write a novel which speaks as much to the American cultural moment as it does to the state of free speech in Kuwait. This geographical broadness is Al-Essa’s intention, gathered from the author’s note stating that the story events happen “sometime in the future, in a place that would be pointless to name, since it resembles every other place.”
In 2024, there were 821 attempts to censor library books and materials, targeting 2,452 unique titles, according to the ALA. Censorship is a centuries-old issue that has inched itself back into the spotlight, and the main critique of Al-Essa’s story falls on the inability of the censorship authority to read past the first interpretation of a novel, believing that language must be a ‘flat surface.’ The original Arabic title translates most closely to “Guardian of Surfaces,” alluding to her main character’s role as a book censor ensuring that there are no hidden metaphors below the surface of his assigned texts. The government-approved literature must not make any room for authors to hide meaning.
“He imagined what all those books imprisoned in the warehouse must be feeling, as they waited for Purification Day. The aimless conversations with which they passed the time so they wouldn’t have to think about the pyre. No doubt they leaned on each other, steadying their shudders as they got carried to their death.”
Yet, the novel trips over its own ideas. The setting is meant to represent anywhere, at any time, and begins to drift into vagueness. It has oddities reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland, such as invasive rabbits in office buildings, but is much more obsessed with what the rabbits may mean as a too-obvious metaphor than their real existence in the storyworld. Our main character can be hard to connect with, due to the strangeness of his life and world, which may have been more immersive if he were narrating the story. Instead, the third-person narrator tends to ramble and lacks the sense of irony and unreliability of someone who is truly trapped in a world of ‘double-speak.’ There are explicit references to an Orwellian government, but it does not convincingly feel like a world sapped of meaning.
The overall effect felt as if the novel, critiquing surface-level interpretation, did not delve beyond its own blunt metaphor of book-banning. Although the writing is in places beautiful and engaging, it suffers from being dragged out over almost 300 pages, until the end, which dramatically disrupts the narrative in a way that does not feel earned.
Elijah Kubicek is a junior at Eastern Illinois University and an intern at Bluestem. He is majoring in English with a minor in Film Studies.