A polyglot library nailed to a ceiling metonymizes cosmopolitan fiction

Evidence

Yet there is a more ostensibly benevolent globalization at work in those fictions that have attempted to trace the origins of the current world situation. Nadeem Aslam’s novel The Wasted Vigil (2008) opens with the image of hundreds of books nailed to the ceiling of a house near the Afghan town of Usha in Kandahar. They have been secured there in the hope that marauding Taliban forces will not find and destroy them. We first see them through the eyes of Lara, a visitor from Russia who has arrived in search of her brother, a soldier missing since the era of the Soviet occupation. We are told, “When enough light began to enter the house, she placed mirrors on the floor to look at the books overhead, though not all of them had been nailed with the titles facing out, and any number of them were in languages she did not possess.” This striking description serves to introduce the novel’s concern with the fate of human cultural expression in a lawless and violent land; the international, polyglot nature of the library also gestures toward a committed eclecticism redolent of the novel’s prevailing cosmopolitan value system. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 383

Categorization

• SEED: An essay angle: the Wasted Vigil’s ceiling-library as a synecdoche of Aslam’s whole project — worlding (nailing books up) as the committed opposite of the war’s physical and cultural violence.
• CANDY: Hundreds of books nailed to a ceiling to save them from the Taliban, read via floor mirrors — a striking detail for the right interlocutor.
• BMF: Thinly strained — the mirror-reading of books overhead has only the faintest echo of anything in the listed library; no genuine BMF resonance, so flag instead for the reading-list suggestion: suggests adding Aslam’s The Wasted Vigil as comparative material to Hamid/Naqvi.