Novels depict cosmopolitan book preservation as resistance to wartime destruction.

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: The nailed-to-the-ceiling multilingual library is a vivid image for an essay on how fiction encodes threatened cosmopolitanism — the mirror trick literally forces readers to read at an angle, like the displaced refugee reader.
• XREF: Books-as-preserved-cultural-memory echoes the library fragility theme in The Library: A Fragile History, but here applied as a fictional symbol of resistance to erasure.
• QUESTION: Does the ‘languages she did not possess’ detail — Lara can’t read most of the texts — undercut or deepen the cosmopolitan claim, since the multilingual library is inaccessible even to its own visitor?