As a book lover, I’m a sucker for books about books. Novels like The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald, Possession by A.S. Byatt, The Little Paris Bookshop by Nina George, anything by Haruki Murakami. Plus nonfiction like The Library Book by Susan Orlean, When Books Went to War, Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi. There are others, but I’m normally more of a fiction reader, especially this year, when I’ve been looking for escapism. But the newly released nonfiction book, The Book Collectors: A Band of Syrian Rebels and the Stories That Carried Them Through a War, by Delphine Minoui (translated from French by Lara Vergnaud), joins this exalted canon, so of course it caught my eye. When it arrived in the mail from a friend, her note promised it would be uplifting.
For a book that depicts a sort of hell, it is uplifting.
The Book Collectors is the glorious and devastating story of the rebels in the city of Daraya, outside of Damascus, Syria, under siege from the Assad regime from 2012 to 2016, and how they built a secret library, despite all odds, as a sanctuary and as an act of resistance. Minoui, living in Turkey, discovers this secret library via a Facebook post and connects with the curators through social media and video calls. We meet many of the people involved in the creation of the library, but Minoui’s main contact is Ahmad, a genial guide in a dark place.
Ahmad gives us a window into the daily struggle: a city destroyed, its citizens deprived of running water, electricity, food, sunlight. The bombings are constant. Constant. And yet this is a book about hope.
Saving books is not just saving their lives by supplying the intellectual, spiritual, and philosophical underpinnings for their burgeoning beliefs, the books are not just an escape into another world, not just a means for betterment as they imagine a future in which they are not at war. Their library is also a tangible act of resistance. A way to fight back. And especially when it seems they have nothing else, they have this.
Through the story of the library, we also learn the story of a city, a people, a resistance. We see the progression of books that help its readers through a series of trials, as the bombings increase, as food dwindles, as friends die. From the other side of the world, it’s easy for us to gloss over the details, to not pay attention, but here is a welcome window into this world.
Minoui is a wonderful chronicler of this particular story. Her writing bears the weight of history. Her words give these resistance fighters the dignity and respect of their mission. She’s aware of the need to remember. She chronicles at first cautiously, a diligent journalist, then enthusiastically. “But should the story of Daraya be buried simply because we can’t see past the wall erected by Assad?” she writes in the introduction. “If we look at this city only as it appears on a computer screen, we risk getting the story wrong. But looking away would condemn it to silence.”
As a new bookstore owner in 2020, books have given me hope in many different ways this year. First, as a reader. But also through the community they have brought me, and as my own means of providing for my family. When we are put to the test, other people’s stories help us get through our own. The Book Collectors makes an excellent means of doing that. As 2020 comes to a close, a year in which we’ve lost so much, couldn’t we all use a little inspiration? Couldn’t we all use a little hope?
