The Man Who Read Books

An elderly bookseller improbably keeps his shop open in Palestine, telling a foreign correspondent the ways in which literature has provided him with refuge and inspiration.

“An essential novel to remind us that those in Gaza continue to read, they continue to exist.” -David Diop, author of Beyond the Door of No Return and At Night All Blood Is Black

A young French photographer travels to Palestine to report on the bombings in the Gaza Strip. One morning, during a ceasefire, he wanders far from his hotel into the narrow alleys of the city. Roaming aimlessly, he stumbles across a bookseller sitting on the doorstop of his shop—an old man, surrounded by stacks of books. As the photographer raises his camera, the bookseller calls out to him and asks him to listen to his story, not simply take his picture.

The story that unfolds is one that encompasses exile and imprisonment, activism and political disillusionment, the joys of love and art and watching your children grow up and thrive, and the tragedies that tear your loved ones from you. Each event is tied to the book that helped him understand and, in some cases, survive it, from Milan Kundera to Frantz Fanon to Umberto Eco to Ernest Hemingway, among many others.

There’s a saying that when an old man dies a library burns, and it’s this very library that the bookseller opens and describes. Rachid Benzine gives us a magnificent modern tale that explores the power of words against barbarism, of books as the last bastions of resistance against the loss of empathy, of literature as a means of sustenance during our darkest hours.

• “Rachid Benzine’s extraordinarily graceful, and lightning swift novel The Man Who Read Books tells the story of a chance encounter between a French photographer and an elderly Gazan man, and in so doing, tells the story of a nation through one of its unlikeliest heroes, a bookshop keeper. Nabil Al Jaber, Benzine's protagonist, bears witness to the haunted history of Palestine from his birth mid-Nakba through a series of defeats which brought his family to Gaza, and on into the unfathomable horror of our recent years. Through his favorite books, Nabil retains his humanity in the face of continuous suffering, and Benzine, through his Palestinian character Nabil, has painted a portrait of resilience, beauty, and the loftiest reaches of the human soul.”
  Hannah Lillith Assadi, author of Paradiso 17
• “An essential novel to remind us that those in Gaza continue to read, they continue to exist.”
  David Diop, author of Beyond the Door of No Return and At Night All Blood Is Black
• “Whoever you are, whatever your politics, please read this.”
  David Mitchell
• “Books are sometimes powerless to alter the course of history. But they can keep history from tearing us away from ourselves. It is this profound faith in literature that Rachid Benzine brings to The Man Who Read Books. Amid the ruins, he gives voice to a quiet refusal to surrender to hatred, grounded in the belief that to read is to continue believing in the possibility of the other. Rarely has the power of fiction been expressed with such restraint and emotional force. Through the deeply moving story of Nabil, Benzine has written a novel in which literature is not a consolation but an act of resistance—against oblivion, hatred, and dehumanization. A book to give, to share, and to cherish.”
  Leila Slimani, author of The Perfect Nanny
• “Direct, beautiful, humane. Such things, so fragile, are the thread we must hold. I hope that every person who has found shelter in reading, who has been saved by the words of another, will open this book.”
  Madeleine Thien, author of The Book of Records
• “Beautifully translated, including a transcendent poem by Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti and invocations of classics, from The Little Prince to One Hundred Years of Solitude, Benzine's novel will be at home in every library.”
  Booklist
• “This novel probes the powers and limits of memory, storytelling, and literature amidst destruction.”
  Mizna