Against the library - Khalil Suwaileh

In "Against the Library," Syrian novelist and journalist Khalil Souailh writes a lyrical text that stands between autobiography and reader's statement, between personal confession and theoretical reflection on the meaning of the library today. The book does not come to demolish the idea of the library, but to dismantle its stiff image: those inflated shelves that are treated as social decor or a certificate of cultural prestige. Souailh, who has accumulated long experience in reading, writing, and cultural work, approaches here the book primarily as a reader, testing his relationship with the shelves, the titles, and the books that clung to his life and then he was forced to part with either by choice or necessity. The book begins with a nearly nightmare-like experience: a library accompanying its owner on his travels between houses, before it becomes impossible to bring it into the new apartment due to a narrow door, so he leaves it to fate and the truck driver. From this painful incident, Souailh opens the door to questions: what does the library mean when it transforms from a refuge into a material burden? What remains of us if we lose that paper "furniture" of our memory? He moves between memories of specific books, shelves that small Arab houses cannot accommodate, and the realities of living that leave no space for an opulent library. In the background appears the image of the Arab writer who cannot afford the luxury of collecting everything he loves, facing the necessity of selection as an existential rather than decorative choice. On another level, the book criticizes the idea of hoarding books and worshipping the paper mass. Souailh attacks poor-quality books that flood markets, libraries that turn into showrooms on social media, and polished shelf images that say nothing about the quality of what is read. He recalls libraries, books, and global and Arab names, from Umberto Eco to experiences of libraries born from the margins or from waste, to say that the true library is not a number or decor, but a small network of foundational books that reshape our consciousness. From here comes the idea of "non-library" as a proposal to reorder our relationship with books, not to demolish them but to free them from excess. In the end, "Against the Library" is a book about the art of choosing what deserves to stay on the shelf, and about the necessity of treating books as complete lives rather than stacked boxes. It is a text that invites the reader to reconsider their own library: what do we really keep? And what do we hoard just so we don't admit we have no connection to it? The question that haunts the reader after closing the book remains: do we own our libraries… or do our libraries own us and impose on us the shape of reading and life?