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.

FICTION: The narrative device of books nailed to a ceiling is a potent image for any story about resistance to censorship or cultural erasure — a physical, almost desperate act of preservation worth exploring.

Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, loc. 383