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

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.