"The Book of Sand" is a novel about the infinite, beginning with a seemingly unrelated description of the uncountability of the grains of sand in the world. The titular Book of Sand the narrator receives is the central symbol of the book, and a mysterious one. Having no beginning or end, and written in a language the narrator cannot understand, the book is framed as fascinating and diabolical. It has no obvious reason for its value: it's an unreadable book. But it clearly has some mystical power, which leads the book seller and the narrator to both view it as highly valuable. The story leads us to question what makes people consider a book valuable. The Book of Sand is compared to Bibles, which also brings to mind the question of how people treat a copy of the Bible as valuable or not. It's one of the most printed books in the world, and many groups exist to distribute Bibles as a technique to proselytize. But many individuals have deep connections to their specific copies of the Bible, or to family Bibles passed down through generations. We can also think of how many people rarely or never read the Bible but might still have a copy they treasure or have an identity tied up with Christianity and the Bible.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
What is the theme of the chapter Lead?
Primo Levi's complex probing of the Holocaust, including his survival of Auschwitz and pre- and post-war life, is organized around indiv...
-
The statement "Development policy needs to be about poor people, not just poor countries," carries a lot of baggage. Let's dis...
-
"Mistaken Identity" is an amusing anecdote recounted by the famous author Mark Twain about an experience he once had while traveli...
-
Primo Levi's complex probing of the Holocaust, including his survival of Auschwitz and pre- and post-war life, is organized around indiv...
-
De Gouges's Declaration of the Rights of Woman was enormously influential. We can see its influences on early English feminist Mary Woll...
-
As if Hamlet were not obsessed enough with death, his uncovering of the skull of Yorick, the court jester from his youth, really sets him of...
-
In both "Volar" and "A Wall of Fire Rising," the characters are impacted by their environments, and this is indeed refle...
No comments:
Post a Comment