Bookshops

  in the West: he went on the obligatory promotional tours and was Booker Prize shortlisted, while in India the circulation of The Satanic Verses slowly ground to a halt after it was spotlighted in India Today (“It will necessarily unleash an avalanche of protest”) and the decision by two Muslim Members of Parliament to attack the book on personal grounds (without having read it). All that led to a decision to ban the book. As so often happened in the United States, in India this decision fell to the Treasury Department, guided by the Customs Law. Rushdie wrote in protest to Rajiv Gandhi, the prime minister. In their turn, fanatics responded by sending a death threat to Viking Press, the book’s publishing house, and another to a place where the writer was scheduled to do a reading. Then the novel was banned in South Africa. An anonymous message was sent to Rushdie’s house in London. Then Saudi Arabia and many other Arab countries banned the novel. And the telephone threats started. Copies of The Satanic Verses were publicly burnt in Bradford and the next day “WHSmith, the main British chain of bookshops, withdrew the book from its shelves in its four hundred and thirty shops,” while in an official press release, they asked not to be considered “censors.” The novel won the Whitbread Prize. A mob attacked the US Centre for Information in Islamabad and five people died as a result of the shooting while the crowd shouted, “Rushdie, you’re a dead man!” Then there was Ayatollah Khomeini and his fatwa and two bodyguards night and day and a farm in a remote corner of Wales and the threat to boycott all Penguin books on sale in the entire Muslim world and getting to number one in the New York Times’ bestseller list and a lot of bomb threats and a real bomb that exploded in Cody’s bookshop in Berkeley that destroyed shelves, the remains of which are preserved as a reminder of barbarism, and multiple death threats to publishers and foreign translators and the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the Pope’s solidarity with the injured feelings of the Muslim people and the Declaration of Support by Writers Throughout the World, then Iran broke off diplomatic relations with Britain and many institutions refused to allow events in support of the writer for security reasons and conflicts escalated (“Those small battles between lovers of books seemed like tragedies in an era when the very freedom of literature was being attacked so violently”) and the periodic house moves and a false name (“Joseph Anton”) and fire bombs in Collet’s and Dillon’s bookshops in London and in Abbey’s in Australia and in four branches of the Penguin chain and the International Rushdie Defence Committee and daily life conditioned, shot through, shaken by the constant shockwaves from security measures and the first anniversary of the book burning in Bradford and the ratification of the fatwa and the murder of the Japanese translator Hitoshi Igarashi and the ratification of the fatwa and the stabbing of the Italian translator Ettore Capriolo and the ratification of the fatwa and the attempted assassination of the Norwegian publisher William Nygaard and the ratification of the fatwa and the death of thirty-seven people in another protest and eleven years in hiding, eleven unable to stroll along the streets, have dinner quietly with friends in a restaurant, or check that his books were properly displayed in a bookshop. And that his books, on the shelves of a bookshop, should blamelessly lead to so many corpses. So very many.

  At the core of Rushdie’s description lies an awareness that his book belongs to a tradtion of persecuted literature:

  When friends asked what they could do to help, he often pleaded, “Defend the text.” The attack was very specific, yet the defence was often a general one, resting on the mighty principle of freedom of speech. He hoped for, he often felt he needed, a more particular defence. Like the quality defence made in the case of other assaulted books, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Ulysses, Lolita; because this was a violent assault not on the novel in general or free speech per se, but on a particular accumulation of words [. . .] and on the intentions and integrity and ability of the writer who had put those words together.

  However, unlike its predecessors, which scandalized a world where news was not spread instantly, The Satanic Verses fell victim to a new international context. A context in which the pole of Islamic intransigence sends the other pole into a state of extreme tension, the democracies that, in one way or another, are heirs to the French Revolution. However, if we see the French Revolution as the first definitive step towards modern democracy, we should remember that alongside the massive number of executions and the sacking of the property of the aristocracy, the people accumulated a huge amount of capital in the form of books that they did not really know how to handle. Alberto Manguel, in A History of Reading, reminds us how, at the end of the eighteenth century, when an antique book was much cheaper than a new one, French and German collectors benefited from the revolution, purchasing by weight thousands of bibliographic jewels through French intermediaries. As the literacy level of ordinary people was very low, the books that were not sold or destroyed did not find too many readers in the public libraries where they were sent. Nor did the opening of public galleries lead to immediate cultural consumption: the most important consequences of collective education are always long-term. The redistribution of books would bear fruit several generations later. A large number of Islamic countries are now working to consolidate systems for repressing reading in order to ensure a future without plurality, dissension and irony.

  In the history of Foyles, the prestigious London bookshop, we find another triangle, two sides of which are in Germany and Russia, through the same dynamic that has been repeated from time immemorial: wars, revolutions, political changes of a radical nature as moments that encourage huge quantities of books to change sides and owners. When Hitler began massively burning books in the 1930s, the first thing that William Foyle thought to do was to send him a telegram offering him a good price for those tons of inflammable printed material. Shortly before that he had sent his daughter Christina, then in her twenties, to Stalinist Russia in search of bargains. The Russian expedition was a success, but not the German sortie: Hitler continued to burn books and had no intention of selling them. Once war broke out and London fell victim to the Nazi bombing raids, the old books from the cellar were mixed with sand and filled the bags that protected the walls of his shop whilst, apparently, Mr Foyle covered the roof with copies of Mein Kampf.

  There were certainly copies of My Struggle, the English edition published by Hurst & Blackett and translated by Edgar Dugdale, a Zionist activist who did so with a view to denouncing Hitler’s plans. Unfortunately, both the English and North American publishers (My Battle) yielded to the demands of Eher-Verlag, which compelled them to cut out the many xenophobic and anti-Semitic rants in the original. As Antoine Vitkine explains in his history of the book, as soon as it appeared in Britain in 1934, 18,000 copies were sold, but by that time it had been read by Churchill, Roosevelt, Ben-Gurion and Stalin, who had unexpurgated translations made by their intelligence services. Mein Kampf not only turned Adolf Hitler into the bestselling author of 1930s Germany, and a millionaire thanks to his royalties, it also made him think of himself as a writer, which is how he describes himself in the corresponding section of his income tax returns for 1935. There is no doubt that being the country’s political leader helped his sales, though the writing myth (prison) and his Messianic will also helped spread the word at a dizzying rate, as did conveniently placed advertisements in the main newspapers of the day. Instead of a typical bookshop launch, Hitler decided on the Bürgerbräukeller to promote the work of his life:

  It is a clumsy and contrived argument, but he convinces his audience. In order to struggle against the shades of Marx, a Nazi Marx is needed or, in other words, Hitler himself, the author of Mein Kampf. By presenting himself as a writer, Hitler changes his image and emerges from the mud where he had operated until then. He is no longer simply a beer-house braggart, a loudmouth, a failed putschist: now he covers himself with the prestige that comes with letters and appears as a new theorist. When he leaves the room, Hitler’s men hand out promotional leaflets advertising the publication of his b
ook and even specifying the price.

  His fame as a book burner eclipsed his fame as a book collector: by the time of his death the exterminator had amassed a library of more than 1,500 volumes. After leaving school, in the shift from adolescence to young man that was accompanied by lung problems, Hitler devoted himself to the life of the artist and intellectual, drawing and reading compulsively. He never gave up on the second activity. August Kubizek, his only friend from the Linz years, relates how he used to go to the Popular Educational Society bookshop on Bismarkstrasse, and several lending libraries. He recalls seeing him surrounded by piles of books, especially the Sagas of German Heroes collection.

  Some fifteen years later, on the other side of the world, while Hitler was staging his first mass rally and setting the Nazi propaganda machine in motion, another future perpetrator of genocide, Mao Tse-tung, was opening a bookshop and publishing house in Changsa, which he dubbed the Cultural Society of Books. Business was so brisk he soon had six employees, thanks to whom he could spend his time writing political articles that brought him to the attention of leading Chinese intellectuals. He fell in love and married in the same period. In previous years he had worked as a librarian, assistant to Li Dazhao, one of the first Chinese communists, in whose study group he was introduced to the basic texts of Marxism-Leninism. But it was in 1920, when he became a bookseller, that he began to call himself a communist. Forty-six years later he spurred on the Cultural Revolution, one of whose fronts was the burning of books.

  As the world’s principal communist regime, China supports state chains that open vast bookshops in the country’s main cities, oversee public morality and abundantly stock the Studies of Success sections, in order to foment hard work and the surpassing of individual expectation, the basis of collective endeavours. The Shinhua chain is probably the biggest and owns monsters like the Beijing Book Building, at the junction of two metro lines, with 300,000 volumes spread over five floors. The titles selected by the government coexist on its shelves with bestselling literature, school textbooks and some books in English. However, in the University of Military Science, the School of the Central Party, and the University of National Defence bookshops, official output isn’t covered by layers of pretence: they publish works of statistics and forecasts written by officers in the People’s Army, doctoral theses and studies that reveal the hard core of communist thought, undisguised by the camouflage of official communiqués intended for the foreign press. Fortunately, beneath its glamorous veneer and distinction as being one of the most beautiful bookshops in the world, the Book Worm bookshop in Beijing has, over the last few years, offered its customers banned or dissident books like those by the artist Ai Weiwei.

  The last time I went to Venezuela, a very young soldier smelled the twenty-three books I was carrying in my luggage one by one. I asked him whether drugs now travelled inside literature and he gave me a puzzled look before replying that they mixed them with glue, in the binding. He also sniffed the two volumes from the Biblioteca Ayacucho that I had bought in a Librería del Sur, the bookshop chain run by the Ministry for the Popular Power of Culture of the Bolivarian Government of Venezuela. When he finished his inspection, he grasped my iPad, relaxed his tone of voice and asked me if I had bought it in the United States and how much it had cost. Apart from Maiquetía, they have scrutinized the books in my luggage in two other airports—title by title and running a thumb across the pages: in Tel Aviv and in Havana. Israeli spies are very young and are often doing compulsory military service; while holding one of your books they ask you if you are planning to visit Palestine, or if you have been there and brought something back, and who you know in the country, where you will stay or have stayed, why you have come, and transfer the information to a label they stick in your passport that evaluates the level of danger you represent. Venezuelan soldiers dress exactly like their Cuban counterparts and are equally unsophisticated; they are in fact copies of that original Cuban style.

  It was in the communist bookshop on calle Carlos III in Havana that future commander and repressor Fidel Castro bought the two key books of his life: The Communist Manifesto and State and Revolution. When he was in prison, he devoured all manner of reading matter, from Victor Hugo and Zweig to Marx or Weber, volumes that were presents from people who visited him in prison; he had bought many others in the same bookshop on Carlos III. In Un seguidor de Montaigne mira La Habana (A Follower of Montaigne Looks at Havana), Antonio José Ponte remembers how you could once buy books in Russian on calle Obispo in the old city:

  I found an old photograph in an encyclopedia from the beginning of the century: a street with shops and awnings on both pavements, it looks like a souk, an Arab market seen from on high. Some time ago I wrote it is rather beachy. It begins with the bookshops and ends by opening out into the square and the port. One of the bookshops then sold books in Russian. Soviet ships passed through the port. Obispo was framed by two notices in Cyrillic: the title of a book and the name of a boat.

  But it is in La fiesta vigilada (The Fiesta under Surveillance) where Ponte traces more precisely the tortured topography of Castro’s city, capital of “the theme park of the Cold War.” He evokes Comandante Guevara in all his complexity: revolutionary soldier and professional photographer, political leader and writer by vocation, a keen reader. “From his military headquarters in La Cabaña,” he tells us in one masterly sentence, “Ernesto Guevara managed a magazine, the camp’s military band, the army’s film unit and the execution squad.” The Revolution provoked, and still provokes, wave after wave of revolutionary tourists. At one point in his book, Ponte recalls the experiences of Jean-Paul Sartre and Susan Sontag, his firmness and her doubts, how Nicolás Guillén’s chilling words echo in the wake of their footsteps: “Any investigation is counter-revolutionary.” In the last section, the narrator moves to Berlin, where he meets his translator, who has just got hold of the Stasi’s file on him: “Thanks to a neighbour who spied on his movements, he was able to revisit a day in his life from thirty years ago.” That trip allows Ponte to transform his life as a writer under surveillance in Havana into a universal experience.

  It was a long journey that brought Che from Buenos Aires to Cuba. And a reverse journey, from north to south, ended in a laundry in El Señor de Malta public hospital, Valle Grande, his corpse before the lens of Freddy Alborta. I met Freddy by chance in his photography shop in La Paz, shortly before his own death, and he told me the story of that other journey: its result, photographs of the illustrious corpse in a glass cabinet alongside rolls of film and frames, on sale like postcards. In one of the best known, Bolivian military officers pose next to the body, as if it were an improvized anatomy lesson, and one touches the stiff body with his index finger, gesturing towards it, demonstrating that myths are also made of flesh, of matter in a constant process of putrefaction.

  Would the books of Ernesto Guevara the writer be on sale in the Librería Universal? I don’t think so. In the same year that the revolutionary was appointed President of the National Bank and Minister of the Economy, counter-revolutionary Juan Manuel Salvat abandoned the island via Guantánamo. Five years later he and his wife opened what was to become one of the cultural focuses of the exiled community on 8th Street in the city of Miami, with its literary conversations and editions of books in Spanish. In a report by Maye Primera, prompted by the closure of the Librería Universal on June 20, 2013, Salvat declared that the first generation of exiled Cubans, the one that read most, was dying out and the “new generation, our children, although they feel Cuban, have no experience of Cuba, don’t have the accoutrements of nationality, and their first language is English, not Spanish.” A law of life.

  On May 2, 1911 Pedro Henríquez Ureña wrote a letter from the Cuban capital to Alfonso Reyes in which he said: “But don’t think for one minute that there are good second-hand or new bookshops here: the Havana bookshops aren’t much better than those in Puebla.” It is possible that for a Mexican visitor t
he city’s bookshops did not seem anything special at the beginning of the last century, but calle Obispo—in whose Hotel Ambos Mundos Hemingway liked to stay—and the Plaza de Armas were the heart of the book trade, where the citizens of Havana obtained reading supplies in the decades when they were unable to travel. When I visited the island in the last days of 1999, I only bought books on the stalls in the Plaza de Armas, because the state shops had very few titles on offer, and filled up all those square metres of space with dozens and dozens of copies of the same title. In doorways, garages and entrance halls, second-hand books were on sale: people were offloading family heirlooms for a fistful of dollars. But La Casa de las Américas, once the powerful bastion of Latin American culture, displayed only a few volumes by writers who were officially approved. Jorge Edwards, who at the end of the 1960s was a jury member for its prestigious annual prizes, recounted in Persona non grata the brutal turn made by the regime at the beginning of the 1970s. The Chilean writer gives many examples of these changes, unfortunately inscribed in the DNA of the very idea of a communist revolution, and very similar to those related by Kiš and Vollmann in their stories about paranoia in the Soviet orbit, though one is particularly telling. The rector of the University of Havana informs him, “We in Cuba don’t need critics, because it is very easy to criticize, you can criticize anything, the difficult thing is to build a country and what that needs is creators, builders of society.” So much so that they wonder whether to suppress a magazine whose name suddenly seems highly subversive: Pensamiento Crítico. And Raúl Castro conspires to subject theoretical studies of Marxism to army control. I read that book, and also Before Night Falls by Reinaldo Arenas, in the first days of the turn of the century, part of an archive of the degeneration that had been gathering pace for over thirty years. As if all the work carried out then—which one can imagine, for example, when reading Cortázar’s letters—had been drained away and the shelves of Rayuela, the Casa de las Américas’ bookshop, were the end result of that draining away.