The Adventures of a Book

Ersi Sotiropoulos’s fifth novel, Zigzag through the Bitter-Orange Trees, was an enormous success on its publication in 2000 in Greece, becoming the first novel ever to win both the national prize for literature and the foremost book critics’ prize, awarded by Diavozo magazine.

Sotiropoulos’s work—which is made only more unsettling by the natural elegance of her prose—was perhaps never going to be an easy choice for a government ministry; her career has not been without controversy and this is not the first accusation of pornography she’s faced. The choice of Zigzag for the prize was subject to some criticism at the time from within the Ministry of Culture, but this did not keep the novel from outstanding critical success (“the best novel of the decade”) as well as translation into French, German, Spanish, and English.

But recently the novel has come under more vigorous attack. Kostas Plevris, a prominent member of the extreme right-wing political party Popular Orthodox Rally (LAOS), has filed a lawsuit denouncing the book: specifically, aiming to force the Ministry of Education, which each year donates copies of the national prizewinning books to libraries around the country, to withdraw all donated copies of Zigzag from schools. The courts have just granted an injunction in his favor—which will result in the book’s immediate removal, pending a final judgment—on the grounds that “A simple reading of this book shows that it includes passages that are clearly pornographic and obscene.”

Even that summary sounds too reasonable for the facts of the case. In December 2007, Plevris was given a 14-month suspended sentence for “inciting hatred and racial violence” in his book The Jews: The Whole Truth—his conviction the result a suit that has also, rightfully, been questioned as a possible infringement of free speech. The Jews: The Whole Truth is apparently (I’m relieved to say that it is not available in translation) a 1,400-page work of neo-Nazi thought and Holocaust denial, declaring among other things that Jews “deserve the firing squad” (See a typical summary here.) Plevris has recently written his own account of the trial, called The Struggle for Truth: The Adventures of a Book (“truth,” featured in both his titles, is clearly a central principle—perhaps he doth protest too much) and is now countersuing. The irony of his own subsequent attempts at censorship seems not to have occurred to him.

Plevris, in short, is certainly no critic of standing: quite the opposite. He seems to have found his ideal reader, however, in the judge ruling on this case, Dimitrios Gavalas. Gavalas justifies his ruling against Zigzag by reasoning that children’s literature should be addressed “to the pure souls of children, which Christ, God incarnate, offered as models to adults.” “School books should inspire children with moral purity and love for their religion and nation,” he continues, and then contemplates such questions as:

“Once most young people went to Church, in order to approach the truth, which is not ideology, or any other point of view, but truth, since the only light and life is Our Lord Jesus Christ; today young people end up in reformatories rotting from drug use. Is that progress?”

“Once the wife concerned herself primarily with child-rearing, which today is left to governesses and babysitters. Is that progress?”

“Once with a thousand drachmas you could buy all sorts of things, today with three euros what can you buy?”

Those of us who believe wholly in the importance of literature may be tempted to take Gavalas’s spectacular accusations as a compliment: what faith he must have in the power of literature, after all, to hold a single novel responsible for the downfall of a culture. But unfortunately, the absurdity of this case does not make its consequences any less dangerous. Books are in fact being removed from libraries—and that certainly is not progress. Please join protestors in Greece in an international petition against this injustice.

And we can’t help but add: Why not buy a copy to donate to your favorite library?
—Hilary Plum, with thanks to Karen Emmerich for her translations from the Greek

The Contest

I had considerable sympathy for Zadie Smith, when she released her explanation for not choosing a winning short story in a contest she was sponsoring.

The boxes of manuscripts for another contest had just begun arriving at my own door, and I’d cracked the first box and embarked on that batch and come up muddied and confused. I’d said yes to reading. I’d submitted to what friends of mine in other disciplines just couldn’t believe. (A journalist friend, when I told her I had to read 116 manuscripts in a month just started laughing. “But that’s impossible. It’s not right.”)

But I’d submitted willingly—no: enthusiastically—because I thought it would teach me something. Like a marathon reveals the body. Such bulk reading presses the bare essentials: What is worth reading? What do I want from a book? How can I say what is wrong with a manuscript—and what is right?

The next boxes had surprises in store, and at my reading’s end, I was left with more manuscripts I wanted to send on for the final round of judging, rather than none. And all of the first questions, and more.

“And who would want to possess independent aesthetic judgment anyway?” asks the writer of the “Hype Cycle” piece in the winter 2008 “Intellectual Situation” section of n+1).

“…in the middle (there’s no end) of the hype cycle, the important thing is no longer what a song, movie, or book does to you. The big question is its relationship to its reputation. So instead of abandoning yourself to the artifact, you try to exploit inefficiencies in the reputation market…. But anyone sensitive to art is also sensitive enough to feel his true aesthetic judgment under continuous assault from publicists, bloggers, journalists, advertisers, reviewers, and assorted subcultural specimens. Hype-and-backlash overwhelm the artifacts that supposedly occasion them…. Never mind the moon; look at the finger pointing at the moon.”

I liked the idea of avoiding all that. I was on my own with eight boxes of moon.

And what did I find?

The easy part is to say what’s wrong with a good deal of them. It surprised me to see that there’s still a resident strain of Carver that taken in such doses is very dull.

And too many short story collections seem called together at random. (For the deadline? The lure of the idea “book”?) Individual stories might be very good, but they don’t reverberate with or amplify their companions (as Carver’s do). By this I don’t mean that stories must be united by theme or by characters or by setting (though any of these might provide a shortcut to a greater unity of vision).

What is this—“greater unity of vision”—a phrase I don’t even like, a fusty complaining construction. My hands make a rounded shape in the air, and I’m not sure if it’s a basket or an egg. But it’s something that holds and can be held.

An atmosphere.

An intelligence.

It’s amazing how much fails to leave any impression at all. A month has passed. It seems to me very difficult to make an impression.

Though I was amazed to think of so many people, alone in their words, creating worlds. What place for us?

It Really Doesn’t Matter with Me Now

Today is the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination. It devastates me every time I hear the speech from the night before he died.

In it, he says “I want to commend the preachers,” a statement I’d like to draw out in relation to Jeremiah Wright. For more on that, and other thoughts on the relevance of King’s vision today, see Isaiah J. Poole’s “Forty Years Later, Still Far from the Mountaintop.”

So this morning finds me crying at the kitchen table to hear King’s words and contemplate anew that we are the society who killed him (God damn America), confused about which of my several jobs to address first, feeling sorry for myself because I’ll miss my son Amos singing his heart out onstage tonight in “All Along the Watchtower”

“There are many among us /
who think that life is but a joke.”

What I want to hold in the mud of my messy morning (laundry, taxes, the Libyan novel, the overdue library books, the bags to be packed, the evening panel to imagine, the afternoon at school to listen to the 2nd grade biographies) is the vision King still gives us of a man who knew what he was about. That the human spectrum holds such clarity. It must be something to end the day thinking, It really doesn’t matter with me now.