One of the most popular items The Globe and Mail has ever produced is a poster called Hot Books, a promotion for our bestseller lists that features a host of bestsellers — or their ashes, anyway — that have been burned, or banned, throughout history.
The list ranges from Homer's Odyssey to Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, which found Iran's ayatollahs as eager to burn the author as the book. Stops in between included works by the likes of Shakespeare, Galileo, Swift, Twain, Joyce and Philip Roth (for Portnoy's Complaint).
Fernando Bàez begins his exceptionally rewarding, and nearly as distressing, history of literary censorship in action — surely one of the most repellent of many repellent human characteristics — with an epigraph from German poet Heinrich Heine: "Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings," which was certainly prophetic, at least for his native country.
There is a double propulsion for the work of the Venezuelan librarian — he's director of the National Library of Venezuela — nicely blending the political and the personal.
The political: The book begins with this lament from an Iraqi history professor: "Our memory no longer exists. The cradle of civilization, writing, and law, has been burned. Only ashes remain."
This is the unspoken collateral damage of the war in Iraq: The indifference of the invaders to protecting the region's rich heritage led to a cultural tragedy as appalling as the human one. Unguarded libraries and museums, apparently linked with the power structures of Saddam Hussein's sadistic regime, were mercilessly pillaged and burned. According to Bàez, one million books in the National Library were burned on one day alone: April 14, 2003, a day that should live in infamy.
The personal: As a lonely child, Bàez found reading his great consolation and his great adventure. It represented an opening to greater worlds, and "as I turned those dearly beloved pages, I forgot my hunger and misery, and that saved me from resentment and fear." Until, that is, a tributary of the Orinoco River flooded and destroyed every volume.
Subsequent experiences with books being destroyed — ranging from a bookshop fire to a landslide — made Bàez obsessive on the subject of what he calls the "bibliocaust."
A Universal History of the Destruction of Books, published in Spanish in 2004, now makes its English-language debut, and what villainy and what error is here portrayed, from barbarians to bibliomanes.
The range of reference is staggering: the libraries of Asurbanipal in Assyria; the destruction of secret papyrus texts by the Egyptian monotheist Akhenaton; Tamerlane's biblio-busting rampage through Syria in 1393; the thousands of books lost in the London fire of 1666; the burning of books by Nazis; their suppression by Stalin; the willful destruction of manuscripts by their authors.
Franz Kafka, for instance, asked his friend and executor Max Brod to burn his notebooks, "everything I've left behind." Brod did not comply, leading Jorge Luis Borges, himself keen to confine some of his own works to the fire, to opine that whoever wants his books burned should not leave the task to others.
But, as others have been, I am a bit perplexed by Bàez's lack of definitions: When does he mean book, and when manuscript? Any sort of printed material seems to be apply.
More puzzlingly, he conflates willed destruction in war or repression with an author's choices, or even with accident. Writing of Greece, for instance, he laments that only seven of Sophocles's alleged 120 plays have survived intact. But there's no evidence that these were intentionally destroyed or suppressed. Their loss is a literary calamity, yes, but not at all the same thing as China burning the libraries of Tibetan monasteries.
But Bàez's primary thesis is compelling: The destruction of a culture's library is the destruction of its collective memory, and there is no identity without memory. Books, he writes, "are not destroyed as physical objects but as links to memory, that is, as one of the axes of identity of a person or community." It is wicked and calamitous when that is done intentionally, merely calamitous when it is accidental.
Still, despite these small reservations, this is a book well worth reading, especially pointed and perhaps necessary during this, Freedom to Read Week (ironically, Bàez says that the Bush government refused him entry to the country to promote the book, presumably owing to his account of the destruction of Iraq's libraries, but perhaps simply to punish Venezuela for Hugo Chavez).
Martin Levin is Books editor of The Globe and Mail.
