2003.12.06 The Guardian
About 20 years ago I spent my summer vacation on an island in the Adriatic. The next uninhabited island was occupied by tourists of a nudist inclination. The only way to that island was by a small boat driven by a local man. One day out of curiosity to see the little island I asked the man to take me over. As we approached the island the naked bodies scattered over the rocks became increasingly visible. Later roaming over the island to find a place for myself I noticed that all those naked bodies were holding a book in their hands. The same book but in several different languages. The author of the book was Umberto Eco and its title was The Name Of The Rose.
As far as one could see the naked bodies belonged neither to intellectuals (who are generally reluctant to go to the beach) nor to the wealthy (it was generally tourists of relatively slender means who came to the Adriatic). The readers of Eco's novel could have been German cooks Italian typists Austrian workers Swiss schoolteachers Dutch bus drivers Hungarian butchers Czech civil servants and English pensioners. I wondered how the renowned professor of semiotics had become the summer reading of a cook a secretary a teacher a bus driver a butcher and a civil servant. I also wondered whether my assumptions about contemporary readers had got stuck in the intellectual stereotype that cooks read romances, if they read at all. And I wondered where the naked readers' enthusiasm came from. Personally drained by the strong sun I had no energy for anything let alone for Umberto Eco.
And then, at a certain point I turned full circle and was suddenly filled with a new exciting faith in literature. These naked bodies scattered over the Arcadian space of a small Adriatic island were reading books! The bodies could have been having sex yawning picking their noses scratching their arses munching sandwiches while pulling out of them the skins of unpeeled local salami snoring looking around they could have been doing all sorts of things but they weren't. They were each reading a book!
Touched by this naked literary enthusiasm ashamed of my own mistrust I relaxed I found a place on a remote rock and taking care that no one could see I took a book out of my bag. The only one I had taken on vacation with me. The Three Musketeers that's what I always take on vacation. But still because of my sense of personal incompatibility with the nudist readers I didn't manage to read a single page. So I went back to my own island on the first available boat.
What is the secret of the bestseller that collective fascination with one book? That is the question that preoccupies writers who have never found themselves on that list writers who have but don't know how as well as publishers editors critics followers of literary trends, bookstore owners. Publishers who believe that they know the secret are still far too often surprised at how wrong their calculations are. Maybe the secret is simpler than it seems. Bestsellers are bought by everybody: by those who believe in the justice of the readers' majority choice and by those who don't whether they buy the book to test once again their own powers of cultural analysis or simply to see what everyone else is buying. People say that writing a bestseller is like winning the lottery but this is a lie, like the lie of professional gamblers who insist that everything is a matter of luck. Even the naive know that as well as luck you have to have money to invest. And the more you invest the greater your chance of winning. Along with the always stable demand for cookbooks gardening books thrillers and romances along with individual authors who have their reliable million-strong readership along with books whose huge print runs do not surprise anyone there also exists the book that appears like a comet in the literary sky flares leaves a million-strong readership breathless, and vanishes. But what, exactly, a bestseller is remains a mystery.
As an inquisitive follower of literary circumstances a measurer of literary water levels I tried for a long time to discover the secret of literary mega-tricks. Until one day the distant image of the little Adriatic island flashed before my eyes, together with the thought that there must be a secret connection between the phenomenon of nudism and the phenomenon of the bestseller. I took out a pencil and paper and noted down what I thought about nudists and what I knew about bestsellers.
Nudists try to perform the naturalness that the whole human race lost long ago - in that sense, nudists are consciously naive. Nudists are asexual and passionless (only people devoid of passion could calmly stroll around naked). Nudists are dogmatists of the body people devoid of irony and humour (it is hard to imagine an ironic nudist). Nudists perform their ideology collectively (an individual nudist would be considered a pervert). Nudists turn existing social norms on their heads with an expression of righteous seriousness on their faces. Nudists are successful manipulators and alchemists, for behind nudist nakedness that ideology of the absence of ideology there is a whole series of values that have somehow attached themselves to nudism and seem to be implicit in the whole affair. Nudism implies pacifism (naked and unarmed) family values (nudists always move in family formations) enlightenment (a naked body is a healthy and moral body) advanced ecological awareness (nature does not pollute nature) goodness and sincerity (a naked person cannot have ulterior motives) faith in the righteousness of the divine order (we are naked as God made us) harmony and innocence (like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden) obedience and anti-intellectualism (Adam and Eve were innocent and naked until they bit into the apple from the tree of knowledge).
Likewise in the phenomenon of the bestseller there is an element of ritual. If one book is read by millions of readers it is a kind of substitute for the host (millions stick out their tongues in order to receive a surrogate of the spiritual and thus participate in a collective act of purification). The phenomenon of the bestseller is a projection of the collective longing for one book for the book of books for a substitute Bible. The longing for one book is deeply anti-intellectual (let us recall that the history of culture begins with tasting that apple from the tree of knowledge). The bestseller is a space of ritualised collective innocence (we enjoy something that everyone enjoys). The phenomenon of the bestseller contains a manipulative fascist streak for the bestseller is a holy marriage between the text and the readers it is always an ideology a surrogate of the spiritual. The bestseller offers a closed system of simple values and even simpler knowledge.
I am not a nudist but this summer I took another trip to the same little Adriatic island to test the accuracy of my literary hypothesis. At the very end of the millennium the naked bodies were holding in their hands three titles by the same author: Paulo Coelho the Brazilian writer whose 12 books have been translated into 39 languages and published in 74 countries. In view of the sudden fall in Adriatic tourism because of the war the naked bodies were on the whole either local or German. So the books bore the titles Der Alchimist (a novel that sold 9.5m copies) Der Fünfte Berg and Am Ufer des Rio Pedra sass ich und weinte.
And so I stepped on to the island naked, compatible and with a triumphant expression on my face which came from the realisation that my hypothesis was correct. I had not managed to buy The Alchemist, Madonna's favourite read, the text from which the megastar "draws her spiritual energy". And therefore I held in my hand like a holy cross Coelho's Valkyries in the English translation.
I settled myself on a rock and tried to match my own reader's pulse to the global pulse of the literary mega-market. I opened Coelho's book. A Brazilian married couple in search of the spiritual travel through the American desert (equipped with a book called The Desert Survival Manual). In the desert it is, of course, unbearably hot so the man and woman take off their clothes and roam around naked (!) in the hope of finding what they have come for the spiritual. I stopped reading at the place where the man and the woman become dehydrated (because they were naked) and take turns running to the bathroom and vomiting.
"Readers have their own experience I am not teaching them anything I am only telling them stories I know" Coelho modestly said somewhere. This writer with "the soul of a child", this "warrior of the light", had just completed his novel Veronika Decides To Die, the action of which takes place in healthier conditions in Slovenia.
I closed the book and gazed at the sky. The sky was blue the clouds calm and white. ("The clouds are rivers that already know the sea" writes Coelho.) My hypothesis has been confirmed! Nudists and the alchemists of literary success are definitely in some secret concord! Nothing could spoil my sense of victory at this discovery. Not even the thought that Eco some 20 years earlier must have been a mistake a case of dysfunction an unpredictable literary arrhythmia in the mega-pulse of the literary market.
I reflected on how many publishers would be grateful to me when I published my discovery. How many writers those poor creatures who spend their lives vainly racking their brains over the alchemy of the bestseller would thank me! Although so far I had been able to hear only the applause of the noisy island cicadas I was sure of myself I was calm as a cloud which was a river that already knew the sea I was spiritually nourished like Madonna. Not even a momentary stab of doubt could disturb my tranquillity. For "you have to listen to your own heart. It knows everything. Follow its beats even when they lead you into sin," says Coelho. I was calm for I knew that the real applause was still to come.
