The utility of misfortunes, the title that Fernando Aramburu used for one of his works, would be a good way of defining the book trend that occurs every time a catastrophe occurs. You will understand it with a recent example, that of Salman Rushdie. Today marks a week since the writer was stabbed during a conference in upstate New York.
The writer has lived through 33 years of threats after Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa for a book that he believes is especially critical of Islam, The Satanic Verses. Work of which, by the way, the aggressor, Hadi Matar, has only read two pages, as he himself has acknowledged in an interview from prison to the New York Post.
In these seven days, his best-known and controversial book has become one of the best sellers on Amazon in several countries, including the United States and Spain. In the latter, in the section of 'The best sellers in Contemporary Fiction', it appeared this Thursday in the third position of the general list of best sellers of the electronic commerce portal. A considerable achievement considering that it is a work that was first published in 1988.
It is not trivial that this has happened. There are many who have been curious to understand the controversy of this story, which aroused the anger of many Muslims as an insult to the Koran. Something similar happened last summer with different readings related in one way or another to Afghanistan, be it politically, historically or culturally. An example of this was The Kabul Bookseller, with which the Norwegian journalist Åsne Seierstad showed the reality of the country in 2001 after the fall of the Taliban regime through the story of Shah Muhammed Rais and his family. This same year Edicions 62 has released a reissue.
It is not necessary to go much farther to find another example. In 2019, the novel Our Lady of Paris, by Victor Hugo, was placed as number one in sales, first on Amazon France, and then in other countries such as Spain and the United States, a few hours after the fire of more than twelve hours that partially devastated the cathedral.
The same dynamic arises when an author or author dies, because that is when the sudden need to reread it arises in everyone. One of the clearest examples occurred in 2014 with the last goodbye of Gabriel García Márquez. The same week in which the Colombian writer died, sales of several of his works skyrocketed, including One Hundred Years of Solitude. The then press officer of Penguin Random House Argentina told the press at the time that “all the bookstores are calling us asking for more copies because her work is out of print.” So much so that the publishing house managed to reprint 15,000 copies of its most requested books.
The same thing happened with the death of José Saramago. In Spain, its sales increased by 70%, according to Alfaguara and Punto de Lectura. The most popular works were Cain, The Elephant's Journey and Essay on Blindness. Data from FNAC and El Corte Inglés were also recorded at that time, where sales of works by the Portuguese increased by 85% the week after his death.
Needless to say, ideally these readings would be discovered and enjoyed without the need for any misfortune to occur. However, as the saying goes, there is always something good behind everything bad.
