What the World is Reading: Buenos Aires

From the December 2001 issue of World Press Review (VOL. 48, No. 12)

The Arts in a Time of Crisis
What the World is Reading

Buenos Aires: Searching for Answers

Susana Reinoso, La Nación (conservative), Buenos Aires, Argentina, September 20, 2001

Bookstores and publishers are surprised to see higher sales of the books of Nostradamus, by Palestinian Edward Said, and by others dealing with Islam and the shocking collision of cultures. This is what has happened since the attacks on New York and Washington. Global society has gone searching for anything to read that includes the words “end of the world,” “third world war,” “terrorism,” “Islam,” “cultural shock,” or “Bin Laden.” And publishers, racing against the clock, are rushing to reprint out-of-print titles that have not sold a single copy in years.

According to a La Nación survey of bookstores and publishing houses, sales of such books have risen by as much as 100 percent, and many shops have sold all their books by Said, for example. Seeing the stampede by readers, Grijalbo ordered copies of The Silenced Scream, flown in from Spain. That book was written by three Spanish women who lived in Afghanistan and relate their experiences. The main office in Mexico of Editores Siglo XXI, which published Said’s The World, The Text, and The Critic, was asked to reprint the work. “The day after the attack,” said a source at Siglo XXI, “the two volumes on Islam in our Historia Universal series both began to sell quickly.”

Two bookstores [in Buenos Aires], El Ateneo and Yenny, reported that along with the books of Nostradamus, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order by Samuel P. Huntington also began selling well. And Executive Orders and Debt of Honor, both Tom Clancy thrillers, have also found more readers. At the Fausto bookstore, aside from the books on the secrets and predictions of Nostradamus, the best sellers were those on Islam.

Other authors who have benefited from the panic and desperation that has overwhelmed people, and left them looking for answers to the global tensions, include astrologers Lilly Süllos and Horangel. Sales of their books are rising at shops where other titles have already sold out. Apparently if the books of Nostradamus are selling like hotcakes and those about Islam are difficult to understand, there is always an opportunity—thanks to astrology—to find out if Jupiter’s transit of Cancer means a brighter future or even greater desolation.