The Little Book that Could
It was born in a dark cell of a Bolivian military dictatorship. It came to life because of one simple
sentence, “The real causes of this crisis is corruption at the highest levels”, published in an evening
paper in La Paz. It took seven days to find its name, “Biting Silence”, and it took 55 days to write it.
“Morder el Silencio” was published seven years later, in 1980, and six days before the most violent
military coup of the century. It reached the hands of a hundred readers and it was then burned by the
“cocaine military regime”. It was never published again in Spanish.
Two copies arrived in the U.S. three months later. They spent the next seven years searching for a
publisher. One reached the Center for Inter-American Relations, which provided it with a glorious review:
the book was compared with “Conversation in the Cathedral”, “Pedro Páramo” and “For Whom the Bell
Tolls”. The reviewer, a Ph.D. in Spanish and Latin American literature and a teacher and translator of
contemporary Latin American literature, urged the Center: “This strong and compelling novel…
deserves translation into many languages… it deserves the immediate attention of American publishers
and the American reading public…”. The Center, some kind of intellectual customs house, ignored his
Report and did not find an editor as it did for other books. The Center never offered one word to explain
why.
It took one mysterious and enigmatic lady to find a publisher for “Biting Silence”. Irene Ilton came, took a
look, walked the streets up and down for several months and finally wrote a very short letter to let it be
known that “Biting Silence” would see the light of day.
It did. It was published by Avon Books in August 1987. Its cover appeared in the back of an Avon’s
monthly brochure and then it vanished. Without a dime spent on advertising, that brochure seemed to be
the end of the road for “Biting Silence”.
But it was not. “Biting Silence” was found by readers all around the world. People from South Chorea,
Japan and Canada wrote a few lines about this book. It was because of the Internet and Amazon Books
that the day came when “Biting Silence” was out of print. Somebody at Avon let it be known that 23.000
copies had been sold. Avon never paid a cent as royalties. A lawyer who is an expert on copyright called
the publishing contract signed by Avon “a piece of trash”.
Meanwhile, “Alan”, another anonymous reviewer, published a few lines on “Biting Silence” for Amazon.
com: “Excellent Book on intellectuals persecuted in Latin America. This is a very good book expressing
the personal experiences and difficulties of being a writer/novelist in South America. It shows how
harrowing dictatorship is and is a vivid account of the psycho-emotional struggles that the intellectual
endures under politically repressive regimes. Excellent and vivid writing”, he said.
Some people would say that Alan helped give “Biting Silence” a third life.
And so it was. Ruminator Books published another edition of the book in 2003. Ruminator did not spend
a dime on advertising either, and it went bankrupt several months later. It paid a small advance, but took
some time to pay it in installments. When it went broke, it had the decency to write a few lines giving the
rights back to the author.
It took two years and the 2005 world tour of Evo Morales, the Bolivian President, to reach the day when
“Biting Silence” went out of print for a second time. It had sold about 15.000 copies, or so it was said to
the author in St. Paul, MN, when he stopped by to buy his book; he had no copies left.
By then, “Biting Silence” had taken 30 years to get a page at Amazon.com and reach readers all around
the world. There were a few emails from Toronto and Seoul and Paris, and London and Tokyo, and that
was all that was left of this struggle. (attenberg?)
Those messages, and BookSurge by the end of 2005. BookSurge is the Amazon.com subsidiary that
works on Books on Demand, the miraculous not so new gift of the Internet to authors everywhere.
“Biting Silence” found BookSurge along the very same days when Presidente Evo was touring the world,
and on the same month when its Ruminator printing had gone out of the market. It was literally made by
its author this time: he made the cover, the typesetting, everything. He paid for this service and “Biting
Silence” was sent to BookSurge to be published as a Book on Demand and sold by Amazon.com.
By now, the story that “Biting Silence” wanted to tell the world is indeed old, but not out of fashion. It was
written in 1972, when the Latin American military were using Operation Condor to fight their dirty war.
Today, Pinochet is dealt with as a thief and a murderer, nobody remembers the name of the Bolivian
dictator that almost killed “Morder el Silencio”, and Bolivia has known formal democracy for almost twenty
years.