May 16, 2008, Forbidden bestsellers, By Kennedy Poyser, Book Fever, Canadian Authors, By Marcia Loy, A glimpse behind high walls and closed doors, By Carolyn De Dea

Contemporary authors look to The New York Times bestseller lists as mileposts on the road to fame and fortune, but the really exclusive list started 450 years ago and is a better gauge of immortality.

It’s one thing to dream about the royalty checks of Stephen King or Danielle Steel, and quite another to contemplate your legacy with a club which counts as its members Dante, Galileo, Martin Luther, John Milton, Voltaire and Victor Hugo. To join, all you have to do is write a book with a lasting impact on civilization containing enough anticlericalism, blasphemy or heresy to offend the Catholic Church.

The Index Librorum Prohibitorum (List of Prohibited Books) listed publications prohibited by the Roman Catholic Church. The list aimed to protect the faith and morals of the faithful by preventing the reading of immoral books or works containing theological errors. Various editions also contained Church rules on the reading, selling and censorship of books.

Books that passed inspection were printed with nihil obstat (nothing forbids) or Imprimatur (let it be printed) on the title page.

The list was not simply a reactive work. Catholic authors could defend their writings and prepare a new edition with corrections, either to avoid or to limit a ban. Pre-publication censorship was encouraged; self-censorship, however, was incalculable.

History

The first list was published in Catholic Netherlands in 1529 and the first Roman edition 30 years later, the work of Pope Paul IV. The very first lists were the work of the Sacred Congregation of the Inquisition of the Roman Catholic Church (later the Holy Office). The Congregation of the Index was abolished in 1917, when the rules on book-reading were again re-elaborated. From that date on the Holy Office (again) took care of the Index.

The Index was regularly updated until the 1948 edition, which censored 4,000 titles. Moral deficiency and sexual explicitness could be found in some (e.g., the sex manual The Perfect Marriage). Almost every modern Western philosopher was included, even those who believed in God, such as Descartes, Kant and Berkeley. Atheists like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche were not included because works which contradict Catholic dogma automatically are forbidden. Some important works are absent simply because nobody bothered to denounce them.

The Index’s effects were felt throughout much of the Catholic world. For many years, it was difficult to find copies of banned works outside of major cities. The Index as an official list having force of law was abolished in 1966 under Pope Paul VI, largely due to practical considerations. However, the moral obligation of not circulating or reading books which endanger faith and morals was reaffirmed at the same time.

All books by Thomas Hobbes, Émile Zola and Jean-Paul Sartre were objectionable, but most writers could land only single titles on the list: Richardson’s Pamela or Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, for examples.

· Joseph Addison· Dante Alighieri· Francis Bacon· Honoré de Balzac· Simone de Beauvoir· Jeremy Bentham· Henri Bergson· George Berkeley· Giordano Bruno· John Calvin· Giacomo Casanova· Auguste Comte· Nicolaus Copernicus· Erasmus Darwin· Daniel Defoe· René Descartes· Denis Diderot· Alexandre Dumas· (father and son)· Desiderius Erasmus· Gustave Flaubert· Anatole France· Galileo Galilei· Edward Gibbon · André Gide· Graham Greene· Heinrich Heine· Thomas Hobbes· Victor Hugo· David Hume· Immanuel Kant· Nikos Kazantzakis· John Locke· Martin Luther· Niccolò Machiavelli· John Stuart Mill· John Milton· Blaise Pascal· François Rabelais· Samuel Richardson· Jean-Jacques Rousseau· George Sand· Jean-Paul Sartre· Baruch de Spinoza· Laurence Sterne· Jonathan Swift· Voltaire· Émile Zola ·

Worthy candidates who didn’t make the cut

Some authors with views generally unacceptable to the Church (e.g., Charles Darwin, Karl Marx or Hitler) were never put on the Index. Mein Kampf did not make it because censors continually postponed and eventually terminated its examination. Also out of luck were Aristophanes, Juvenal, François Rabelais, John Cleland, James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence.

Book Fever
By Marcia Loy

Canadian Authors

You can always tell book people. They are well dressed and their hair is really clean.

—Overheard by Constance Casey

The Custodian of Paradise by Wayne Johnston, 2006. Here’s another great Canadian writer. This book has one of the more eccentric heroines I’ve encountered. The book begins when Sheilagh Fielding goes to the Newfoundland Registry to find a deserted island, one that had once been inhabited but no longer is. She promptly moves there and slowly we learn about her life to date and why she’s there. The language is compelling and the story imaginative.

Excerpt: How bereft I was of all that was so precious to other people. The immigrants had brought with them ancestral photographs and heirlooms, keepsakes, letters from which they hoped their descendants would piece together some sort of family history. I had brought none of the few family photographs I possessed. They were in a box in a closet in my room just as they had been for years, looked at by no one, not even me. I had astonished my landlord by giving him three years’ rent the day before I left. I warned him that a friend of mine would come to check on the room from time to time to make sure that he didn’t, in my absence, rent it out to someone else. But I had made no such arrangement. Both keys to the room were in one of the trunks.

Life of Pi by Yann Martel, 2001. This was the book that made me stop reading the back covers or dust jackets of novels. They often give you too much information, information I think the writer wants to unfold. This book won the Man Booker Prize. The author was born in Spain. His parents were Canadian. He lived in Costa Rica, France, Mexico and now lives in Montreal. Life of Pi is a gripping, mysterious, wonderful story, different from anything I’d read.

Excerpt: I love Canada. I miss the heat of India, the food, the house lizards on the walls, the musicals on the silver screen, the cows wandering the streets, the crows cawing, even the talk of cricket matches, but I love Canada. It is a great country much to cold for good sense, inhabited by compassionate, intelligent people with bad hairdos. Anyway, I have nothing to go home to in Pondicherry.

The doctors and nurses at the hospital in Mexico were incredibly kind to me. And the patients, too. Victims of cancer or car accidents, once they heard my story, they hobbled and wheeled over to see me, they and their families, though none of them spoke English and I spoke no Spanish. They smiled at me, shook my hand, patted me on the head, left gifts of food and clothing on my bed. They moved me to uncontrollable fits of laughing and crying.

The Stone Angel by Margaret Laurence, 1964. It’s rare to find a book whose main character is an old woman confronting the end of her life, especially one written in the sixties. Hagar Currie may be hard to love, but she’s easy to sympathize with. This book was written by one of Canada’s most respected writers and was one of a series she wrote that took place in the Manawaka area of Canada.

Excerpt: The boys worked in the store after school. They didn’t get paid for it, of course. It didn’t do them any harm, either. Youngsters were expected to help out in those days—they didn’t laze around as they do now. Matt, skinny and bespectacled, worked doggedly, with neither a smile nor a complaint. But his fingers were all thumbs—he’d knock over a stack of lamp glasses or jolt a bottle of vanilla essence from a shelf, and then he’d catch it from Father, who couldn’t bear clumsiness. When Matt was sixteen, he asked Father for a rifle and leave to go with Jules Tonnerre to set winter traplines up at Galloping Mountain. Father refused, naturally, saying Matt would likely blow a foot off, and a pretty penny it would set him back to have an artificial one made, and anyway he wasn’t having any son of his gallivanting around the country with a half breed.

Our columnist had to stop here to go wash her hair.

Do you have a favorite novel you’d like to share with Atención readers? If so send a few lines and an excerpt to marciabookfever@hotmail.com.

Marcia Loy is a member of the steering committee of the Authors’ Sala and a volunteer at the Biblioteca Pública.

A glimpse behind high walls and closed doors
By Carolyn De Dea

Book Signing
San Miguel Mexican Interiors
Sandy Baum
Sat, May 17, 2pm
Home 26 Circuito de Frida
Rancho Los Labradores

Photographer Sandy Baum began compiling a collection of interior shots of local homes during the Biblioteca Pública’s House and Garden Tours, visits to Rancho Los Labradores and other events. The result is his book San Miguel Mexican Interiors.

Sandy Baum has been a professional photographer and pilot for over 40 years. His last construction project, just before moving to San Miguel, was three commercial buildings at the Grand Canyon in Arizona. A full-time resident of San Miguel since November 2004 he recently provided aerial photos to the Botanical Garden’s board of directors, who were in the process of establishing boundaries and guidelines for future planning.

Baum’s architectural training, experience in construction and a sharp eye for detail contribute to his extraordinary photographs of interiors and exteriors. He looks for everyday subjects that many people pass by and draws attention to items that might normally go unnoticed.

More than 350 color photographs appear in the book which offers a glimpse of what lies behind the high walls and the closed doors. This book would not have been possible without the generosity of the San Miguel homeowners who open their homes every Sunday for the House and Garden tours organized by Jennifer Hamilton.