As the year drags on, we’re bombarded with more and more lists of the books we should read.
‘Should’ is a killer. It’s like anti-marketing, but it didn’t stop the world’s top publisher pushing this out the other day https://www.penguin.co.uk/articles/2020/may/20-books-to-read-by-40.html?
I mean, I like Nick Hornby as much as the next guy, but my goodness, could that list be any more normal? I suppose Cloud Atlas is a little strange - the structure is unconventional and it has that SF thread running through it, but where are we if that’s the outlier of weirdness?
So, in the spirit of embracing the weird, here’s something conspicuous by its absence from any list, despite having sold more than a million copies - Saddam Hussein's opus 'Zabibah and the King'. It’s a love story set in 8th century Tikrit. To avoid accusations of favouritism, the dictator published it anonymously three years before his downfall.
Here we have the two bestselling versions side by side. The original cover was created by Canadian artist Jonathon Earl Bowser, who was never paid for his work, but doesn’t seem too bothered about it. He takes the view that copyright violation is important, but still minor compared to genocide. Disney could take a leaf out of his book. On the other hand, the English language edition is really something. I'm not sure this cover works for Romance, but what do I know?
Another dictator, another failed artist (I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that the anonymous publishing didn’t work as planned, or rather that it worked exactly as planned). What does that tell us about these people? What does it tell us about the creative act?
Some of the answers are straightforward - just like dictators, artists want attention. Apart from the other obvious historical example, it’s hard not to think about Boris Johnson’s novel ‘72 Virgins’, and his rejected screenplay that wasn’t even a screenplay. What’s really striking is that Boris and Saddam both possessed a powerful desire to put their stories into the world, but were unwilling, or more likely unable, to do the work. They both took the bizarre route of attaining fame and power, then leveraged it into getting published.
It’s almost as if getting their stories out there was the point of it all.
What kind of emotional damage does it take to leave someone with such a powerful compulsion, and none of the tools to fulfil it? I don’t actually know much about Johnson’s upbringing, but Saddam’s was heartbreaking. Cancer killed his father and brother while he was still in the womb. His pregnant mother was so depressed she tried to abort him. When the abortion failed and baby Saddam was born, she wanted nothing to do with him, so he went to live with an uncle. Could Boris have suffered as badly?
I hope not.