Features
On A Mission
by Judith Gurewich
I always agree with my books. It wouldn’t cross my mind to publish works whose perspectives or stories I can’t embrace. This feels particularly important when it comes to politics, economics, social issues or even philosophy, but fiction is no exception. Publishing is, to me, a very intimate enterprise. My books represent me as much as I represent them.
But there is something else at work that I have become aware of only recently. My books reflect less who I am, as I think I know myself, than they introduce me to who I have become—sometimes behind my own back. I had no idea, for example, that I could be passionate about a book about Cambodia during its direst years. I had to overcome not only my squeamishness, but also my conviction that the banality of evil knows no borders and therefore doesn’t require particular scrutiny. (Horrors are the same everywhere.) But that is the transformative power of literature: The Elimination, the fascinating autobiography of the Cambodian director Rithy Panh, who escaped the Khmer Rouge camps, is written with such intelligence, sensitivity, and style that it allows you to both bear the worst and surrender to a world you understand nothing about. It made me realize that while the mechanisms of evil are universal, what triggers the awful processes of dehumanization, and the rationale that is constructed to carry it through, are never the same.
The boundary between what happens around us and inside us is more porous than it ever was; now, more than ever, the personal truly is political, and vice versa. Good books must reflect but also affect this trend, by feeding our souls and enlarging our vision. I, for one, want to believe that quality is not subjective, that even colors and tastes must be discussed, and that critical thought ought to be distinguished from mere opinion (to which, as we well know, everyone is entitled). Paradoxically, the less green I become as a publisher, the more narrow-minded I become. My mission statement today can be reduced to a one-liner: unless a book provides, at some level or another, a real electric shock that reveals something you didn’t know, either about yourself or the world around you, then forget it!
This is not to say that all the books I’m publishing these days must be sad, serious, or full of foreboding. Quite the contrary! Take The Path of Hope by Stephane Hessel (who is ninety years old) and Edgar Morin (ninety-five years old), for example. This is an appetizing menu for a better world, “a political path to national salvation.” In his invigorating foreword to The Path of Hope, Jeff Madrick picks up right away how this little tract provides Occupy Wall Street with the perfect outline to support its cause.
Age, for sure, is no deterrent to a defiant spirit. Take Benoite Groult’s inspiring and lively autobiography My Escape, which covers almost the whole of the twentieth century in France (and a bit of the twenty-first, too). Gorgeous and elegant at ninety-one years old, Benoite tells us how it felt to be a young woman in Paris when you could neither vote nor request custody of your own children, without even realizing that something was wrong. “I am a ‘young’ feminist,” Benoite told me over lunch in Paris, between oysters and white wine. “I started working for the women’s movement only when I was in my fifties.” What a delight this book is! As a novelist of women’s fiction with a subtle yet highly persuasive feminist message, Benoite Groult has sold millions of copies; and you can be sure that her own story has all the gusto, the intelligence, and the erotic power of her fiction. She is truly a model of feminine resilience, optimism, and perseverance. Without her, France would still think that all lawyers, doctors, and professors are men! (She feminized the language, earning her the damnation of the Academie Francaise.)
When it comes to fiction, I deplore the fact that my “narrow” mission statement seems to attract primarily works in translation, as if foreign writers were more in tune with my determination to apply shock therapy. My latest acquisition, The Flowers of War by Chinese author Geling Yan (which has been turned into a movie with Christian Bale), defies the imagination, punctures our prejudices, and teaches us history while at the same time nourishing our primitive craving for romance. We need more books like that in America: novels that reach far inside us while bringing in what has been kept out (often for bad reasons, as I have recently learned), that grab us from the get-go, making us forget we are reading (so often I catch myself watching myself read, not a good sign) while subtly but surely kicking us out of our comfort zones.
Judith Gurewich is the Publisher of Other Press.
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This article originally appeared in the Holiday 2011 issue of the Other Press newsletter. Click here to subscribe.
