A Coupon-Induced Quest

When a buddy sent me a coupon in the mail for $5 off a purchase at Half Price Books  (HPB), I insisted to myself I was only buying one book.  I want to buckle down in 2011 and read through the stack of books piling up unread on my shelves and desk.  Then, I’ll venture out to buy some more.  I immediately knew what I wanted to buy -- a book whose mere mention was practically taboo where I lived on the brass buckle of the Bible Belt, simply because it had the word satanic in the title.

I recall when the Ayatollah Khomeini issued the fatwa against Salman Rushdie for blasphemous novel The Satanic Verses, at the end of the '80s.  In a Vanity Fair article, Christopher Hitchens posited that the fatwa was issued in a bid to regain some Islamic street cred after reneging on his vow to never sign a treaty with Saddam Hussein.  Suddenly, with the utterance, Khomeini recast himself as the Defender of the Faith and shifted focus from his dealings with Hussein to the outrage of a novelist's heresy.

While I never heard the expected news of Rushdie's murder, what I didn't know about until reading the Hitchens article, was the deaths of "supporting cast" players.

The fatwa didn't merely suborn Rushdie's murder, but was "fat" enough to encompass those "involved in its publication."  Khomeini might have tossed in those "who read the blasphemous text," too, had that not opened the door on complicated explanations about whether or not he had read the offending novel himself.  If so, he'd call for his own death.  If not, how could he know?

The Japanese translator of Rushdie's novel, Hitoshi Igarashi, was stabbed to death.  Ettore Capriolo, the Italian translator, was knifed in Milan.  And The Satanic Verses publisher in Norway, William Nygaard, was shot thrice in the back outside his home in Oslo.

After reading about the plot of the lyrical novel, it has intrigued me enough to read the object of all the controversy, the frothy calls for censorship, the religious indignation -- except it was not to be found at the few HPB stores I visited.

Instead, I picked up and carried around the 2007 edition of the Houghton Mifflin Best American Essays, edited by David Foster Wallace, whose 2008 death was a profound disappoint me to me.  

Just a few days before his death, I spoke with a friend about Wallace's measured and thorough "Host" essay. We both praised it for being informative and fascinating.  It not only gave me a lot to consider, but I felt it armed me with new, detailed insight where I previously had none at all.

(Read the essay here.) [1]

Typically, death is a tragedy.[2]  I mean, there is always grief for those survivors left to make sense of the loss.  The perplexity of processing it is compounded in cases of suicide.  (I was also inexplicably affected by Spalding Gray’s suicide. [3]) Answer-searching seems more complex, more futile when the deceased was not the victim of a random accident, disease, medical complication, or other likely causes of demise -- ones that can be accounted for, even if it is ascribed to the profound misfortune of time and place wherein a freak accident cuts a life short.[4]

Then, I spied on the shelf an edition of the Billy Collins book of poems, Picnic, Lightning, which had one of my favorite pastoral paintings for cover art:  “Newburyport Meadows,” by Martin Johnson Heade.  For years I have been a fan of Billy Collins, whose poetry never fails to buoy me with phrases and imagery.  The serendipity of the cover art suggested perhaps I should purchase that book instead of the essay collection.

But, the quest concluded when I found a book I have wanted for some time, Fred Kaplan’s 1959: The Year that Changed Everything.

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[1] Though it was originally published in Atlantic Monthly, I read the article in the collection New Kings of Nonfiction, edited by Ira Glass of NPR and Public Radio International's This American Life.

[2] I say "typically" because for some persons severely wounded -- on a battlefield or in a remote area, for example -- or inflicted with a painful and terminal illness, there seems to be some comfort for survivors knowing their loved one is no longer suffering.  And, for a would-be assassin killed in the act of attempted murder, tragedy hardly seems the appropriate word.

[3]  I read an article about Gray that revealed some of his habits and perceptions...and some of the circumstances that led up to his disappearance.  Previous to that, he already held some fascination to me in his talent as a monologist.  It was heartbreaking to imagine what his wife and children were coping with in his final months, throughout the period of his disappearance, and beyond the discover of his body.  But, Gray’s suicide came as no real surprise, though the finality of such an act reverberates through the emotional landscape of all who knew and cared for him.

(Read the article on Spalding Gray -- "Vanishing Act" -- from New York Magazine.)

[4]  I certainly don't intend to imply there aren't complex and seemingly unanswerable questions of survivors (i.e., friends and family) from non-suicide deaths.  It's just that the purposefulness of the deceased's actions is at once angering and inexplicable -- and, in some ways, a thing survivors are likely to wrestle with and continually imagine how they might have said or done something differently to redirect the deceased from that option to another one that involved living.