Salon du Livres Opens Amid Controversy
Rüdiger Wischenbart -- Publishers Weekly, 3/13/2008 1:10:00 PM
The Salon du Livre, the hugely popular book exhibition and festival in Paris, opened last night after enduring weeks of controversy from Arab publishers and writers about its decision to name Israel as its guest of honor. The Egytian bestselling author Alaa Al Aswani has denounced Israel as a “country responsible for crimes against humanity,” but Al Aswani will nevertheless attend Salon to promote his new book, Chicago – while planning to distribute pictures of Palestinian and Lebanese children who became victims of Israeli politics. And a number of Arab countries, including Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Lebanon, are boycotting the show.
Serge Eyrolles, the president of the “Syndicat National du Livre” (National Book Syndicate), the organizer of the Salon, said he regreted the political turn of events, as the book fair had invited “the Israeli literature,” and not the state of Israel. However, Israeli president Shimon Peres opened the Salon, taking advantage of his current state visit to Paris celebrating six decades of the French-Israeli relationship, thereby turning the literary presentations into a decidedly official event.
Oddly enough, the organizers also chose to invite only authors who write in Hebrew, thereby excluding widely recognized Palestinian writers who write in Arab. Still, 39 writers have been invited, with celebrities like Amos Oz and David Grossmann among those coming.
The conflict echoes an earlier controversy when in 2004, China was the guest of honor, and initially the organizers of the French show had omitted to invite the Chinese Nobel laureate writer Gao Xingjian. Gao, a Chinese exile living in Paris and a harsh critic of the Chinese authorities, had been declared to be “a French writer” by his home country, while the Salon had hope to avoid an open conflict by welcoming only the official delegation of writers as sent by Beijing – stirring up wide protests of pro democracy activities.
The French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy recently called the Arab call for a boycott “a hostage taking of writers” by some Arab countries which he considered “unacceptable and absurd”. The point is even more important as similar protests have been also launched against the invitation of Israel to the Italian book fair in Turin in May.
All those debates highlight a growing dilemma for such cultural presentations as the Salon du Livre. Traditionally, book fairs and reading festivals have won part of their recognition and popularity with the audience by being platforms for open cultural and literary debates, with a clear celebration of the freedom of expression and of human rights. But with official politics taking over much of these celebrations for their goals, the literary events tend to lose their innocence – which results in clashes like those around the Salon du Livre in Paris.
