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The Slow, Irresistible Rise of Against All Hope
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11365 |
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BOOK WORLD
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11 / 1986 |
1,035 Words |
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Cynthia Grenier
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The orders from bookstores across the land are coming in at a rate of 2,000 a week for Armando Valladares' harrowing account of his 23 years in Castro's prisons. His publishers, Alfred A. Knopf, have sent the book back to the printers for the fourth time, and expect to be going back again. Armando Valladares appeared on the Today Show, addressed the Council on Foreign Relations, talked to members of Congress at a. gathering organized by Rep. Jack Kemp, and went on a nation-wide book and lecture tour. The New York Post and The Miami Herald ran lengthy excerpts from the book. A major Hollywood film is to be made from Against All Hope.
"Frankly," says Lee Goerner, Valladares' editor at Alfred Knopf, "I think we had too modest an idea of how the book would do in the beginning." Given the initial slow response in the press to the book, the publishers probably felt justified in their decision to issue the book in a limited printing-under 10,000. The publication date was May 9, and the first major review only appeared June 3, in The New York Times. John Gross compared Valladares' description of his experiences in Castro's prisons to those described by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in the gulag. (Indeed, every review of Against All Hope was to compare the book to The Gulag Archipelago.)
The following Sunday, the highly influential New York Times Book Review devoted a full page to the book, with a sympathetic and moving review. Ronald Radosh, author of The Rosenburg File (1983), considers himself a liberal yet had no trouble stating high in his review: "It has taken us 25 years to find out the terrible reality Mr. Castro has created a new despotism that has institutionalized torture as a mechanism of social control." It is to be remembered that it was The New York Times' correspondent Herbert Matthews who almost single handedly insured Castro's position as an international figure at the time he first appeared in the Sierra Maestra in the late fifties.
It was only in July that the press came out in full force behind the Valladares book, with the kind of reviews that all publishers dream of. Valladares himself flew to the United States from Madrid, where he now lives, giving interviews and meeting with editorial boards of newspapers and magazines. His extremely impressive manner contributed considerably to publications giving both him and his book prominent display in their pages.
Meanwhile in the rest of the world the book had become a best seller: France, England, Italy, Japan, Brazil, Scandinavia, Portugal, and Spain. In France Valladares appeared on the prestigious television program Apostrophes, where Isabel Allende was a fellow guest. She admitted that what he had to say about Cuba was unquestionably true, but said she still felt a "nostalgia" for the Cuba she had known. Britain's Sunday Times featured the book for two weeks, leading its arts section with a lengthy excerpt.
Scarcely a day passed in America this summer without another review or article in a national publication extolling the merits of the book. Many reviewers wondered why it had taken so long to recognize Castro for the tyrant he clearly had always been. Time: "For nearly 30 years, suggestions that Castro is a dictatorial goon have been greeted with scorn from many of the world's most glitzy intellectuals." George Will in Newsweek: "It (the Valladares book) will drive a stake through whatever remains of the romance between Castro and the 'literary left'."
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