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The writer tries to burn the new edition of ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ with a flamethrower
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The book will be auctioned to raise funds.
The novel “The Handmaid’s Tale”, by the Canadian Margaret Atwood, now has a “fireproof edition”, proof of a possible burning: the publisher Penguin Random House has created a limited edition (of a single copy) for Put it up for auction at Sotheby’s.
The writer has lent herself to this game and appears in a video of the publisher equipped with a flamethrower and trying to burn this incombustible book, without success, “because powerful words cannot be destroyed,” the publisher says in the video.
“The Handmaid’s Tale” was published in 1985 and tells the story of an imaginary future in the United States where a few women with the ability to procreate are enslaved to have children that they then deliver to the ruling classes of a republic ruled by a handful of ultraconservative men.
The book achieved worldwide fame thanks to the television series created by Hulu; in that dystopian republic only a privileged few can read a limited number of works, and women are absolutely prohibited from doing so.
The novel itself has been banned several times in the past decade on grounds such as its “vulgarity” or because it promotes sexual promiscuity, according to a Marshall Bookstore count.
So far, and according to the Sotheby’s page, the “fireproof novel” has already reached $40,000, although he hopes that the bidding, open until June 7, will make it rise to $100,000.
The proceeds from the auction will go to PEN America, the national writers’ association, “in defense of freedom of expression.”
Penguin’s initiative, which is a nod to the mythical work Farentheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (where a fire brigade is dedicated to burning the only ones in a dystopian future), occurs when in the United States the debate on the prohibition of certain books, almost always for moral reasons and at the initiative of conservative individuals or groups.
According to the American Library Association, last year there were 729 attempts to censor 1,597 books in libraries, whether school, municipal or any other class.
In general, the banned books – at the initiative of parents’ associations, religious groups or sometimes individuals – usually have homosexual or transgender themes, or sometimes deal with issues of sex and racial violence with crude language, but censorship sometimes reaches works of resonance world like “1984” by George Orwell.
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This May, the New York Public Library Network launched the “Forbidden Books for All” initiative, making free electronic versions of some of the most frequently banned contemporary books across the country available to the public.