Free The Life of an Unknown Man by Andreï Makine Page B

here is quite categorical about it…”
    Menacing shadows on a bloodred cover. The Occult Forces Behind the Revolution. Shutov smiles.
    “Ouch! That’s scary!”
    “That’s the idea. And you should have seen the ad I put together for the launch. There was this Russian monk praying in front of an icon with a crowd of devils dancing all around him…”
    “That’s not very close to the historical truth. Especially if your monk looked like Rasputin.”
    “Historians rewrite the truth every day. What interests us is the truth that gets the reader to reach for his wallet. You know what my boss’s motto is? ‘Only the blind are excused from buying our books.’ And it’s more or less the case. But you need imagination for it. When we were launching the book on Stalin I dug up a cleaning woman who’d worked at his dacha on the Black Sea. Imagine that! She’s a granny aged a hundred now, but I still managed to get her on TV and the interviewer (well, he’s one of our authors) questioned her in such a way that you might have thought she’d been Stalin’s mistress. The next day we’d sold out. That’s historical truth. Or take Bella, with No Taboos. It’s about a brothel where the Moscow underworld go. Well, to launch it on TV we had five prostitutes who swore everything in the book was true…”
    Vlad gets carried away, soon Shutov has not enough arms to hold the rolls of posters, the large-format photographs; Nicholas II adorned with the halo of a newly canonized saint; Stalin with a female figure in the background and a gangster thrusting open the collar of a blouse with the barrel of his revolver to reveal enormous, very pink breasts.
    “The same carnival yet again,” thinks Shutov, violently struck once more by the heady intoxication of the change. What energy this young Vlad has! And this easygoing cynicism, selling books like vacuum cleaners. All these publishing houses have sprung up in just a few years! And already they have this American-style know-how…
    Suddenly, in the armful of documents, Shutov catches sight of a view of a park, with sculptures beneath autumnal foliage. The Summer Garden… The picture vanishes beneath a swatch of color photographs: women embracing, men exchanging tender kisses…
    “That’s our series aimed at sexual minorities,” comments Vlad. “I told you. No one escapes us!” He laughs.
    Shutov remembers the carnival executioners who cut off his head earlier: that’s it, no one is to look sad. The parallel is disturbing.
    “You know, Vlad, in the old days, when I was young, a good many poets were published. The print runs for their books were not vast but there was… How can I put it?… Yes, there was real passion in those of us who read them. Often printed on very poor paper. Poetry was our bible…”
    “Yeah. I can see what kind of books you’re talking about. The old folks heave a sigh and call it ‘Great Literature.’ Listen, I’ll tell you what I think about it. I once met a girl, an American, in the same job as me. And she started giving me a lot of stuff, like: oh sure, we publish crap but that’s so we can publish Real Literature! What two-faced bastards these puritans are! Well, I wanted to put her on the spot so I quoted Marx: the only criterion of truth is the practical result. And in publishing the result is the number of sales, OK? If crap books sell it’s because they’re needed. You should have seen her face!”
    He roars with laughter then, glancing at the television, declares, “But the main thing is, if I published your poets with their small print runs, I’d never be able to afford wheels like that.”
    On the screen (the sound is off) the car races up toward the sunrise. “To be on time, when every second counts!” Vlad’s cell phone emits jazz notes and the conversation breaks into slangy English, incomprehensible to Shutov. Vlad covers the telephone with his hand, winks at Shutov, and whispers: “Only joking!…” Yes, only a joke,