“What is the meaning of celebrating a book fair in a country where every day poverty and indigence increase (with) thousands of layoffs?” The book “has a very special meaning in this period (…) it represents everything that is under attack in the world of culture.”
Receiving a standing ovation during her opening speech at the Fair, the writer Liliana Heker, 81, set the tone for a literature in resistance against a policy of austerity and deregulation, under the ultraliberal government of President Milei since December, which affects cultural credits, academic credits, and reading itself.
“In January, booksellers told us of a drop in sales of 20% over one year, in February of 25%, and in March of almost 40%,” assures AFP Juan Pampin, president of the house of independent publishing Corregidores and the Argentine Book Chamber.
The book is suffering on all sides: On the raw material side, whose prices have exploded with the 54% devaluation in December, driving up the price of imported products (therefore paid in dollars). And in terms of the reader’s purchasing power, strangled by inflation accumulating at 288% over one year.
– The city of booksellers –
In bookstores in central Buenos Aires, the latest publications sell on average for around 18,000 pesos (18 euros), in a country where the minimum wage barely exceeds 202,000 pesos (211 euros).
And yet a government project planned to deregulate book prices, repealing a law which protected small booksellers.
The shock wave is strong in an Argentina with a literary fiber, the homeland of Borges, Cortazar, Sabato. A country which, symbolically, was the first in Latin America “to produce translations abandoning standard Spanish, to incorporate Latin American terms”, underlines Mr. Pampin.
A country, which “by far in Latin America has the most booksellers per capita”, between 1,000 and 1,200, the vast majority in Buenos Aires.
The Book Fair (April 25-May 13) welcomes some 1,500 exhibitors from around forty countries, more than a thousand diverse cultural offerings, between conferences, workshops and debates. But for the first year, symbolically, the government has no stand, a symptom of an ambient bitterness between the world of culture and the Milei administration.
Simple question of “economy”, insisted the presidential spokesperson, according to which a stand would have cost more than 303,000 euros “an exorbitant sum, completely crazy for the period we are living in”.
– Milei, the book and the lecture –
“Lie,” replied the el Libro Foundation, organizer of the Fair, which disputes this amount. While its president Alejandro Vaccaro attacks Milei head-on, accusing him of “a merciless and unjustified attack” against cultural expression and of “definancing” the show, via the end of sponsorship by Banco Nacion, the public bank.
However, the Head of State has monopolized the attention of the Book Fair. He had requisitioned a large exhibition space to present his book, with thousands of people expected, according to the presidency. Then he canceled these days, citing the “level of hostility” towards him “which raises suspicion of an attempt to sabotage the presentation of the book”.
Ironically, Milei the essayist was a darling of the same Fair in recent years when a popular economist-polemicist on TV sets, he came to present and sign his latest opus every May in front of a packed room.
It is finally in an 8,000-seat concert hall, far from the Fair, that he will present his book at the end of May, in political meeting mode. “Capitalism, Socialism and the Neoclassical Trap,” Milei’s 18th book, promises a narrative “from economic theory to political action.”
And the “anarcho-capitalist” economist who became president will hold, as at the Davos Forum in January, a master class in economics, his favorite exercise.
