What’s it like to write books in a country where people don’t read?
I was sitting in the waiting room at a bus station in San Jose, Costa Rica, when I realized that out of about 100 people waiting for the bus, I was the only one reading. This was my second trip to Costa Rica, and in the month I was there, I saw two people reading – one, my hostess, who read the newspaper delivered to her house every morning; the other, my young teacher, who brought a novel with her to class to read on her break. During the two months of my third trip, I saw one more – a young man reading a book in a restaurant.
Given Costa Rica’s reputation as a country with an educated populace, I was surprised by the apparently low incidence of reading, so I started introducing the topic into conversations. Everyone I talked with – an unscientific sample that included a publisher, several writers and teachers, and an officer of a national journalists association – agreed: by and large, Costa Ricans are not readers. They watch television. They read emails and Facebook entries. They play videogames. They don’t read. If that is indeed true, how, I wondered, did it come about?
The books that students are most likely to read in school appear on a master list drawn up by the Ministry of Education after a complicated process of evaluation. That list plays a significant part in what books are actually available in bookstores.For instance, it was easy for me to find a copy of La Loca de Gandoca at the main bookstore in San Isidro de El General, a small city in a mountain valley south of San Jose. That book actually did get onto the education list and stayed there for years; though it has recently been removed, its longstanding status has kept it on the store shelves. But I could find neither of Rossi’s newer novels at that store, nor were they available in the biggest bookstore close to the National University in downtown Heredia, a university town near San Jose. To find Rossi’s Límon Blues and Límon Reggae, I had to trek down to bookstores in central San Jose.
How then, I wondered, do people who want to read books get hold of them? A writer in San Isidro, where I was studying Spanish, told me she takes the bus to San Jose periodically and returns laden with bags of books, used and new. Even when books are available in bookstores, in a country where the per capita income is less than one-fifth the per capita income in the U.S., the cost for many readers is prohibitive.
As an alternative, readers can go to the public library, but that, too, is likely to provide slim pickings. After several visits to the public library in San Isidro, a city of 45,000, I discovered that what I had thought was the reserve section of books – a few rows of shelves behind the main desk – was in fact the entire collection. There were two separate rooms for children, but of the books scattered sparsely across the shelves, many were Walt Disney books in Spanish and most were for the very young.
When I talked with novelist Rossi about the dearth of books in that library, she said, “The library system is a disaster because books are not considered important. This started in the first government of Óscar Arias when literature started being dangerous.” She sees the de-emphasis on reading in the schools in the same light. “They don’t want people that think. They don’t want people that read. So they keep the teachers very low paid with this problem of not paying them for the preparation of classes because all they want to have is manpower that is easy to manipulate and that will adjust to any salary, not people that think. I don’t like conspiracy theories but you can see the picture.
In what Rossi believes is a new non-reading Costa Rica, imagine the challenge facing publishers. Rossi’s publisher, Felipe Vaquerano Pineda, manager of Editorial Legado, sat down with me one afternoon in the crowded cafeteria at the University of Costa Rica to talk about his publishing life in a country with only 4 million people, most of them not book readers. Obviously, it would be helpful if the market for Costa Rican books could expand beyond Costa Rica, so Editorial Legado has started an online bookstore to sell its own books as well as books by other publishers in Central America with the hope, he said, of getting “the whole Central American production to distribution to every part of the world.” So far, the traffic on the Librería Legado site is not high because Costa Ricans are not accustomed to buying books in that way and because the cost of mailing adds a bit to the price. But orders are trickling in from countries outside Costa Rica.
Faced with what is now still a very limited market, Vaquerano Pineda hedges his bets by publishing only books by authors who have at least one work on the Ministry of Education list – or are “very good” by the standards of his father, Sebastian Vaquerano López, who started the company. Editorial Legado also keeps print runs modest – 15,000 for a bestselling children’s book at the top of the list while a new novel like Rossi’s Limon Reggae may sell fewer than 1,000 copies in its first year.
What about authors who are not well known and who don’t have books on the Ministry of Education list? There are publishers who publish new authors, he said – publishers like Ediciones Lanzallamas, a new company that expresses the hope on its website that it will eventually publish writers from throughout the Spanish-speaking world.
I talked with one San Isidro writer, Marta Barboza Valverde, who paid for printing her history of her grandmother’s role as a pioneer. Seven years in the making, the book – Dorotea – is a product of interviews, memories, and her own intimate knowledge of the terrain of the life of this hardy woman who used horses to carry letters, matches, coffee, and other goods across the mountains to and from this valley that was once cut off from the outside world. The book came out under the imprint of the Asociación de Escritores y Editores de Pérez Zeledón, the cantón where San Isidro is located. A former teacher, Barboza Valverde had also written a children’s book on the miracle of reading — Inquilinos de papel – and published that, too, through the Asociación. She told me she had gotten no help in promoting either book from the Ministry of Education, although the Municipalidad of San Isidro did buy 100 copies of Dorotea.
Barboza Valverde invited me to sit in on Friday evening sessions of the Asociación, and there I found as good evidence as any of writers’ will to endure in unencouraging circumstances. Nine or ten people sat around a long table in the narrow office on the ground floor of the municipal library. A rack along one wall displayed members’ books, as well as a pamphlet review the association puts out from time to time, collecting poems and other short pieces by the writers who gather weekly to share their work.
After each reading, the writers present offered suggestions – meditatively rereading their colleagues’ lines aloud with their own inflections and rhythms. Sometimes attention wandered, private conversations stirred, but eventually the focus returned to the work under scrutiny. It was a hot night, so the door to the street was open and the roar of trucks and horns from the traffic outside sometimes nearly drowned out the lines – “Me abandono al tiempo,/ un rio manso e inexorable” – the start of a poem by Ilieth Barboza Gamboa, writing about the world as perceived by someone blind. It ends with the question that lies behind many a writer’s work: Is time worth as much when it is lived in the dark? – Carol Polsgrove, April 2011. For more on writing in Costa Rica, see Anacristina Rossi and Fernando Contreras Castro.
~This is very interesting for me since I’m a Costa Rican writer who specializes in English! The reading crowd here is diminishing little by little, surrendering to TV and Internet. There are a few that still gather round in small venues to talk about upcoming authors and new books coming out.
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