Agatha Christie, the mystery of the “forbidden” title

What are ghost books, to which Andrea Kerbaker dedicates a delightful essay, just released for Salani? They seem to represent a new category in the universe of libraries, perhaps alongside that of lost books, of which we know that they existed and at most we have some information about the title or the plot (for example the texts – not yet books in the strict sense – of much of ancient Greek tragedy). They populate the libraries with absence. Ghosts, on the other hand, wander among the shelves, perhaps not always, with a certain vaporous presence. The fascination of ghost books (“those that, after a more or less ephemeral life – writes Kerbaker – disappear from circulation and never reappear” and therefore “exist and do not exist”) is perhaps greater, at least for bibliophiles than that , we apologize to the other half of heaven, embodied by the “faith of females” in the immortal even if certainly historically dated booklet that Da Ponte wrote for Mozart’s “So does it all”: “that there is everyone says it, where no one is He knows”.

In this case we know, indeed we could even visit it, the place not of “faith” but of ghosts: it is the Kasa dei Libri, the great library resulting from his raids as a collector – but open to enthusiasts and enriched by all sorts of donations – , which Kerbaker built in Milan with an annex in Angera on Lake Maggiore. There is a bit of everything in this unpredictable phantasmagoria: for example the sequel to the “Young Holden” that Salinger wrote for an issue of the New Yorker in ’65, and refused, after changing his mind at least once, to publish in volume. The story – all in all it doesn’t seem like much – was however released in Italy, and only in Italy, for a small publisher. Obviously, it barely had time to be announced, and Einaudi, which held the rights to Salinger, immediately blocked him. Some copies are left here and there, whoever owns them knows they have a small treasure in the library, or at least a fetish.

However, the list is long: it includes a book even more repulsive than usual written in ’44 by Céline, which despite the anti-Semitic fury was also banned in Pétain’s France, due to certain criticisms of the collaborationist government; or a cheerfully pornographic manual – and pseudonym – by Sebastiano Vassalli; or, an exemplary case in its own way in the history of politically correct, one of Agatha Christie’s most celebrated thrillers, “Ten Little Indians”. In the first edition, published in 1939 in Great Britain, it was entitled “Ten Little Niggers”. And she exhibited the word forbidden par excellence, not out of racist arrogance but because the writer was referring to an English nursery rhyme from the previous century, sung then by all children, which began exactly like this.

The American publisher, in that same year, did not want to know, however, and titled “And Then There Were None”, from which the first Italian translation will also derive literally (“And then there was none”); while in France the film that René Clair drew from it in ’54 was, who knows why, “Dix petits indiens”. The Indians had nothing to do with it (to tell the truth not even the “niggers” as such), but they had an enormous fortune, and have remained so in all new translations ever since: even if not in the UK, because until ’76, when he died, Christie wanted to keep the now very forbidden version at least at home. Nice proof of character. Or ringworm?