Former
Iranian prime minister and detained opposition leader Mir Hossein
Mousavi says Marquez's News of a Kidnapping is an accurate relfection
of his life under house arrest. Photograph: Majid/Getty
The Nobel-prize winning author
Gabriel García Márquez is revered for his evocation of a surreal and sometimes dangerous world where nothing is quite what it seems.
In this case, however, the country in question is not his native Colombia but
Iran under President
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Copies of Márquez's 1996 work
News of a Kidnapping have sold out from bookshops in Tehran this week after detained opposition leader
Mir Hossein Mousavi said the book's description of Colombian kidnappings offers an accurate reflection of his life under house arrest.
Mousavi and fellow opposition leader
Mehdi Karroubi have been under house arrest
since mid-February when thousands of Iranians poured onto the streets
in response to their calls for fresh protests in solidarity with
pro-democracy movements in the Arab world.
Since then, they have
had little access to the outside world. But Mousavi was allowed a brief
meeting with his daughters last week, for the first time in seven
months. The brief encounter took place in the presence of security
officials but Mousavi reportedly told his daughters: "If you want to
know about my situation in captivity, read Gabriel García Márquez's
News of a Kidnapping."
Mousavi's comments spread quickly across
Iran's huge online community, prompting hundreds of opposition
supporters to seek out the book. Queues formed in some bookshops, and
copies of the book sold out within days.
One Tehran-based
journalist said: "It took me couple of hours to find a copy of the
book. I first went to bookshops in the Karimkhan area, but none had a
copy left. I went to Enghelab Avenue and I was amazed to see people
queuing up to buy the book as if they were queuing up to buy a new
Harry Potter."
At least 10 large bookshops in the capital told the Guardian their stocks of the book had sold out. None of them would say why.
"It
got sold out in the last week or so, we have no copies left," said one
shopkeeper. "I don't know why it happened, I can't say."
News of
a Kidnapping, which was initially published in English in 1997,
describes the abduction in the early 1990s of high-profile Colombians,
including journalists and politicians, on the orders of the drug
kingpin Pablo Escobar.
A news website, Aftab, listed the book at
the top of bestseller chart last Thursday and Shargh, a reformist
newspaper, reported an unprecedented demand for the book in big
bookshops in Tehran.
García Márquez reacted to the news by
sharing on his Facebook page a blogpost about the episode by an Iranian reporter.
Supporters
of Mousavi have also launched a Facebook page, called "News of a
Kidnapping, the status of a president in captivity", where readers have
posted sections of the book. Some websites have put the Farsi
translation of the book online for free download.
Supporters of
Mousavi and Karroubi describe their status as "an abduction" and have
called on the UN to investigate their disappearances. They believe
Iran's supreme leader,
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was directly involved in them being placed under house arrest without any judicial ruling.