Daniel Quinn Writes: Readers of ISHMAEL nowadays are surprised to learn that, when it first came out, no one knew quite what to expect. Even the publisher didn't hold out much hope for the success of such a book. A thinly-plotted philosophical voyage helmed by a lowland gorilla? The idea was an improbable one, to say the least. Nonetheless, because it had received a lot of publicity as the winner of the half-million-dollar Turner Tomorrow Award, it was widely reviewed, and its reviewers generally agreed with Ray Bradbury's that it was "a genuine discovery." For me, however, the success of ISHMAEL was not going to be measured in sales. I knew the book wouldn't completely languish on bookstore shelves, but that wasn't the point. Would it REACH anyone? I couldn't be sure that a single reader would receive it as what I intended it to be—a thunderbolt. The fact is, eight years earlier, one of the country's most powerful literary agents had assured me that, no matter how I finally managed to write it, my book would not be received as a thunderbolt but as a boring irrelevance. Following the book's publication in January 1992, this state of doubt lasted about one week, which is how long it took for the first letter from a reader to reach me. The letter dispelled all my doubts: The thunderbolt had been received—at least by one reader. By the end of another week, I knew this one reader was no exception. Another dozen readers let me know that ISHMAEL had forever changed the way they see the world. Thereafter the stream of letters flowed in nonstop, three or four a day, day after day, month after month, always bearing the same message: "ISHMAEL has forever changed the way I see the world." But at the same time, little by little, the letters dragged me to the edge of an important new realization about the nature of new ideas and the way they're taken in by the reading public. What I eventually saw was this: Understanding of a complex and subtle system of new ideas isn't like a light activated by an on/off switch. It's like a light activated by a dimmer switch. I realized that people could (and did) genuinely love the "light" they received from ISHMAEL---even if they were only getting forty or fifty percent of it. No one complained about getting too little, even when it was obvious to me that most of my message was still in the dark for them. This is how I came to learn what I was going to do with the rest of my life. It couldn't have happened without ISHMAEL---and it couldn't have happened without ISHMAEL's readers, who compelled me to a new understanding of what still needs to be done. I've been working on "what still needs to be done" ever since---and expect to be working on it for the rest of my life! --Daniel Quinn back to the list of Books Our Friends Wrote |
