Publisher beats Spanish court gag by recreating banned mafia book from text of Don Quixote

A book about Spain’s drug-smuggling underworld banned last week by a Madrid court has been brought to readers online as a cut-and-pasted text from Spanish classic Don Quixote.  

Kicking against what they consider outdated censorship, a booksellers’ association has reacted to the seizure of the non-fiction book ‘Fariña’ by launching a website to replicate it word for word. 

The website includes a digital tool that searches for and locates the 80,000 words that make up the forbidden manuscript from within the text of Don Quixote, extracting them one by one to recompose the banned book. On Friday after two days online, the findingfarina.com had racked up over 30,000 hits, according to the Booksellers Guild of Madrid.

“We discovered that all the words of ‘Fariña' were contained one way or another in Don Quixote, and it was just a case of finding a mechanism to make them appear in the right order,” explains Fernando Valverde, the Guild secretary.

Words that weren’t around in the early 17th century and some proper nouns are made up by the search engine syllable by syllable from Miguel de Cervantes’ gigantic tome.

It is not clear whether the ruse is a legal way for people to read it. 

Publication and sale of 'Fariña’ have been suspended while a libel case brought by one of the book’s real-life characters is deliberated.  

The court was asked by José Alfredo Bea Gondar, a former mayor of the coastal town of O Grove in Galicia, to freeze distribution of ‘Fariña’ because of references to his alleged involvement in the unloading of a shipment of cocaine and a supposed negotiation between Colombia’s Cali cartel and local smugglers.

“It’s all completely false,” Mr Bea Gondar said in a television interview on La Sexta.

Mr Bea Gondar was investigated by former Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón and convicted of drug smuggling, but the sentence was overturned on appeal by the supreme court – all of which is stated in the latest edition of Fariña, written by journalist Nacho Carretero and first published in 2015 by Libros del KO.

“It’s a metaphor for the fact that in the digital era you can seize a book, but you cannot gag words,” says Mr Valverde. 

He added that the initiative aims both to show “solidarity” with the book’s writer and publisher, as well as taking a stand against censorship after a series of controversies in Spain over artists’ right to express political ideas. 

In the past month, the Madrid art fair Arco was marred by the withdrawal of a photographic exhibit featuring jailed Catalan politicians, and two rappers have been sentenced to prison for glorifying terrorism with their lyrics.