It’s Kind of a Love Story ... if You Love Murder and Torture

“Saddam Hussein spent the final weeks before the war writing a novel predicting that he would lead an underground resistance movement to victory over the Americans, rather than planning the defense of his regime. As the war began and Saddam went into hiding, 40,000 copies of ‘Begone Demons’! were rolling off the presses.”

-- Daily Telegraph

Dec. 17, 2003

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Memo From: The Editorial Staff

To: Saddam Hussein

RE: “Begone, Demons!”

Dear Mr. President:

First, let me tell you how thrilled everyone here at the publishing house is to be involved with this terrific novel! We’ve all spent a few days with the manuscript, and we think that both you and your agent, Andrew Wylie, will understand that a few small changes will help your hilarious, moving, gripping and ultimately life-affirming book reach its largest audience.

* We’re concerned about the opening chapter. You’ve called it a “Prologue,” which may help to set the stage a bit, but we’re not sure that a gas attack on a Kurdish village is really the “grabber” that a book with this kind of potential needs. And is the narrator’s use of the second-person plural ironic? It’s hard to tell. We suggest moving the entire chapter to later, somewhere after the chapter titled “We Gotta Break a Few Eggs.”

* In the romantic flashback in Chapter Three, “Our Magnificent Manhood,” there’s a wonderful pair of sequences describing the conceptions of Uday and Qusay. We particularly like the part where “our eyes, burning with the twin passions of love for woman and love for country, drank in the beautiful woman unveiled before us,” and then, later, “after a bout of lovemaking both violent and tender, she held us close and whispered, ‘You are like a magnificent camel. Both powerful and long-lasting,’ and we laughed, stubbed out our cigarette and went to use the telephone to order a series of totally justified executions.”

I guess what we’re missing is a description of the lovemaking itself. “Violent and tender” may not be explicit enough for Americans -- especially since elsewhere in the novel you write with such passion about the “tangled limbs of the enemy dead” and the “awestruck wonder of all who gazed upon our nude body, matted with wire-thick hair.”

* Our lawyers are fairly insistent that you remove the chapter describing Sean Penn’s visit. We are marketing this manuscript as a “novel” and it will be stocked on the fiction shelves, but libel laws regarding publicly known personalities still apply.

* We’re concerned about the frequency with which you -- or, better put, the character called “Saddam Hussein” -- orders the death of many of the novel’s ancillary characters. On pages 2, 5, 7, 13-45, 53, 56, 57, 60, 70-84, 86, 88, 90, 93-119, 122-137, 140, 145, 147, 150, 151, 154-168, 176, 180, 183, 187, 190, 200-239, 269, 274, 278, 280, 285, 294, 295-337, 339, 350, 353, 358, 360-378, 392-449, 459, 460, 462-504 and 507 you order the deaths and/or imprisonment and/or torture of so many people -- excuse me, characters in the novel -- that it becomes confusing and, we think, interrupts the flow of the narrative.

Can you pick just a few key enemies and traitors and really zero in on those, and we’ll trust the reader to know that a leader of such “dynamic and ruthless mercy” (as you put it) must have had similar dealings with others? In this case, we really think that less is more.

* Finally, the second half is wonderfully gripping and suspenseful. It’s a spellbinding tale of a man who leads his people in a courageous movement to expel the invaders. Just great stuff, really. And yet the entire tenor of the section is hard to square with the image so many book buyers now have of you, dazed, pale, out of sorts, caked in your own filth.

We’re all trying to brainstorm ways to deal with this disconnect. Is it possible -- and remember, we’re all just pitching here, we’re all on the same team -- that the final section could be altered slightly to focus less on a heroic and courageous underground resistance movement and more on, say, a heroic and courageous defense at a trial?

Again, these are just our preliminary thoughts. It goes without saying that “Begone, Demons!” is going to be a very important part of our ‘04-’05 book list. “Begone, Demons”? Heck, it’ll be “Begone, Copies!” from the bookstores if we all do our part.

-- The Editorial Staff