The Porcupine

First UK edition. 8vo. Pp. [vi (last blank)], 138. Maroon cloth boards, blocked in gilt to spine; pale blue endpapers. Jacket design by Peter Dyer (priced £9.99 to front flap).

Signed by Barnes to title page.

Author's seventh novel. Following the collapse of Communism, the deposed leader of a former Soviet satellite state stands trial under his own totalitarian laws, for political murder and corruption.

Willingly blurring the frontier between reality and fiction, Barnes's dictator closely resembles Bulgaria's former strongman, Todor Zhivkov (1911–1998) – even if his fictional protagonist is robust and unrepentant in the mould of East Germany's leader Eric Honecker (1912–1994) or Romania's head of state Nicolae Ceausescu (1918–1989), while the original was sick, fragile and apologised in court to "those who suffered unjustly".

The Bulgarian translation by Obsidian Press, titled Бодливо свинче (Bodlivo Svinche), was published six weeks before the British edition. The first title of this hastily set up company by his Bulgarian translator, Dimitrina Kondeva, to whom the book is dedicated, it sold 10,000 copies in its first week of release. The two had met while Barnes was on a visit to Sofia in November 1990 to promote the Bulgarian translation of Flaubert's Parrot, amid great shortages of food and petrol but an abundance of hope and fear. It resulted in a lengthy essay, "Candles for the Living", published in the London Review of Books, and the author followed up by soliciting information from her on "the texture of life" in the post-Zhivkov era, to incorporate into "an embryo of a nameless novel".

While it would be a gross exaggeration to credit Ms Kondeva as a co-author, the resultant to and fro between author and translator vis-a-vis the novel's arc led to both locus and place names being more Bulgaria-centric than originally envisaged. Additionally, a tussle over its ambiguous ending, authorising a plurality of interpretations according to Kondeva, such as the cyclical nature of history and the "steadfastness" of the Communists, was only resolved after a detailed riposte from Barnes putting forward structural arguments for its retention.

His job, he explained, was not to act as a guide to the "ideal" reader on the "correct" reading of the text, since "readers will always misinterpret books", therefore he expected "when the book is right and the reader wrong, then the publisher should stand by the author". Furthermore, "A novel has to end how it has to end, according to its own internal motions and forces".

In another letter to Ms Kondeva, used as a preface to the Bulgarian edition, Barnes warned his Bulgarian audience that "you will probably recognize bits of your recent history but all this really takes place in the country of my and [the reader's] mind." Nevertheless, it was rumoured that Zhivkov himself, who was sentenced to seven years' imprisonment after an 18-month trial in August 1992, had sent for a copy to read while in prison and had enjoyed it very much.

"The author trains his laser-bright intelligence and phosphorescent prose on the ambiguities raised by the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe." –New Republic

[Kondeva, Dimitrina. "The Story of Julian Barnes's The Porcupine: An Epistolary ½ Chapter." in Julian Barnes: Contemporary Critical Perspectives. Eds. Sebastian Groes and Peter Childs. Continuum, 2011. pp. 81–91.; Guignery, Vanessa. "Untangling the Intertwined Threads of Fiction and Reality in The Porcupine (1992) by Julian Barnes." in Pre and Post-publication Itineraries of the Contemporary Novel in English. Publibook, 2007: 49–71.]