Andrei's blog

The Shadow of Three Little Pigs

The story of how I got into a book. (or just 2 book reviews)

What if a book became reality?

Potterheads1 will talk about paradise, but lets be real: you Do Not Want to be in a book. Realistically you don't have enough Courage, Luck, or Plot Armor to survive past the first chapter.

You might be living in a fantasy book from some other world right now, and not even notice the things readers looking at us are ready to sell their souls for. Think about it.

Fantasy is a strange genre where Physics is to complicated so you try to offset it with something "simpler." Quotation marks because this will happen: Harry Potter and Methods of Rationality (someone will overpower your friendship using math) and good luck surviving that! Let me make this clear: all worlds are equivalent, if you lived in one you wouldn't notice.

Oh so you know the plot? A convenient advantage indeed. But that means you are comparing a slightly different set of options: the Book World vs. Time Travel here on earth.

And if you have that choice you must choose Earth, because you know it better (I hope). And doing stock market manipulations should be easier here than in an unfamiliar environment. If you know the future: you are the richest person in the world.

If a book became reality it would be at best nothing special, and at worst a horror story.

That's a long introduction that is actually at a pretty big angle to what I am about to discuss below. (it's "just" 2 book reviews)

The Shadow of the Wind

Der Shatten des Windes(I read German translation) is a 2001 Spanish novel by Ruiz Zafon. (My admiration, if you actually remember the date or author from the last sentence.)

The setting is amazing: Somebody is trying to burn all books of an unknown author. The protagonist gets his hands on the last copy of a title and tries to track the author. Then the bookhunter shows up, introduces himself with the name of a character from the title and tries to buy/steal and burn it at any cost. You get the idea.

Unfortunately the novel spirals away from the plot and into character development. My Rating 8/10.

But there are some elements of the protagonist experiencing scenes from his book. So there is a half broken illusion of "the story repeats itself."

Now imagine this happens to you. You get a mysterious book, the last known copy of it aparently and...

Des Menschen Wolf

The English title is The Three Little Men according to Wikipedia, but Three Little Pigs: A Story according to the author's website.

I read it in German where the title translation is an outliar Des Menschn Wolf referring to the wolf instead of the pigs.

The English version was nowhere to be found, and German hardcovers are hard to come by.

The mysterious author in question is Apostolos Doxiadis (he is Greek which only adds to the atmosphere) who is still alive (born 1953).

The Plot

Obviously the whole thing is based on the fairy tale The Three Little Pigs. I am not sure how well known it is, but for me it was "the classic children story."

The setting: 3 borthers become the targets of a Capo2 who said each of them would die at the age of 42. Of course there is the entire psychological debate whether the threat is even real.

All 3 brothers try to use their own methods to protect themselves, the Eldest with Money, the Middle with Fame, the Youngest with [I am not going to spoiler that].

And then there is the killer who has to keep track of his targets over the course of decades.

Overall pretty interesting take on a classic fairly tale.

At the very end there is [some stuff I won't spolier] that make the illusion of it being a lost book waiting for someone to find it even stronger.

How I got it

It started on a weeked back in middleschool. My family was at a river, but I hated the water so my father handed me an ebook-reader and told me to read Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture. First thing I did was try to solve the Goldback Conjecture (haha) the second thing I did was finish reading the book the same day.

It was really good and probably one of the best books I had read up to that point.

As it turns out the author is famous for Logicomix which I learned about only by reading the jacket3 of Des Menschen Wolf hardcover.

My father handed it to me, proudly stating he dug up a grave just to get this last lost copy for me. The title and book summery on the back weren't particularly exciting but I had my expectations high. It was the same Author as that of Uncle Petros after all.

First time I tried reading, I complained it was boring. Nobody understood me,; how could That plot be boring.

In hindsight the reason is simple: By the MPAA4 it would be R rated (17+).

The hobbys of the adult characters are boring for the current me, and complete nonsense for the me from 2 years ago. (And it's not even necessary for the story progression.)

But now I finished it, and because The Shadow of the Wind preceeded it, I am now getting the creepy feeling of being in a book.

Is mine the last existing copy?

First google search gives you Wikipedia "Homo homini lupus" - completely unrelated. So the book is not really popular.

It has no Wikipedia page. (But Agatha Christie has a book called Five Little Pigs)

Here is the official website for Three Little Pigs information with no usefull information whatsoever.

Luckily some digging quickly revealed traces of the book. (It was suprising how much effort that took. I had to go further than Wikipedia)

Goodreads reveals that the book is in 4 languages: Greek (original), English, Spanish and German.

But then I start facing "Not Found" pages.

Apple Books: no longer available.

Barens And Noble only the Spanish version.

Books a Million also has only the Spanish version.

Archive.org Text Archive: Spanish only.

The "offical" Amazon link is dead. But the German Hardcover and Spanish 1st Edition can still be found. It is strange however that Greek and English versions are not comming up.

I checked some deep web sites, German and Spanish epubs came up instantly, but No trace of the English version.

Then I found Google Books and it had the english version as a preview (with many pages emitted for copyright reasons). Looks like the English version does exist.

For copyright reasons, there has to be some agency with the english version of the book. From my understanding that would be the British Library and I am right: Three little pigs: a story is indeed there but not available due to the recent cyber attack (not like I would go get it).

The publisher of the English version is Canelo (why is the top-level domain of a UK publisher Colombian?). Strangely they have no results at all on Google Books and looking at their website they are busy publishing clickbaity titles.

Looking for Three Little Pigs gives 2 news/blog posts from February and March of 2016. Clicking on the provided link gives a Not Found page.

And while I am doing the research children books of the actually fairy tale are getting in the way.

Then I found this: A Scam Site called eBook Full it has a pretty incredible API where if you put in the right URL parameters it will display a full webpage pretending like it has a pdf of the book. To download or read it you will have to log-in and enter your credit card etc.

The very best I could find was a portugese shop Wook and an Austrian shop Morawa that appear to be selling an epub. It also appears to be in a few libraries here and there "through Hoopla Digital" whatever that means.

The entire situation has a bunch of missmatching ISBNs so I have no clue if any of it is legit or anything. (All cost 6.09 Euro tho)

Here are some other links I found:

Now to Greek version. When searching on latin alphabetic sites no Greek books come up at all (which is not surprising, why would Greek books be there?) The moment I pasted the Greek title (Τα Τρία Ανθρωπάκια) into the search bar, I got plenty of results, stores stating they have paperbacks for sale.

Here is the summery:

Conclusion

When I just finished reading The Three Little Pigs I felt like I was the protagonist of The Shadow of the Wind about to get a knock on the door by a person willing to get and burn my book at any cost.

If it ever happends to you, you won't feel joy or happienes from getting into a book, you will feel creepy. Very very creepy and very very scared. (I am talking from experience)

But how could 2 book read back to back have such a connection? There must be dark powers at play here!

No, it was just a coincidence. (Is probability considered black magic?)

People tend to be overly impressed by coincidences in their lives, that is because they are using the wrong probability. Did something unlikely happen to you? I get it, pulling a 37 from number 1-100 is rather unlikely (1/100 chance). But it is nothing to be surprised about, because this event was guranteed to happen. When you pull a number you are guranteed to be subjected to a very unlikely event.

It is impossible for a month to go by whithout some coincidence happening. If you add up all the tiny probabilities of the millions of coincidences that could theoretically happen to you, you will learn that a coincidence is certain to happen.

This book case was unlikely, but it is nothing to be surprised about. It is however a good story that I will proudly tell people, when giving them my book suggestions.

Dad, just in case my math is wrong, Please don't get into a fight with a mafioso.

- very qualified Daniel Sempere5

Footnotes

  1. Extreme fans of Harry Potter books by J.K. Rowling↩

  2. Capo is the leader of a Mafia (leader of a family)↩

  3. Book Jacket or Dust Jacket is a wrapper out of thin paper often found on hardcover books. It is used because hard covers are produced without illustrations, so the jackets are added on top to append the information and colors usually found on the cover.↩

  4. MPAA (The Motion Picture Association of America) uses a rating system for films. This is not about the target audience, it is about the age at which children are psychologically developed enough to not get Trauma from a movie. The main anchor points of the scale are violene/blood, curse words, drugs and adult content.↩

  5. Daniel Sempere is the main character of The Shadow of the Wind.↩