The dustbin
has popped open in France this month and rendered up
Laurent Mauvignier’s elegiac second novel, Learning
to Finish, which details the plight of a trash collector
who announces he is leaving his wife — only to maim
himself in a bad car wreck on the way out. As we learn
from the heroine’s monologue, she takes her hubby back
in hope that nursing him to health will repair the marriage
as well. Psychic debris from the war in Algeria interferes,
however, and then there’s that junk heap known as the
Other Woman. Critics have invoked nothing less than
Stephen King’s Misery, marveling at the book’s
“hypnotic structure” as it lays bare “the silence of
a defunct love.” As the 34-year-old Mauvignier explained,
“I write like a brute, without limits.” In fact, an
act of violence hobbled his writing ability when he
was 16. But four years ago, he picked up the pen and
out rushed his first book, Far from Them, to
which Minuit’s Irène Lindon responded
within 48 hours (it was published in 1999). Though it
has slipped off the top ten list, the new novel won
the Wepler Prize last fall and has sold over
80,000 copies in France. Rights have been picked up
in Germany (Eichborn), Taiwan (Crown),
and Israel (Kinneret), with negotiations continuing
in Korea and China. US rights are available from agent
Georges Borchardt.
Also of
note in France, the beguilingly titled And Rising
Slowly Into Immense Love by former journalist and
feminist-provocateur Katherine Pancol rises right
into the top ten. It’s a tale of love found in — where
else? — the elevator, where a man (named Mann) and woman
(Angelina) discover fleeting but all-out-dizzying passion
on their brief ascent between floors. Alas, she’s due
to be married the next day, and much amorous intrigue
ensues, the upshot being a dramatic rescue from the
altar that plays into Pancol’s pointedly thoughtful
consideration of nonconformity and social mores. The
title, incidentally, is a line from Rimbaud.
Last we heard, all rights were available from Albin
Michel.
The hugely
popular comic actress Luciana Littizzetto puts
Italy in stitches this month with Alone Like a Celery
Stalk, her new volume of “high-pitch confessions”
on the plentiful perils of womanhood. Every chapter
takes up a different theme, probing it from both the
male and female point of view and yielding a ribald
collection that is said to be “caustic, irresistible,
and without modesty.” As Littizzetto puts it: “Every
woman, sooner or later, looks at herself in the mirror
and would like to slice her face off with a machete.”
While men gain points with age, she adds, “women are
more like gorgonzola.” All rights are available; see
Emanuela Canali at Mondadori.
Also on
tap in Italy, the flabbergasting Luciano de Crescenzo
has been giving readers some Of This and That
in his latest volume of pop philosophy, Neapolitan style.
The book ponders the oddness of time’s passage after
the protagonist wanders into a secret room where time
stands still, and includes a bonus trip to the underworld
of Naples, all told with Crescenzo’s trademark nonchalance.
(Who else could spin the pre-Socratics as “a most likeable
parcel of rogues,” as the author did in his History
of Greek Philosophy?) As all Italians know, the 73-year-old
Crescenzo is a former engineer whose first book sold
600,000 copies and launched a career spanning 24 titles
and 18 million copies worldwide. The new one had a first
print run of 100,000 copies, and at press time, no rights
had been sold, according to Chiara Ferrari at
the Laura Grandi agency.
All of
Holland has been “peeping at stranded lives” as a sequel
of sorts to Vonne van der Meer’s bestselling
1999 novel The Silence of Small Things hits the
lists. The new book, The Last Boat, extends the
tales of the first novel, which offered a collection
of seven portraits that read as short stories, each
one tracking a different visitor to an island cottage
that serves as a bed-and-breakfast for lost souls: a
pregnant teenager, a woman dying of cancer, and a maritally
challenged couple among them. The cottage’s “cleaning
woman” tidies up their lives with her “special view
about hospitality,” prompting one reviewer to dub the
series a “modern Book of Hours.” Both titles have been
sold to Germany (Kiepenheuer) and Serbia (Prometej),
and US rights are still available from Contact.
India’s
abuzz over Ladies Coupe, the second novel from
Bangalore-based Anita Nair, which chronicles
five women as they embark on a train ride in the “ladies
coupe,” as the women’s segregated compartment was known
in the dark ages of gender history. Things get chugging
when the fortysomething Akhila suddenly decides to climb
aboard and ride to Kanyakumari, the farthest point on
the map of India. The women trade tales (and also trade
scathing remarks about Margaret’s “drawer-of-genitalia-in-library-books
husband”) until Akhila reaches her destination and flings
off the shackles of her tradition-bound family. The
new one is a gender-switched counterpart to Nair’s first
novel, The Better Man, an “imposing debut” with
an “impact that sneaks into one’s dreams.” Rights for
the new one have been sold in Spain and Holland, and
others are available from Penguin India.
Shackles
are also flying off in Australia this month, where the
biography Nancy Wake chronicles the exploits
of the Australian war heroine who was one of the Gestapo’s
most wanted people, and who survived in German-occupied
France working as a secret agent with the French Resistance.
The 90-year-old Wake is renowned for her “casual impudence”
and “film-star glamour,” and given her youthful follies,
a reviewer writes, “It’s hard to resist planning the
film version that must surely follow.” Fortunately,
Sydney journalist Peter FitzSimons captures all
the right shots: “Ever conscious of the finer things
in life,” says the promo copy, “[Wake] still managed
to sleep in a silk nightgown, even when camping deep
in the forest.” Almost 20,000 copies have been sold,
and US and UK rights are available from Curtis Brown
Australia’s Fiona Inglis.
Lastly
in Australia, Cecilia Dart-Thornton’s first novel
The Ill-Made Mute has received a big holler from
the fantasy crowd, as it plunges into the history of
Scotland and Ireland to spin a tale “drawn from obscure
folklore and the more secret places of the human heart.”
The book opens with a “horribly scarred, mute creature”
that tumbles into a series of adventures on the path
to an ancient treasure. Warner will publish this
one and two sequels in the US, and a deal has been sealed
in the UK. See agent Martha Millard.
