The vagaries of history are the subject of a new novel
by noted French playwright Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt,
who in On Behalf of Another sets his noggin on
fire over this world-historical mindbender: What would
have happened if Adolf Hitler had been accepted to Vienna’s
École des Beaux-Arts? In reality, the young Hitler’s
proto-artistic overtures had been roundly rebuffed when,
in 1906, he arrived in Vienna at the age of 17, smitten
with dreams of being a boho sensation. Alas, after slaving
over a two-day entrance exam for the academy’s school
of painting, his test drawings were deemed lacking in
appreciation of the human form. Go figure. Author Schmitt
turns the tables on history, however, and has furtive
Adolf accepted by the school and even liberated from
his complexes by one Dr. Freud. Jettisoning all frustrations,
Adolf rushes headlong into a life of art and amorous
affairs, eventually finding his way to Montparnasse
in the twenties, happily falling in with Picasso, Breton,
and the Surrealists (not to mention a certain lovely
gal from La Rotonde). The 41-year-old Schmitt won wide
acclaim with his 1993 play The Visitor, which
took home three Molière awards and toured more
than 15 countries. The new book had a first print run
of 50,000 copies, and at press time, rights were set
to be sold in Greece, with interest in Spain, Italy,
and Germany. No deals as yet in the US or UK. For rights,
see France Edition in New York.
Also in
France, Yves Simon lets out a huge yodel with
The Lost Voice of Humanity, wherein a young priest
putts around Paris “on a scooter practicing the art
of the confessional with his ear stuck to his mobile
phone.” The mobile confessor harvests a bounty of “secrets
dragged out of forgetfulness and solitude,” and gets
an earful from the likes of Luis, a blind man in love
with a prostitute, and Ismalia, a young nurse who’s
the “firefly of the city.” Redolent with “a nostalgia
of humanism,” the book also manages to besiege Paris
with a daylong sandstorm, a kind of Bohemian Sahara
wherein we meet our cast of urban nomads. Simon’s 1987
work The Magnificent Voyager sold over 200,000
copies, and The Drift of Feelings won the Prix
Médicis and sold 550,000 copies as a mass-market
edition. Though it’s not on the list at the moment,
about 30,000 copies of the new one have been sold to
date, and all foreign rights are open, says Marie-Hélène
d’Ovidio at Grasset.
Things
are rather less surreal in Germany, where Sven Regener
bursts out of the gate with a first novel, Mr. Lehmann,
which is set in the Kreuzberg district of West Berlin
in 1989 and ponders the unambitious life of twentysomething
waiter Frank Lehmann. Deemed “an Oblomov figure of our
time,” Lehmann concerns himself with the trifles of
urban anomie, blissfully distracted until his 30th birthday
hits — and down comes the Berlin Wall. The book has
captivated critics with its concentrated, laconic spirit,
moving one to note, “it could be that Regener managed
to write the long-awaited great German ‘Wenderoman’”.
Nearly 50,000 copies of the hardcover edition have been
sold since the book’s August publication (putting it
just below the top ten this month), and at press time
the paperback auction had reached almost half a million
Deutschmarks. The publisher also reports “very lively”
interest in film rights. Eichborn holds world
rights, but for US rights see Jennifer Lyons
at Writers House, and for the UK, talk to Imrie
& Dervis in London.
Moving
on to the Aegean, 70-year-old Athenian writer Menis
Koumandareas takes an “x-ray of postwar Greece”
in his latest, expansively scaled novel Twice Greek.
The book tracks an average family in Athens as they
weather 50 years of political tumult, a period that
saw the nation struggle up “from a shattered ruin into
a European country.” The author, a one-time journalist,
has translated Faulkner, Melville, and
Fitzgerald, and his work The Handsome Captain
will be awarded the Blue Book Prize at Frankfurt
this year (that title is set to be published in Germany
by Frankfurter). Originally published in June,
Twice Greek has sold 20,000 copies despite what
its publisher mock-despairingly calls its “one major
disadvantage”: it weighs in at 750 pages. No rights
have yet been sold, according to Maria Zampara
at Kedros.
Word reaches
us from Norway, where The Half Brother by Lars
Saabye Christensen summons up “latent ferocity and
dark undertones” in a book that captures three generations
in west Oslo. Young Barnum’s childhood is painful, starting
with his name, which his father took from the American
humbug king. The book has evoked strangely euphoric
comments from critics: one raved that “we are talking
about a tome worth its weight in gold,” while another
deemed it “a literary feat of international eminence.”
The 48-year-old author has been compared to Woody
Allen in his black humor, and 200,000 copies of
his 1984 novel Beatles were sold in Norway. We’re
told 17,000 copies of the new one were sold in two weeks,
and rights have been sold to Arcadia in the UK,
as well as to Denmark, Germany, and Sweden. See Eirin
Hagen at Cappelen.
On a more
sobering note, a bestselling nonfiction title in Australia
tackles the dramatic tale of two Australian doctors
in Ethiopia. Written by Dr. Catherine Hamlin
and co-authored by John Little, The Hospital
by the River tells of the school for midwives Hamlin
and her late husband founded in Addis Ababa, and chronicles
their work with fistula patients — women who have suffered
from a devastating condition caused by obstructed labor
during childbirth. While such cases are almost unknown
in nations with modern hospital facilities, an estimated
8,000 new fistula cases a year plague Ethiopia. The
77-year-old Hamlin was nominated for the Nobel
Prize in 1999, and over 25,000 copies of the book are
in print. US and other translation rights are being
represented by Chantal Noel at Macmillan UK.
For comic
relief, on the other hand, Australia has snatched up
The Day My Bum Went Psycho, a children’s book
by Andy Griffiths that’s put the nation in stitches.
It tells the harrowing tale of Zack Freeman and his
renegade bum, which deserts him and plots with other
bums to take their rightful place atop the world’s necks.
“It’s just that bums are attempting to take over the
world,” author Griffiths earnestly explained when asked
if his book would offend the kiddies. Some 60,000 copies
are in print, with 100,000 due by Christmas. No rights
have been sold as yet. See Jill Grinberg for
rights in the US, and Macmillan Australia for the UK.
