Argentina’s
“official historians” are quacking away over the latest
provocation from historical novelist María Esther
de Miguel, titled The Palace of the Ducks.
The book carries forward the author’s “generally transgressive”
history of Buenos Aires and adapts a detective novel’s
suspenseful structure to explore a “dark network of
complicities” that unfurls behind the majestic 19th-century
palace façade. The plot follows a succession of families
who inhabit the structure over the course of a century,
among them an alcoholic writer who angles for inspiration
in the life stories he finds among the city’s watering
holes, while a whole rogues’ gallery of suspects prowls
the palace in the wake of a murder. The author’s Planeta-winning
work of 1996, The General, The Painter and the Lady,
has now sold over 150,000 copies in 21 editions, and
delves into a love triangle forged amid Argentina’s
wars of state formation, ultimately wringing from the
tale a roiling mix of “flesh, blood, incertitude, and
the doubts that are part of life.” As for the new book,
publisher Alfaguara printed a first run of over
12,000 copies in November, and all rights outside of
Latin America are available. See agent Mónica Herrero
at the Guillermo Schavelzon agency.
Meanwhile,
historical revisionism gets sassy in Spain, where Ángela
Vallvey has won this year’s Nadal Prize with
State of Deprivation, a hilarious homage to The
Odyssey that updates Homer while satirizing the
nation’s booming self-help genre. In Vallvey’s version
of the classic Greek tale, top fashion designer Penelope
strikes out on the wandering journey, while her once
philandering hubby Ulysses hangs up his painting career
for the domestic thrills of diapers and baby food as
he nurses two-year-old Telemachus. Throw in a Socratic
dialogue or two, and you’ve got the literary equivalent
of the lotus flower. Vallvey’s 1999 work Hunting
the Last Wild Man was her first novel for adults,
and has been sold to France (Lattès), Germany
(Krüger), Italy (Feltrinelli), the UK
(Penguin), and the US (Seven Stories),
among others. About 50,000 copies of the new one are
now in print following the book’s launch in February,
with rights sold thus far to France (Lattès). Contact
Anna Vilà at the MB agency in Barcelona.
Antiquity’s
also on the plate in Spain this month with Terenci
Moix’s The Blind Harpist, set in mythical
Thebes and pondering the friendship of three young men
during the reign of Tutankhamun. The book contrasts
religious chastity with erotic fetishism as it shows
how King Tut “returned the gods to their rightful place
after the iron grip of Akhenaten’s monotheism.” Deemed
“a splendid description” of ancient Egypt by reviewers,
the book has been said to paint “a melancholic frieze
of the extinction” of Akhenaten’s doomed dynasty. Journalist
and essayist Moix won the Planeta Prize in 1986 with
Don’t Say It Was a Dream, which has sold over
a million copies in 40 editions. Rights in the US and
UK are available for the new one from Carmen Pinilla
at the Balcells agency in Barcelona. And finally
in Spain, Antonio Muñoz Molina surveys “the enigma
of passion” with his latest work, Missing Blanca.
The book portrays the romantic travails of Mario and
his vivacious love interest, Blanca, as Mario obsessively
worries that he’ll lose his gal. The 46-year-old Molina
won the Crítica Prize in 1987 for A Winter
in Lisbon, and took home the Planeta in 1992 for
The Polish Rider. Though the book has slipped
off the list this month, some 30,000 copies of the new
one were sold in two months, and rights have been sold
to Germany, France, Portugal, and Italy, among other
nations. See agent Raquel de la Concha for rights.
In France,
literary darling Alexandre Jardin gets fresh
with his latest novel, Miss Liberty, wherein
the married college headmaster Horace meets up with
the vixenish 18-year-old Liberty Byron, and leaps at
the chance to indulge her “prodigious taste for pleasure.”
Liberty quickly teaches the old dog a thing or two about
romantic exaltation — “the infinite is her measure,
the absolute is her oxygen” — and together they traipse
off to forge a perfect love, a creation that will be
“a masterpiece or nothing at all.” Jardin’s 1999 novel
Autobiography of a Love looked at the troubled
marriage of a teacher in New Hebrides whose twin brother
gallantly steps in to save the day (indeed, marriage
is “the bête noir of Alexandre Jardin,” one reviewer
writes), and his work The Zebra won the Femina
Prize in 1988. Critics declared the new book “a
cry of revolt against numbness,” and, for what it’s
worth, the thirtysomething author is said to be so devoted
to joie de vivre that he putts around Paris on
a scooter, so as to avoid the moping faces on the subway.
All rights are available from Anne-Solange Noble
at Gallimard.
We’re happy
to bring you the list from Denmark this month, where
well-known journalist Gretelise Holm has inspired
Paranoia throughout the Nordic nation with her
new crime novel. The story opens on a shocking note
as ace reporter Karin Sommer discovers her dead cat
hanging on her front door, and soon all hell breaks
loose as a “self-proclaimed superman” wreaks havoc on
a small Danish town. One charged-up reviewer called
the book “an excellent run for one’s money,” while another
said simply: “Crème de la crème.” In addition to her
journalism, Holm has written several books for children.
Her crime fiction, however, is speedily gaining notice,
winning the Kriminalakademis prize for the turbocharged
1998 thriller, Mercedes-Benz Syndrome. Rights
to Paranoia have been sold to Sweden (Piratförlaget),
Germany (List), and Norway (Cappelen).
Talk to Editor-in-Chief Charlotte Jorgensen at
Aschehoug.
And in
Canada, Sandra Birdsell is back with her long-awaited
third novel The Rüsslander, about the life of
a tightly-knit Mennonite community in pre-Revolution
Russia, as seen through the eyes of the teenaged Katya.
Said to be “decadent with detail but frugal with sentimentality,”
the book was inspired by stories Birdsell had heard
about her Russian grandparents, who along with thousands
of other fleeing Russian Mennonites landed in the Canadian
prairies. Now an old woman in Manitoba, Katya looks
back on the anarchic time after the Revolution when
the pacifist Mennonites were sitting ducks for roving
bands of thieves. The book was nominated for Canada’s
Giller Prize, and is currently on submission
in a number of markets, with buzz said to be strong
in Germany. We’re told film rights are a hot item, too.
See agent Bruce Westwood at Westwood Creative
Artists for rights.
