Breezes,
gales, gusts, and tempests swirl like suspicious characters
through this month’s bestselling Spanish novel Difficult
Airs, the latest effort from well-known erotica
queen Almudena Grandes. The author’s fifth novel
sets out to map the meaning of wind as a kind of mutable
metaphor for the human condition. Amid an expansive
backdrop of the Bay of Cadiz, the two actual protagonists,
Juan and Sara, determine to reinvent their lives amid
a sea of moral ambiguities involving revenge and money.
(Heat-seeking readers are advised, however, that “there
are erotic scenes, but to be found after page 300.”)
Grandes’ first book, The Ages of Lulu, was deemed
a “powerful essay into the darker side of female sexuality,”
and noted for its “louche sexual hedonism sanctified
by the aura of the artistic.” Or, as one reader exclaimed:
“Finally! Some decent erotica!” That book was published
in the US by Grove in 1994, in addition to 20
other territories, and collectively sold more than a
million copies. Her subsequent title, Atlas of Human
Geography, sold 120,000 copies in Spain and has
been published in France, Italy, Germany, Portugal,
and Brazil, among other nations. The 42-year-old Grandes
won Italy’s prestigious Rossone Prize in 1997,
and several of her projects, including Lulu,
have made a splash on the big screen. Thus far, rights
to Difficult Airs have been sold to Italy, France,
and Germany, and US rights are still open, according
to Delia Louzán at Tusquets.
Also in
Spain, The Guitar Player by Luis Landero
is strumming up a storm, telling the story of teenage
Emilio as he dreams of ditching his machine-shop day
job to strike out on the path to bohemia as a flamenco
guitarist. He’s soon finger-picking away, and, lo and
behold, he suddenly finds himself giving private guitar
lessons to the vixenish young wife of his boss. Arriba,
as they say. As Landero’s fourth novel, The Guitar
Player borrows from the author’s own exploits; he
himself worked grungy day jobs before becoming a renowned
flamenco player and touring the globe. About 37,000
copies of the new one have been printed, and at press
time, all foreign rights were open from Tusquets.
In Greece,
The Witches of Smirni by Mara Meimaridi
has bedazzled readers with the story of Katina, a ruthless
woman from a ghetto of Asia Minor who is inducted into
the world of magic after meeting a Turkish witch. Katina
uses her newfound wiles as sorceress to marry one man
after another, each bumping her up one more peg on the
social ladder and offering her a hand in their own businesses;
soon all of Smirni is groveling at her feet. Author
Meimaridi is an anthropologist in Athens, who has written
on nutrition for newspapers and magazines, and is now,
yes, brushing up on her astrophysics. All rights are
available from Kastaniotis.
In Israel,
Tamara Walks on Water by Shifra Horn has
hit the list’s #2 slot after several weeks of steady
ascent. The book tells the story of three generations
of women in the ancient city of Jaffa, and focuses on
Tamara, who falls head over heels for an eccentric Greek-Orthodox
monk. As it happens, this boy-pal soon drowns in the
Sea of Galilee, jolting Tamara to full awareness of
her love for Yosef, who hails from mixed Jewish and
Arab ancestry. The author’s previous books have been
translated in Germany, France, Italy, Holland, Japan,
and other nations, and her first novel, Four Mothers,
sold 65,000 copies in Hebrew and tells a magical-realist
story of five generations of Jerusalem women. Critics
called it an “enchanting, almost stunning” work and
noted, “That the tale is dense, ponderous and sincere
is part of its charm as a novelized Israeli genealogy.”
Horn’s second novel, The Fairest Among Women,
sold well over 70,000 copies in Israel and was published
in the US by St. Martin’s. Meanwhile, world English
rights for the new one are being negotiated with Piatkus,
but other rights are open from the Institute for
the Translation of Hebrew Literature.
Elsewhere
in Israel, critics are falling over themselves to laud
the virtuosic Heatwave and Crazy Birds, which
one admirer flat-out deemed “one of the ten Hebrew novels
of the past decade which I would take with me to a desert
island.” This “ambitious, complex, superbly written
novel” chronicles heroine Loya Kaplan, an Israeli flight
attendant “living between heaven and earth” who returns
home after 20 years to find the world she knew upended.
The book goes on to weave a “lush embroidery, ceaselessly
enriched by the heroine’s wide-ranging knowledge” which
serves as a kind of archaeology of an Israel of generations
past. Author Gavriella Avigur-Rotem was born
in Argentina but emigrated to Israel in 1950, where
she works as an editor at the Haifa University Publishing
House. Her 1992 first novel Mozart Was Not a
Jew met with wide success in Italy (Tartaruga),
Portugal (Imago), China (Flower City),
and Arabia (Al Dar Al Arabia), and is due out
in the US (Syracuse U. Press). Rights to the
new one have been sold to France (Actes-Sud)
and Italy (Baldini & Castoldi). See Ayala
Carmeli at the Institute for Hebrew Literature.
In Sweden,
the “unusually vigorous and fluently vivacious” novel
Underdog by Torbjörn Flygt is jam-packed
with family violence, shoplifting, teenage pregnancies,
and the lurking pedophiles of your average working-class
boyhood of the Malmö of the 1970s. This unsparing autobiographical
novel is narrated by the boy’s now middle-aged and disillusioned
self, and spans that mind-blowing gap “from the World
Cup in 1974 to the Springsteen concert in Gothenburg
in 1985,” eventually landing the narrator smack in the
“materially comfortable — but culturally and spiritually
disoriented” bourgeois life of a company lawyer. Livid
with “lengthy, fizzing emotional outpourings,” the book
is a giggle-packed, brilliantly bitter description of
boys growing up in the Swedish welfare state. See Norstedts
for rights.
On a last
note in Sweden, that “most prominent ironist in Swedish
literature” Torgny Lindgren’s Hash takes
its title from the Swedish dish made from offal and
grain (think haggis), and is a “steamily funny novel”
chronicling the tuberculosis-ravaged Sweden of the ’40s,
and inventing a striking, extended metaphor for the
world. “In short,” said one amazed critic, “life is
an offal-hash dish!” We couldn’t have put it better
ourselves. Lindgren has been translated in about every
nation imaginable (yes, even Iceland), and the new one
has been sold in Denmark, Norway, Germany, France, and
Italy. See Maria Bohn at Norstedts’ Pan Agency
for rights.
