At the colossal
Fnac megastore in Barcelona last month, you had
to bushwhack your way past bales of Jean Auel’s
The Shelters of Stone — the ubiquitously promoted
tome could be had in no less than four separate editions:
Catalan, Spanish, UK, and US — and fend off aggressively
planted thickets of Star Wars visual dictionaries
(not to mention a heap of Harlan Coben’s Tell
No One, translated as the jaw-bending No Se Lo
Digas a Nadie). But once you plowed past that panoramic
display of Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon,
there it was: an actual indigenous Spanish bestseller,
Antonio Gala’s Guests in the Garden, which
has sprung open a whole Pandora’s box of amorous anxieties
in its compendium of stories about the multifarious
vagaries of love: from the sweetly diverting to the
dolorous, and right down to the rankly incestuous. Described
as a sort of bestiary of unruly passions and hothouse
carnality, this one’s a guided tour through the gigolo-filled
bowers of Gala’s grand jungle of love — from the “pudgy
gay couple” lodged in a claustrophobic apartment, to
the lovers who hook up in a stuck elevator. The 66-year-old,
Córdoba-born author’s 1993 novel Turkish Passion
was deemed “an adventurous pilgrimage of sexual
passion and unknown circumstances” loaded with “ever-waylaying
surprises” that bubble over into “a most volcanic plot.”
That title was published in Italy (RCS), Greece
(Livanis), France (Lattès), and Korea
(Creative Times), among other nations, and Gala
earlier grabbed the Planeta Prize for his 1990
first novel The Crimson Manuscript. More than
250,000 copies of the new one have been sold, and all
rights are open from Cristina Mora at Planeta.
Also spicing
the Spanish list with local flavor in recent months
(though it’s dropped off the top ten at the moment)
is Josefina Aldecoa’s The Enigma, wherein
a married professor wakes up one day to find himself
trapped in a life of bourgeois banalities. Having jetted
off to study in New York, however, he falls hard for
his sultry, scintillating colleague Teresa, and thus
ensues an epic psychic battle between emotional complacency
and stark, raving freedom. The 76-year-old Aldecoa co-founded
the magazine Espadaña and holds a doctorate in
philosophy from Madrid, and her 1990 novel A Teacher’s
Story, now in its 13th printing, was the first in
a trilogy of works kicking off with a “dense and vigorous”
portrait of an emancipated woman in 1920s Spain. The
new one (not part of the trilogy) has sold 45,000 copies
so far, and all foreign rights are open from the Bad
Homburg–based agent Ray-Güde Mertin.
Meanwhile,
a woman’s work is never done in Denmark, where Hanne-Vibeke
Holst’s action-packed novel The Crown Princess
follows thirty-something heroine Charlotte Damgaard
as she’s tapped as the Social Democratic Party’s new
Minister of Environment, only to get sucked into a whirlpool
of back-stabbing colleagues, sniping reporters, and
a sniveling husband who gripes about “how difficult
it is to be a woman when you’re a man.” This is Holst’s
first novel after two detours through the documentary
genre, but she previously racked up six-figure sales
for her 1994 novel Real Life, which sold 85,000
copies in Denmark, as well as 50,000 copies in Germany
(Bertelsmann) plus 55,000 in Sweden (Bonniers).
That book follows pregnant television reporter Therese
as she whisks back to Copenhagen from a dangerous foreign
trip to give birth to a daughter, and ends up bonding
with a certain Heidi of the high-rise suburbs. Next,
taking up where Real Life left off, the author’s
1998 novel A Happy Woman sold 130,000 copies
in Denmark and follows Therese’s travails as her father
dies and she swoons over a suave filmmaker while on
assignment in Budapest. We’re told sales of the new
book have been “very satisfying so far,” and rights
have been sold to Sweden (Bonniers) for “a huge advance
— one of the highest ever paid for Scandinavian literature
in Scandinavia.” See Esthi Kunz at Gyldendal
for rights.
Also rocking
the list in Denmark is Swedish Crime maestro Åke
Edwardson, whose timely novel Heaven Is a Place
on Earth (see PT,
9/01) has gained traction in this nation with its
haunting tale of a four-year-old boy who is abducted
from a playground and later found to be abused. When
another boy disappears for good, shrewd Inspector Erik
Winter steps in to wreak some deductive vengeance. Critics
have dubbed this title “the best, the most complex literary
construction that Åke Edwardson has achieved,” describing
the author as a sort of Delta bluesman of crime fiction,
singing “a sad but logical tune where the three basic
chords are outsiderness, loneliness, and desperation.”
In addition to Denmark, the book has been sold to Germany
(Econ/List/Ullstein), and Norway (Tiden),
with other rights available from Agneta Markås
at Norstedts. And for what it’s worth in Denmark,
74-year-old former journalist Erik Juul Clausen
has come down from the mountain with a historical tale
called The Healer, which is said to tell the
story of Jesus Christ from — yes — “a new and exciting
angle.” Prominent Roman citizen Publius embarks upon
a secret mission to Palestine to investigate a certain
mysterious healer, and shortly thereafter, as his wife
chucks the old polytheism and converts to Christianity,
he stumbles upon the Crucifixion itself. Though the
book has slipped off the list this month, foreign rights
may be vouchsafed from the Hanserik Tönnheim
agency in Malmö.
Finally,
the perennially tetchy mother-daughter nexus has enthralled
France this month as a nonfiction title hits the list:
Mothers-Daughters: A Three-Way Relationship by
psychoanalyst Caroline Eliacheff and sociologist
Nathalie Heinich. Emotional rigidity, narcissism,
hysteria — it’s all here — but the twist in this “passionate
and exceptionally limpid work” is to freshen up the
gender gloss with abundant examples from classic works
of literature and cinema, reviewing the role of moms
in everything from Almodovar’s High Heels
to Edith Wharton’s Pomegranate Seed.
The authors also delve into “extreme mothers” (Hitchcock’s
the relevant reference there) and “star mothers” (Bergman’s
Autumn Sonata), and get mileage out of Madame
Bovary. The title, by the way, refers not to some
maternal ménage à trois but to that third party
in Oedipus-land, dad. We’re told 100,000 copies have
been sold in France to date, with rights sold to Italy
(Einaudi), and submissions under way in the US.
See Monique DiDonna at the French Publishers’
Agency.
