Serotonin
levels are plunging this month all over Poland, where
the delightfully demented author Janusz Wisniewski
comes down with Tense Syndromes (otherwise translated
as Premenstrual Syndrome; the original title
was Menstruation, but the Warsaw publisher deemed
it “too shocking”), which guilefully regales readers
with what’s been called a “dazzling knowledge of woman’s
soul.” Said to be “moving, provoking, teasing, and full
of scientific factoids,” this collection of six stories
kicks off with a portrait of a girl stricken with an
unusual genetic sickness, and delves into anorexia,
jealousy, menopause, and an “absolutely unique study
of the role of Nazi women” detailing the short marriage
of Eva Braun and Adolf Hitler in a Berlin bunker in
1945. The author’s first book, Loneliness on the
Net, exhibits “courageous eroticism” as it tells
the true story of “unusually tense and vivid love” consummated
on the Internet (and throws in a few thoughts on the
double helix, Einstein’s brain, and e-tickets). One
reader declares, “Wisniewski’s emotions are true. Nothing
to do with any dentist’s waiting room at all,” and we’re
told the author, a one-time Playboy contributor,
is a computer scientist whose specialty is chemical
research. “After Loneliness on the Net, I could
write the telephone book and they would buy it,” Wisniewski
tells PT. “But the book is better than the Yellow
Pages in NYC. Really.” All foreign rights are open,
directly from the author. Email janusz@wisniewski.net.
Maybe she’s
untranslatable — into English, that is — but here she
comes again, Poland’s irrepressible Joanna Chmielewska,
who’s sold over 5 million books in Poland and 10 million
in Russia, where she’s said to be the most widely read
foreign author. The 70-year-old sprite is a colorful
celebrity in her own nation (“she is a confirmed horse
racing player,” says her press kit, “and does not shun
gambling in casinos all over Europe”), and her children’s
title Adventures of Puffy the Bear and the adult
work The Great Diamond have been translated into
English — but not published. Her novel My Dead Husband
has just hit the charts in a reprint edition, said
to be “abundant with thugs” and rife with “nightmarish
family relationships” as it chronicles a brilliant businessman
who degenerates into a crude boor at home, while his
wife, the prospective murderess, is herself “an obese,
nagging, and frighteningly stupid woman whose only talent
— culinary genius — may not be enough to keep their
marriage together.” They call it “Home-Made Horror.”
Enough said. Rights have been sold to Russia thus far,
with interest in the US from Scholastic; talk
to Tadeusz Lewandowski in Warsaw.
Women’s
travails also engross Spain this month, as literary
stallion Juan José Millás hits the list with
Two Women in Prague, which dissects the fate
of a mysterious middle-aged woman who enrolls in a writing
workshop “to find an author to write the story of her
life.” In class she meets up with a young stud who’s
obsessed with the idea that he was adopted at birth,
and a web of loneliness and disappointments quickly
envelops the two in their biographical endeavors. The
book won this year’s Primavera Prize, and Millás’1990
novel This Was Solitude won the Nadal
Prize, and was subsequently published in Denmark
(Gyldendal), Norway (Aschehoug), France
(Laffont), Germany (Suhrkamp), and the
UK (Allison & Busby). Several of the author’s
titles have topped 100,000 copies, and critics are quick
to distance him from “the florid magic realism” of Garcia
Márquez, instead noting the work’s urban grit and
frank, journalistic style. As Millás once said, “the
writing has to be efficient as a pistol. No adornments:
to the heart of the affair, line-by-line.” Talk to publisher
Espasa for rights.
In Sweden,
tennis authority (he’s written 23 books on the subject)
and crime writer Björn Hellberg is back with
the 13th installment in his series featuring the inimitable
Inspector Sten Wall. Named after a fictional TV program
with sky-high ratings, Funny Fanny follows the
fate of perky show host Fanny Cordell, who unexpectedly
discovers “a great danger” lurking on the other side
of the teleprompter. One of Sweden’s most revered authors,
Hellberg is a popular TV personality who apparently
knocks out mysteries in between tennis lessons. Funny
Fanny sold 10,000 copies in less than a month (it’s
“a book you swallow just as fast as you can,” one critic
raved), and rights have been sold to Germany (Argon)
and Holland (De Geus). See agent Bengt Nordin
for rights.
Denmark
edges Close to Paradise this month as Thomas
Qvortrup’s “spectacular debut” novel hits the list.
Three friends perpetrate a nasty crime and hole up on
a yacht tethered to a tropical Thai island, where they
proceed to wallow in a dope-fueled, nihilistic reverie,
eventually “pushing each other’s sexual limits, until
they go beyond what is both healthy and bearable.” Critics
have plopped the book in with such distinguished company
as Thomas Mann’s Utopia and Golding’s
Lord of the Flies, praising it as a “scandal
novel which takes the conventional novel a step further,”
but also grooving to its philosophical qualities that
gain urgency from the author’s “knife-sharp talent for
telling stories.” No foreign rights sales have been
made as yet, but interest is perking, and a film deal
looks like a no-brainer. Contact Esthi Kunz at
Gyldendal.
And in
Israel, writer Gail Hareven has just absconded
with this year’s prestigious Sapir Prize for
her “cholesterol-free” and “impeccably rational” novel
My True Love, which emerged from a tough crowd
of finalists including A.B. Yehoshua’s The
Liberating Bride and Gavriela Avigur-Rotem’s
Heatwave and Crazy Birds. The judges settled
on My True Love in part for its complex protagonists
“who are not open to simplistic and moralistic judgment,”
and praised its quest for “the idea of a great, addictive
love as a possible and legitimate way of aspiring to
the sublime.” The story takes place partly in Moscow,
and draws on Russian literature as it examines the inner
agony of heroine Noa as she’s caught in that existential
vortex between Moscow and America. The 43-year-old author
lives in Jerusalem and writes on politics and feminist
issues, in addition to her books for children and several
plays (five of which have been staged). The Sapir Prize
carries a translation subsidy (in addition to a tidy
$30,000 pot), and part of the book has been translated
into English by Dalia Bilu. Rights are available
from the Institute for the Translation of Hebrew
Literature.
