Junkies,
pushers, ‘narco-tarts’, and their degenerate demi-monde
come crackling to life in Denmark, as Jakob Ejersbo’s
novel Nordkraft (the title translates roughly
as “Northern Power”) barrels up the list with its “oddly
encouraging” tale of a generation searching for light
at the end of the shooting gallery. In what could pass
for a chapter out of Penelope Eckert’s cultural
studies oeuvre Jocks and Burnouts, Nordkraft
juxtaposes three intertwined stories (“Junkie Dogs,”
“The Bridge,” and “Funeral”), opening with the beautifully
bedraggled Maria, a drug courier who looks for salvation
by way of an Iranian dude named Hossein. Meanwhile,
ex-sailor Allan is a machinist haunted by demons lingering
from an oil-tanker fire. Lastly, a young addict named
Steso flashes back to his fateful steps down the road
to overdose. Called a “delightfully cliché-free group-photo,”
the book apparently offers up “the most beautiful and
the most shocking testimony yet written in Danish about
the generation that should have become adult during
the 1990s but that catapulted itself out of life and
into a drug orbit.” The 34-year-old Ejersbo is a journalist
who previously dabbled in epistolary novels (Fuga)
and short stories (Superego), but has now delivered
something critics claimed would never be written: the
“Great Danish Contemporary Novel of Realism.” The book
is headed for a fourth print run after only two weeks,
and rights have been sold to Norway (Aschehoug)
and Finland (Otava), with a sale pending in Sweden.
See Gyldendal for all other rights.
Also in
Denmark, hormones were on high alert as Lone Kindberg’s
novel Natasha’s Nights made a sultry splash on
the charts. Begun five years ago when Kindberg was a
budding twentysomething, Natasha’s Nights tracks
one young woman’s rising sexual self-consciousness:
heroine Therese has just dumped a man she finds boring
in his utter perfection, and soon shoots to starlet-dom
in a feature film about a young prostitute named Natasha.
Cut to a steamy scene or two with the director, and
you’ve got enough to warrant a second printing, putting
the total at 4,000 copies in print (a considerable figure
in Denmark, especially for a first novel). Though it
has dropped off the list this month, the book has been
riveting Danish media hounds, as Kindberg herself apparently
has that certain je ne sais quoi (ravishing looks,
outspoken ideology) that gets eyeballs glued to the
tube. Danish film companies are prowling around the
project, and queries for translation rights have been
pouring in from Sweden, Norway, and Iceland, though
nothing firm has been reported as yet. US and UK rights
are available from Medusa.
A ludicrous
Parisian dinner serves as our entrée into Christine
Angot’s satire of love and high society, Why
Brazil?, which hits the charts in France this month.
Deemed a “strip-tease of the heart,” the author’s first
love story tackles the evolution of an intimate relationship,
warts and all, delving into its passions, foibles, and
bare-knuckle violence. Thickening the plot, Why Brazil?
includes characters named after and modeled on real
personalities, including film director Laetitia Masson,
publisher Paul Otchakovski-Laurens, journalist
Jean-Luc Douin, and writer Frédéric Beigbeder,
all of which has propelled the book past the 40,000-copy
mark in France. One critic’s heart-thumping verdict:
“the text does not breathe: it gasps. We read it like
an electrocardiogram.” The new one has been on submission
to Tropen (Germany), Seix Barral (Spain),
Kanakis (Greece), Einaudi (Italy), and
Sea-Sky (China), all of which published Angot’s
last novel, Incest, but no deals had been made
at press time. See Fabienne Roussel for UK rights
and the French Publishers’ Agency for US rights.
Also in
France, Nicolas Fargues puts on a rousing One
Man Show with his third novel, a “corrosive study
of manners” which stars a young married writer who up
and decides to revel in his own “dark tendencies,” eventually
throwing all dignity to the wind and plunging into the
abyss of commercial French television. Said to be a
“ferocious satire” of literary Paris and a “caustic
critique” of our televised world, the book ultimately
takes aim at “most men’s cowardice towards women and
life in general.” The 30-year-old Fargues hails from
Madagascar, and his earlier novel, Tomorrow If You
Really Want It, was called a playful but tender
portrait of a disillusioned, postmodern generation of
“false artists, conceited truths, idealistic neo-proletarians,
[and] ex-soixante-huitards.” The new book currently
has 45,000 copies in print, with no foreign rights sales
as yet. See France Editions for rights.
A historic
novel of “epic proportions” heats up in Greece this
month, as Athina Kakouri’s saga The Kite kicks
off amid the newly formed Greek State of 1871, when
Greeks were whooping it up for the 50th anniversary
of the revolution against the Ottoman Empire. Central
to the author’s potent exposé of political pride are
the rich silver mines of Laurion, an area on the southeast
coast of Attica, which have piqued historians’ interest
as far back as Thucydides, who estimated that
the mines churned through the lives of more than 20,000
slaves. Kakouri mingles nostalgia with political intrigue
as her beloved Athens gets trampled under its own detritus,
yet still manages to remain an enduring thing of beauty.
The author’s earlier work The Knife of Fortune was
published in France (Alteredit Editions), and
English rights to both titles are available from Hestia.
And here’s
the question of the hour in Sweden: Take an American
billionaire with an Elvis-look-alike for an assistant,
a Russian countess, a Swedish estate owner, and a lawyer
with a face like Karl XII’s death mask, and send them
all off on a luxury cruise liner. What do you get? Murder
on Board, the 30th installment in the crime series
by former Director-General of the UN Jan Mårtenson,
featuring redoubtable anti-hero Johan Kristian Homan
and Siamese sidekick Cleo. As usual, the murders take
place in between chapters, sparing readers all that
gratuitous gore. (As Mårtenson once explained: “There
is more red bordeaux than blood in my detective novels.”)
The ultra-popular series has sold a total of 500,000
copies in Sweden, and Mårtenson, who published a well-received
memoir two years ago, has been exported abroad in numerous
languages, including English (Ram, UK), French
(Champs-Élysées), and German (Neue Berlin).
Rights for Murder on Board (outside the Nordic
countries) are available from the Linda Michaels
Agency.
