International
Fiction Bestsellers
It's a Wonderful Double
Life
Hot-Buttered in Finland, Dreyfus Redux in Israel, and
Watusi on the Brain in Spain
FROM PUBLISHING
TRENDS (DECEMBER 2002)
Nouveau-riche
restaurateur Brede Ziegler is murdered not once, but
twice in No Echo, the sixth in a series of shrewdly
executed detective novels from megastar Norwegian author
Anne Holt. After Ziegler turns up hot-buttered
and trussed, a slapdash police investigation finds that
the victim was fatally poisoned — that is, on the day
before he was knifed to death. While bumbling Chief
Billy gropes for clues in the pantry, enter recurring
Holt heroine Hanne Wilhelmsen, fresh from a six-month
exile in an Italian convent. Rejected and friendless,
she holes up in a secluded office to study the case’s
documents, slowly working her way through the crime
and back to the life she ditched when her spouse died
and she withdrew to the cloister. Author Holt, whose
high-wire thrillers are said to “demolish some cherished
illusions about the transparency and moral cleanliness
of Norwegian politics and the law-enforcement bureaucracy,”
is herself a former chief of police for the Oslo region
who also served as the Norwegian Minister of Justice,
not to mention a stint as a television journalist for
the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation. This
month she makes a splash on PT’s newly reinstated
Finnish list, and she’s been selling anywhere from 24,000
to 115,000 copies of each of her books in Norway (and
double that amount in Sweden), receiving the Riverton
Prize in 1994 and the Booksellers’ Prize
in 1995 for Death of the Demon. Meanwhile, her
Swedish chartbuster What is Mine, which has fallen
off the list this month after a respectable run, features
new characters in Holt’s crime lineup. Rights to No
Echo have been sold to Denmark (Gyldendal),
Finland (Gummerus), Germany (Piper), the
Netherlands (Arbeiderspers), and Sweden (Piratförlaget).
Rights for all of Holt’s titles are controlled by Cappelen.
On a lighter note in Sweden, a pile of Christmas trees
are heaped up on a sun-soaked beach for the ritual springtime
bonfire as Viveca Lärn’s riotous novel Sun
and Spring opens on the island of Saltön, situated
off the Swedish west coast. Lärn’s latest effort — the
fourth in a series wherein each title is set in a different
season — invokes burlesques apparently attaining Joanna
Trollope proportions. The current installment’s
quirky cast of characters features an old favorite,
Kabben Nilsson (who planned an intricate suicide in
the earlier novel A Joyful Christmas); Emily
Schenker, whose physician father scandalously runs off
with an octogenarian; and redoubtable bee-keeper/chicken-farm
proprietor MacFie, who chases a hot young thing off
to Paris, leaving his barnyard menagerie behind. Cut
to Gothenburg, where Emily returns home from vacation
to find the local coffee shop ablaze, and conveniently
jumps into the burly arms of both Christer (a Saltön
police officer) and a redheaded fireman named Odd. Events
take a further twist as Emily is soon hit up for cash
in a grand scheme to open an adventure land at Saltön.
Best known as a children’s book writer, Lärn has been
published in more than ten languages and has written
seven novels since she made her debut as an adult novel
writer in 1995. Rights for the first three books in
this series (A Joyful Christmas, The Hummer
Feast, and Midsummer Waltz) have been sold
to Germany (Rowohlt) and Norway (Dann &
Son). Contact the Bengt Nordin Agency for
rights.
“A
juicy bone at long last,” pants one reviewer of Amnon
Dankner’s historical novel The Boneless,
which hits the list in Israel as it chronicles the life
of Theodore Herzl, the “founder of modern Zionism” who,
as Viennese correspondent to the Dreyfus trial, was
violently affected by the period’s anti-semitism. In
a novel deemed a “living, breathing, and beautifully
written mélange,” the author hypothesizes that Herzl,
in his anger, murdered Valentine le Désossé (aka Valentine
the Boneless), a dancer at the Moulin Rouge. The plot
thickens when, with a confession supposedly signed by
Herzl as his only evidence, Israeli post-Zionist historian
Modi writes a staggering account of the crime (sharing
the pen with his anarchist wife Gaia), only to be murdered
himself. The body count gets higher when another noted
Jerusalem historian dies surrounded by his priceless
collection of manuscripts, with a jealous wife and a
vanished assistant as the only suspects. Dankner, whose
style is so inimitable that his characters are said
to speak “Danknerish,” has been a popular columnist
for the daily Ha’aretz. None of his 13 books
have been sold outside of Israel yet, but this year
they’ve aroused flurries of interest post-Frankfurt.
All rights are available from the Institute for the
Translation of Hebrew Literature.
In Spain, Barcelona-based writer Francisco Casavella’s
new novel Wild Games has been whipping up plenty
of post-Frankfurt buzz, though the book has not hit
the nation’s bestseller list. Said to be animated by
the “blurred borders between truth and lies, and farce
and tragedy,” the book is set in a town of remote shanties
on the mountain of Montjuic outside Barcelona, and follows
quixotic immigrant Fernando Atienza as he and fellow
pariah Pepito set out in search of a certain Watusi,
who is reputed to be a famous yet reclusive denizen
of the district. We track Atienza in cinematic detail
as he lives with his widowed mother, spending his hours
fishing the dirty waters of Barcelona’s port and dreaming
about the larger-than-life Watusi. Wading into “the
garbage dumps of reality without falling into the squalor,”
Wild Games is the first installment of the 36-year-old
author’s ambitious Watusi’s Day trilogy, which
is described as a novel in three parts rather than three
separate books. Radiating what critics have called “self-assurance
and concentrated tenderness,” Wild Games has
been sold thus far to the UK (Faber), Germany
(Kiepenheuer & Witsch), France (Actes
Sud), and Italy (Mondadori). Contact Carmen
Pinilla at the Balcells Agency for rights.
Lastly, in Poland, Joanna Olczak-Ronikier plants
a family tree to rival the most baroque García Marquez
saga. The Garden of Memory tells the story of
four generations of the author’s family, including her
grandparents, who survived World War II and Soviet prison
camps. They founded the Mortkowicz publishing
house, which was famous across Europe during the interwar
period, and ran one of the best literary bookshops and
publishing houses in pre-War Poland. Perhaps bibliophilia
is genetic after all. Rights have been sold to Germany
(Aufbau) and world English rights have been sold
to Weidenfeld & Nicolson (UK). For rights
information, contact Anna Rucinska at Znak.
©2002
Publishing Trends
