John Belushi
meets the Coen brothers — or maybe the three stooges
— this month as a trio of young Israelis land in New
York to strike it fabulously rich but soon put the pedal
to the metal on a rollicking, star-crossed road trip
in Moving, Israeli author Assaf Gavron’s
latest quasi-autobiographical tale (he worked in a New
York moving company to write the book). It’s the spring
of 1998, and Izzy, Jonesy, and Shlomi are schlepping
away at “Sababa Moving and Storage” near Times Square.
They soon split with the owner’s blue moving truck (which
stows a trove of paintings owned by an aging couple
from New York who have shipped out to Florida) and a
few misadventures down the road, stolen slot machines
are added to the booty. Problem is, the slots are rigged
to discharge the “big win” to members of the Russian
mafia, and our trio is soon tailed by an embittered
band of hooligans. These mobsters, in turn, are stalked
by FBI agents, among them a Jewish man frantically worried
about whether he’ll make it to his overbearing mother’s
Passover seder. Chock full of fateful encounters, wide
American spaces, road-bleary rest stops, and an Indian
woman falling head over heels for a federal agent, this
“fascinating, funny, and thrilling” novel takes aim
at both the American and Zionist dreams, and ironically
comments on the very notion of homeland. The London-based
Gavron (who has released three albums with cult pop
group Hoof and Mouth) is the author of Ice
(1997) and the short story collection Sex in
the Cemetery (2000), part of which was adapted for
Israeli theatre. Some of the author’s stories have been
translated into Russian, but rights are open for the
new one from Deborah Harris at the Harris/Elon
Agency.
In Poland,
middle-aged Gdansk law professor Jacob flunks a student
during a final exam, then brushes her off when she confronts
him in Stefan Chwin’s morbidly fascinating new
novel, Golden Pelican. When word of a student’s
suicide reaches him, however, the thought of possibly
having provoked her death opens the floodgates of malaise,
kicking off with the professor’s petty thievery in grocery
stores and devolving into homelessness and humiliation
before eventual rebirth. Drawing upon “the basic duality
of modern society” — that is, life is passing us by,
yet we can’t be bothered about it — Chwin aspires to
the likes of Pawel Huelle and Günter Grass
as he probes the unseemly side of his native city and
revels in the rich ambivalencies of his protagonists.
Also known for forays into the adventure genre for young
readers (illustrating them himself, no less), as well
as critical studies of literature, the 53-year-old Chwin
has been acclaimed for Hanemann, a novel about
Gdansk as a free city in the 1930s and under Polish
administration after the war, and was awarded the Andreas
Gryphius Prize in 1999. Unabashedly fixated on high-profile
suicides (“Chwin masterfully describes a world of things
expiring in fires, falling into the hands of strangers,
and decaying in an alien atmosphere,” explains the catalog
copy), Chwin has nonetheless been lauded as a sort of
spiritual genealogist of Polish-German relations. Negotiations
are under way with Rowohlt (Germany), and rights
are available from Krystyna Lars (Tytul).
In the
social-realist sockdolager we’ve all been waiting for,
Danish writer Jan Sonnergaard takes on nothing
less than “the intoxication of yuppies at finally being
liberated from all the solidarity and hippie crap from
the 1960s and 1970s.” In I Am Still Afraid of Caspar
Michael Petersen, which is the third and final volume
in a trilogy of short story collections (after Radiator
and Last Sunday in October), the “ravishing”
Sonnergaard follows up his studies of hardship on the
margins (the unemployed, perennial students, alcoholics)
and stand-up members of the middle class, respectively,
to target the careers and intrigues of the raised-pinky
upper crust that resides north of Copenhagen. From the
successful adman who steamrolls his way through life
to the illegal alien who is hounded by authorities,
Sonnergaard shows that he’s “without compare in portraiture
and linguistic-musical empathy” when describing these
millennial times. Go get ’em, Jan. The book has been
sold to Germany (Achilla), Italy (Pendragon),
Iceland (Bjartur), and Holland (Skanderbeg).
See Gyldendal for rights.
Positively
shrugging off “all the recent trends in Dutch literature,”
hit-maker Thomas Rosenboom comes out of the corner
swinging with The New Man, hitting us with obscure
Dutch towns and marvelously bilious, vengeful characters.
A two-time recipient of the prestigious Libris Award
(the Dutch equivalent of the Booker Prize) for
Public Works — over 200,000 copies sold — and
Washed Meat, Rosenboom writes of Berend Bepol,
a philosophical sixty-something shipbuilder unperturbed
by the 1920s downturn in shipbuilding, instead fixated
on finding a suitor for his unmarried daughter. When
his foreman, Niesten, jumps at the opportunity, a taut,
shameful drama ensues between the two men amidst a background
of crushing economic hardship. Hailed for its “impeccable
structure” and “mesmerizing tension,” the book is up
to its seventh print run in two months, and sparking
interest all over Europe, though no rights have yet
been sold. Contact Floortje Jansen of Querido,
soon to be rights manager at a new agency set up by
Querido, Nijgh & Van Ditmar, Athenaeum-Polak
& van Gennep, and Querido Children.
Finally,
heartbreaker and dream-maker Antonio Gala searches
for the source of love’s bitter sting in his latest,
The Owner of the Injury. When love turns treacherous,
Gala wonders, is the injury “owned” by the person who
inflicts it? Indeed, who owns a letter — the sender,
the receiver, or even love’s middle man: the post office?
In this collection of stories held together by a common
amorous thread, Gala gets ever more obsessed with archer
Cupid’s marksmanship. Garnering his greatest success
as a playwright, Gala has been published in Germany
(Eichborn), France (Lattès), Italy (RCS),
and Greece (Livani), among many other nations.
Rights to his latest and to Guests in the Garden
(see PT,
7/02) are both available from Cristina Mora
at Planeta.
