Pull up
a barstool and lend an ear to the simply Seinfeldian
comic strip artist and author Roberto Fontanarrosa,
whose latest book, You’ll Never Believe Me, is
stirring up all manner of giggles and guffaws in Argentina
this month. A mix of colloquial charm and universal
wit likened to that of Mark Twain — even dubbed,
if you can believe it, a “pastiche of the style of Gabriel
García Márquez and the Reader’s Digest” —
this collection of 22 short stories is written in the
style of an excitable sort who arrives at a party and
exclaims, “You’ll never believe what has just happened
to me!” There are the two angry bourgeois parents who
reprimand their young son for having stolen a toaster
from a supermarket — but have a miraculous change of
heart when they discover that he also inadvertently
swiped a handbag stocked with cold, hard cash. Then,
in the title story, there’s an amateur soccer scout,
confident that he has found a future sports legend,
who learns that the boy has, in fact, run off with the
circus. In another story, amid the turbulent shipwreck
of a transatlantic cruise liner, a millionaire passenger
spends some quality time in the ship’s library, choosing
three books to read on the desert island where he surmises
they will land. Fontanarrosa, with three novels, nine
volumes of short stories, and forty volumes of daily
cartoons (some of which have appeared in US newspapers)
to his credit, is a hit just about everywhere in Latin
America and has been published in Spain (RBA
and Alfaguara), as well as Italy (Feltrinelli).
Contact Daniel Divinsky at Ediciones de la
Flor for US rights and see Ángeles Martín
(amliterary@bsab.com)
for Europe.
Also in
Argentina, Rosa Montero concocts an aphrodisiacal
cocktail of fact and fiction in her uncanny, category-busting
latest, Madness in the Attic, which also appears
at #1 on the non-fiction list in Spain and which
has received high praise from such notables as Mario
Vargas Llosa. A torrid history of the love affair
between Montero and her own imagination, the book is
essentially her spin on the origins of fiction and on
the presence of fantasy in even the most documentarily
proven biographies. While undertaking a trip to her
own interior (and revealing juicy details of an early
affair with an actor), Montero tells reputed tales and
curiosities of some of her personal heroes, including
Goethe and Tolstoy, incorporating fictitious variations
along the way. In a book in which the imagination is
the protagonist, Montero turns out a perfect soufflé
of biography, autobiography, and novel, declaring that
“all autobiography is fiction and all fiction is autobiography”
and leaving it up to her readers to tell the real from
the surreal. Adding to the author’s mystique is the
adaptation of her book The Cannibal’s Daughter by
director Antonio Serrano in his hit film Lucia,
Lucia — “a crafty marriage of detective genre and
feminist liberation parable” which details an author’s
search for her missing husband and which claimed Mexico’s
third highest box office opening on record earlier this
year. Rights have been sold to Portugal (Asa)
and France (Metailié), with negotiations under
way with Frassinelli in Italy and with more offers
expected from her usual publishers in Brazil, Germany,
Holland, Greece, and Poland. English rights are available
for all of her works; contact Carmen Pinilla
at Carmen Balcells.
Dateline
New York, 1903: Cousins Diamante and Vita (aged 12 and
9) arrive at Ellis Island from a minute village in the
province of Caserta in Southern Italy in Melania
Mazzucco’s novel Vita, which is said to share
the ambience of Martin Scorsese-directed Gangs
of New York. Trekking to number six on the Italian
list, this winner of the prestigious Strega Prize
details the frustrations experienced by immigrants
in a new world, where 12,000 foreigners disembarked
daily (the cousins are just two of 1,500 on their ship
who are under the age of 25) and where newcomers were
often the victims of xenophobic threats. Deemed “picaresque”
and “imaginative,” the book is based on the harsh reality
of Mazzucco’s own grandfather’s arrival in New York,
and is said to unite “individual destinies and collective
phenomena” in a darn near polyphonic and multinational
city. The title has yet to be sold in the UK and US,
but will be published in France (Flammarion),
Spain (Anagrama), Holland (Moura), and
Israel (Schocken). Contact Giovanna Canton
at RCS-Rizzoli.
In Germany,
the word is this: move over, Oprah. The nation’s
own television personality/book guru Elke Heidenreich
is doing her part to shape the bestseller list with
her no-nonsense, yet refreshingly objective style on
the new ZDF television program, Lesen!
(“Read!”) A bestselling author herself, nearly all of
the books she has recommended in her first two shows
have appeared almost immediately on Der Spiegel’s
bestseller list. Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt’s book
Monsieur Ibrahim and the Flowers of the Koran went
straight to the top spot after it was featured, followed
closely by Jakob Arjouni’s short story collection
Idiots: Five Fairytales, which was highlighted
on the second episode. (Though Arjouni has been published
in the UK, US/UK rights are still available to his latest.
Contact Susanne Bauknecht at Diogenes.)
“I’ve only got thirty minutes. Should I use that time
to tell people what they shouldn’t read?” says Heidenreich,
a former sitcom star. Featuring guests like talk show
host Harald Schmidt and literary critic Marcel
Reich-Ranicki (who, incidentally, recommended Undine
Gruenter’s seasonal sensation Summer Guests at
Trouville; see last month’s PT), the show
garnered an audience exceeding two million in its first
broadcast. Publishers have been rushing to order additional
print runs when they find out that one of their books
is scheduled to appear on the show, and bookshops have
set up special displays for her recommendations. Even
those featured titles that do not immediately jump on
the bestseller lists experience a noticeable surge in
sales. Sound familiar? As a case in point, Max Aub’s
historical novel Bitter Almonds, set during the
Spanish civil war, sold fewer than 10,000 copies between
the novel’s publication date in April and the first
show on June 10. But in the week following Heidenreich’s
endorsement, 6,500 additional copies were quickly vacuumed
off the shelves. (Carmen Balcells holds world
rights on behalf of Max Aub’s estate.)
Finally,
please take note that rights to Unni Lindell’s
The Night Sister, covered in last month’s issue,
are held by Bengt Nordin.
