Streaking
across the firmament on her way to the #1 spot in the
Czech Republic this month, 84-year-old Kveta Legatova
is a “new meteor in the Czech literary skies” who burst
on the scene at the age of 80 after a career as an independent-minded
teacher in the Czech countryside (where she routinely
tangled with the Communist authorities). Legatova’s
first short-story collection Zelary debuted in
2001 with an ultra-modest first print run of 400 copies,
but has since soared to over 25,000 sold and been praised
as a work of “full-blooded, passionate, and tragic”
tales from the turn of the 20th century “yet with a
flourish, pace, and composition a hundred years younger.”
Named for its setting in a remote Czech village during
WWII, the book has bounced back to the bestseller list
as the Czech film adaptation of its sequel, the novella
Joe’s Annie, premieres this month (the film,
however, bears the title of the earlier volume). Both
books envelop the reader with the “cruel charm” of the
Beskides, the mountainous region near the Polish border
where the author taught in small schoolhouses, a setting
lush with “immense richness in spite of omnipresent
poverty.” Joe’s Annie takes up the story of Eliska,
a young female teacher-turned-doctor hiding in the mountains
from Nazi persecution, who falls hopelessly in love
with a man from the region. Legatova won the State
Literary Prize (the nation’s highest such honor)
last year, and critics have declared Zelary “a
breathtaking, naturalistic, and beautiful read from
start to finish.” Joe’s Annie, meanwhile, has
sold 17,000 copies since its publication in 2002. Contact
Milan Machacek at Paseka for rights to
both titles. (Our Czech bestseller list, we’re pleased
to note, is graciously provided by Jaroslav Cisar,
Editor of the bi-weekly magazine Book News —
the PW of the Czech Republic — and Secretary
of the Association of Czech Booksellers and Publishers.
See our full report on the
Czech and Slovak publishing markets.)
Also in
the Czech Republic, Petr Sabach is back in play
with his seventh and latest offering: Four Men Afloat,
or, Drunk Bananas Are Coming Back (the title was
#2 last month, but has slipped just below the top ten).
A sequel to his earlier ode to punchy produce, Drunk
Bananas (about the coming-of-age exploits of four
young men in the twilight of the Communist era), Sabach’s
newest book tracks the men down 20 years later as they
realize that some things in life can never be regained.
Inspired by memories of pre-1989 Czechoslovakia, as
well as tales spun down at the local pub, Sabach writes
in the tradition of Czech greats Jaroslav Hasek and
Bohumil Hrabal, and found his greatest
success in 1994 with the bluntly titled Shit Burns,
a collection of three stories about the collision of
male and female world views. The book has sold more
than 50,000 copies and is the basis of Cozy Dens,
one of the most successful recent Czech films. Sabach
will be published in Hungary (Europa), Italy
(Marsilio), and France (L’Aventurine);
keep an eye out for his other works, which include Grannies,
a story of two old ladies with political chips on their
shoulders, and The Strange Problem of Francis S.,
the story of a young man’s drug-induced hallucinatory
experience inspired by the life of that bare-footed
radical, St. Francis of Assisi. See Paseka for
rights.
With Russia
fêted as the guest of honor at Frankfurt this year,
buzz is sure to build over critic and columnist Dmitry
Bykov’s latest offering, Orthography, regarded
as a “novel-opera in three acts,” and even “Russia’s
answer to The Magic Mountain.” The scene: Bolsheviks
hatch a plan in 1918 to reinvent Russian orthography,
shipping unemployed linguists and writers to a Petrograd
commune to revamp the alphabet. A cadre of young avant-gardists
forms its own commune in response, however, and budding
reporter Yat is torn between the two camps: fired from
his job at a newspaper that was shuttered for being
counter-revolutionary, Yat is cast off from society
like the letters of the old alphabet, yet caught in
the crush of the new order. Bykov’s parable of Russian
history and his grand metaphor for revolution are said
to be fired by “a tremendous will to transform not only
the literary but primarily the social landscape.” His
previous book, The Acquittal, an anti-utopian
account of a brilliant professor’s arrest and disappearance
after a mysterious phone call, has been published in
France (Denoël). All rights for Orthography
are available from Nibbe & Wiedling in
Germany.
Crime-loving
Sweden gets a new fix this month as Björn Hellberg
brings to life a fictitious Swedish metropolis with
a pulsating street life and deep-rooted social gaps
in Pariah. The most blighted area in Loviken
— aptly nicknamed the “Sewer Rat” — is home to dodgy
characters known as the pariahs. One evening in May,
the police are summoned to this odious place, where
a routine task turns into a nightmare. Hellberg is no
stranger to crime writing (he’s written 11 detective
stories on top of 23 books about tennis, and “beats
Mankell in three straight sets, to use tennis
terms”). His new electrifying police squad features
Carina Keller, a mother of three; her outspoken partner
Stig-Allan Jönsson; and sexy crime scene investigator
Mona Ceder. Earlier works have been published in Germany
(Argon) and Holland (DeGeus), but all
rights are available for this one, which has “all the
potential of becoming just as popular as his previous
series.” Contact Bengt Nordin.
Lastly,
the international press is going gaga over a young Jewish
French woman writing under the pseudonym Nima Zamar
and her account of six intense years in the Israeli
army. I Also Had to Kill, which climbed to number
5 on the nonfiction list in l’Express, tells
Zamar’s story of emigrating to Israel at the age of
22, where she joined the army after her skills as a
computer programmer caught the attention of the Israeli
secret service. Following months of torture-resistance
training, she infiltrated Hezbollah camps in Libya,
Syria, and Lebanon, posing as a Swiss-reared Palestinian
with money to spare. While training at terrorist camps,
her mission was to introduce bugs into computer networks
so that the systems could be accessed by Israelis back
home. Now working in information technology in Paris
and raising her 18-month-old daughter (whose father
was a colleague in the Israeli army killed during a
mission in Iran), she stands by her account without
naming names for fear of endangering her associates.
Called “a page-turner to the end,” Zamar’s book was
published by Albin Michel in France; rights are
available from Lucinda Karter at the French
Publishers Agency.
