International
Fiction Bestsellers
Frenzy in Finland
Book Babes on the Baltic, Italy's Newsstand Novellas,
And Germany's Aesopian Menagerie
FROM PUBLISHING
TRENDS (MARCH 2004)
Having
budged out of their Barcaloungers, reader-citizens are
barging into bookshops all across Finland, where surveys
reveal that the number of Finns who regularly read and
buy books is climbing — 14% of those surveyed bought
more than 10 books in 2003, up from 8% in 1995 — while
the number of those couch potatoes who never bother
with books has shrunk from 28% in 1995 to 22% in 2003.
What’s the deal? Ilona Lindh, Foreign Fiction
Editor for Finnish house Tammi, reports that
“there seems to be a great interest in our own culture
— history, language, customs — so Finnish fiction is
more successful than translated fiction,” with crime
and suspense being especially popular these days. Two
of Tammi’s indigenous stars are Taavi Soininvaara,
whose thrillers involving crime, terrorism, and lethal
viruses have started to cause much panting among foreign
publishers, and Juha Itkonen, whose first novel
tells of the wrenching adjustments made by two American
Mormons who wake up one fine morning in Finland. Lindh
is also singing the praises of Leena Lehtolainen,
who has injected a feminist angle into Finnish crime
fiction since she made her precocious debut at age 12
with a novel for young readers. Her detective series
started with the 1993 novel My First Murder and is up
to eight titles so far, sold to as many countries.
Meanwhile, a mainstay on the Finnish list for more than
20 years, Arto Paasilinna, is also the most translated
living author in Finland. He’s now sold abroad in 25
languages, and his best known work, The Year of the
Hare — in which the stressed-out protagonist leaves
his frenetic life behind to return to nature, in the
company of, um, a young hare — was just published in
the US by Dufour Editions. Paasilinna has been
deemed “as much an element of Finnish autumn as falling
birch leaves,” and praised for taking up “macabre themes
such as suicide, Armageddon, and unemployment” and weaving
them into humorous, therapeutic antidotes to despair.
The nation’s readers have also been hooked on promising
“rookies,” according to Veikko Sonninen of the
Finnish Book Publishers Association, foremost
among them action-thriller maven Ilkka Remes,
whose latest novel Endless Night sold 135,000 copies
in just a couple of months. Then there’s 2002 Finlandia
Prize recipient Kari Hotakainen, who explores
the notion of “The Finnish Dream” in The Trench Road,
which details the mediocre life of Matti Virtanen (it’s
by far the most common Finnish name for men). The object
of Virtanen’s desire is a “veteran house,” one of the
homes built on free plots of land for men returning
from battle. After his wife and daughter ditch
him, snagging the house is the holy grail, and he sells
off his possessions and turns to peddling erotic massages
to raise cash. Hotakainen’s earlier novel, Heart Attacks,
features a down-and-out factory worker/cinema buff who
tries to force his way into the filming of Francis
Ford Coppola’s epic, The Godfather. Hotakainen
has been published in Germany (Fischer), the
Slovak Republic (Slovenský Spisovatel), and elsewhere.
For more on the Finn reading frenzy, contact Ilona Lindh
at ilona.lindh@tammi.net
and Veikko Sonninen at veikko.sonninen@skyry.net.
The Finns aren’t the only ones beefing up their personal
libraries, as readers in Italy need travel no further
than their local newsstand, with several daily and weekly
newspapers continuing to develop new series in assorted
areas of interest, ranging from art, music, and sports,
to tourism, literature, and history. La Repubblica
was the first daily out of the gates in 2002 (it has
packaged 50 novels from the likes of Isabel Allende,
Heinrich Böll, and James Joyce, each of
which sold a whopping 500,000 copies) and others quickly
followed suit. Armed with publicity channels to die
for, newspapers are banking on their subscribers’ keenness
for collectibles by running full-page color ads featuring
photos of their latest series in its entirety. Newsstands,
it should be noted, are a more familiar part of daily
life than bookstores in Italy, and the stacks of new
volumes that appear there on a weekly basis (favorably
priced at just about 5 euros) have proven irresistible.
The first titles (print runs have run as high as 1 million
copies) are generally offered for free with the purchase
of a newspaper. Italy’s most widely read daily, Il
Corriere della Sera, just launched 30 books of poetry,
setting its spotlight on Eugenio Montale in the
first volume. A public reading of his poetry last week
drew a crowd that filled the 600-seat Grassi
theater in Milan. Look for this phenomenon to grow as
weeklies like Panorama and Famiglia Cristiana
get in on the action.
It wasn’t a newsstand but a bench at the train station
in Bielefeld where German author, literary critic, and
former TV personality Roger Willemsen was approached
by the artistic director of an orchestra who hoped to
recruit him to pen a story based on the classic Camille
Saint-Saëns piece, Carnival of the Animals. Willemsen
agreed and asked his friend Volker Kriegel, a
multi-talented jazz guitarist and author, to illustrate
the book. (Sadly, this was Kriegel’s last work before
he died in June 2003.) This Aesopian menagerie, including
snails who wear lipgloss and rats who jump out of cakes,
provides a witty picture of animals as they reflect
the oddities of human beings. The book received an added
boost when Elke Heidenreich featured it on her
hit series Lesen! (see PT, 8/03). Rights
have been sold to Korea (Haeto). US and UK rights
for this book and his previous book Travel Through Germany
are still open. Contact Isabell Ludewig at Eichborn
in Germany.
Finally, stay tuned for our Japanese list next month,
but in the meantime, check out A Real Novel by Minae
Mizumura. Hailed as the contemporary Japanese version
of Wuthering Heights, the two-volume epic has been called
a “decisive moment in the history of Japanese literature”
which describes Japan from its prewar social structure,
to a “middle-class vapidness” in the 50 years following
World War II. With a complex narrative structure (in
which Mizumura takes part in the plot), the book presents
the author’s life in the US and her numerous encounters
with Taro Azuma, the central character in the novel
itself. Years later, when the author, now a middle-aged
novelist teaching at Stanford University, has lost touch
with Taro, she is visited by a young editor wanting
to hear the story of Taro’s life in Japan. Thus begins
the story of how the young editor came to hear Taro’s
story from a woman he once met. Got it? The book has
been sold to Seuil (France), but US rights are
still available. Contact Writers House.
©2004
Publishing Trends
