Culture
Shock
Italians Battle Reclusive Tenants, Food
Taster Plays With Fire, Tony Soprano Takes Normandy
FROM PUBLISHING
TRENDS (October 2004)
Like
an episode of House Hunters gone terribly awry,
the latest offering of Italy’s Andrea De Carlo, Wind
Shear, sets two well-acquainted couples (along with
their trusty real estate agent) off from Milan to visit
some country houses which they hope to buy and refurbish.
As they approach the picturesque hamlet, they take
a wrong turn and find themselves stranded in a ditch
in an isolated, hilly part of the woods, the words “Can
you hear me now?” but a distant echo as the boonies
are outside of their cell phone network’s coverage area.
They spot a few dim lights in the distance as they wander
through the darkness and rain, and are soon invited
into a house, discovering shortly thereafter that their
hosts are the survivors of a peculiar community that
has chosen to cut off all ties to the outside world.
The happy couples soon realize another disquieting thing,
namely that the house is part of the group of cottages
that they wanted to buy and that the inhabitants are
a bunch of gritty squatters. Tempers flare when the
two groups meet head to head and several accidents prevent
the couples from leaving. The tale gives a “piercing
and vivid portrait of what we are like today,” complete
with contradictions, aspirations, obsessions and fears.
And starting on October 20th, a special edition of the
book will be released, featuring a CD with music (composed
by De Carlo as a sort of soundtrack for the book) and
24 pages of his photographs, drawings, and words, all
meant to offer new and unknown details, curiosities,
and impressions of the characters and locales in the
novel. Talk about interactive media! Contact Elisabetta
Sgarbi at Bompiani for rights.
“An
incomparable [novel] based on humor, gastronomy, eroticism
and crime,” Scorpion Soup is Spanish author and script
writer Juan Bas’ walk in the shoes of Pacho Murga,
a doltish and work-shy Bilbao resident who recounts
the unusual launch of El Mapamundi de Bilbao — “the
Rolls-Royce of tapas bars.” Its peculiar cook and owner,
Antón Astigarraga, a man with a dreadful past, was serving
as Franco’s food taster in 1962, when he was
enlisted by a group of Basque nationalist militants
and members of ETA to try to end the dictator’s life.
Many years later, a rag tag team of shady characters,
including a rich priest who is on his way to becoming
bishop, an opera singer, a leader of the military branch
of ETA, and an important nationalist politician will
be among the key characters in Astigarraga’s beleaguered
life. Rights have been sold to Gallimard (France),
Frankfurter Verlagsanstalt (Germany) and Machaon
(Russia) and are available from Laure Merle d’Aubigné
at A.C.E.R. (Spain).
“I
don’t know this man,” Christian de Houwelandt replies
when he is asked to give a speech at his grandfather’s
eightieth birthday party in John von Düffel’s
moving family chronicle, Houwelandt, which has been
likened to Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections
by German book guru Elke Heidenreich. Esther,
the wife of family patriarch Jorge, an ascetic God-seeker,
is planning the party of the century for him at their
home in the north of Germany, which they’d recently
abandoned for the splendors of the Spanish coast. The
classic curmudgeon’s son Thomas inherits control of
the estate, but continues to writhe under the thumb
of his authoritarian father. Christian, the third generation
drawn into the de Houwelandt family fracas, makes all
attempts to avoid family business. On Esther’s shoulders
falls the task of gathering the far-flung family for
a final reunion. Praised as “an exceptionally gifted
word artist...and a great storyteller,” von Düffel is
one of only two German authors invited to the Goethe-Institut’s
“Best of the Frankfurt Book Fair” on November 30. Mark
your calendars! Rights have been sold to Albin Michel
(France) and earlier books have been published in
Finland (Otava), Italy (Mondadori), Spain
(Ediciones del Bronce), and Taiwan (New Sprouts
Publishing). Contact Judith Habermas at DuMont
(Germany).
Also in Germany, the accomplished “enfant terrible”
Martin Walser hitches the fate of Gottlieb Zürn,
a 70-something retired professor and real estate agent,
to the buoyant optimism of Beate Gutbrod, a young German
post-doc in Chapel Hill’s philosophy department in his
latest tome, The Moment of Love. Beate first encounters
Gottlieb while conducting research for her dissertation
on the reception of the hedonist philosophy of Julien
Offray de La Mettrie in Germany. Gottlieb had published
two essays on the philosopher twenty years earlier and
their common admiration for him sparks an instant but
seemingly irrational attraction. After they spend a
few blissful hours on the sunny porch of his mansion,
Gottlieb’s snarky wife, Anna, comments on the impossibility
of an affair between the two because of the forty year
age difference. But when Beate wangles an invitation
for Gottlieb to speak at an international la Mettrie
conference at Berkeley, they spend three days releasing
their pent-up desire in a California hotel. When Gottlieb’s
lecture is attacked by one of Beate’s colleagues, he
flees the conference and sends his relationship with
Beate into a tailspin. Upon returning home, he hears
news about her that might make him regret his decision
to leave. Reminiscent of Philip Roth’s The Dying
Animal, this “accomplished satire about intellectuals”
has sold over 100,000 copies in Germany. Walser’s oeuvre
has an impressive foreign history and rights to his
books have been sold to Laffont (France), Lumen
(Spain), Shanghai Translation/W&K Publishing
(China), De Geus (Holland), to name a few. His
look at the Third Reich from the perspective of a young
boy in The Springing Fountain was published several
years ago by Arcade, but US rights to his more
recent books are still available from Astrid Kurth
of Sanford Greenburger.
When the Blakes, an American family with more than a
few heads in their duffel bag relocate to a tranquil
town in Normandy, nothing can prepare the locals for
the chaos that will ensue in Tonino Benacquista’s
riotous rendition of a larger-than-life ex-mafioso,
Malavita. The Blakes attempt to fit in, but become the
focus of local gossip, no thanks to a team of FBI agents
and police who are tracing their every step. Mr. Blake,
it turns out, is a former East Coast mafia boss who
sold out his former “business partners” and who is now
enrolled in the witness protection program. Regardless
of the ocean that separates him from his past life,
his former “friends” might not be as far away as he
thinks. When Blake starts to write his memoirs, the
White House steps in with a thunderous “Fuhgeddaboudit!”
Contact Anne-Solange Noble at Gallimard.
Note: While
the above-mentioned titles are hot items in their respective
countries, they fall just shy of the top-10 lists.
©2004
Publishing Trends
