Hard Habits
to Break
Curvings
of a Self-Help Author,Imaginary Friends in France Rated-R
in Taiwan
FROM PUBLISHING
TRENDS (FEBRUARY 2005)
Eva Agull
ó has become famous after writing a successful
book about addiction in Luc ía Etxebarria’s
new novel A Miracle in Balance, which has charged to
number 4 on the list in Spain. However, in Rush
Limbaugh-like fashion, she herself has become
a slave to certain demons, including alcohol, anguish
and the judgments of others. As the ailing mother of
a newborn, she lies in a hospital and sets out to write
a letter to explain the story of the family into which
her daughter has been born. With a narrative that shifts
through time, and spans the globe from New York to Madrid
and Alicante, Eva reconstructs the untold story of the
Agull ó Benayas family, including all of the
skeletons in the closet and the inheritances parents
leave to their children, for better or for worse. Ultimately,
she concludes that, in spite of her own bad moods, insecurities
and neurosis, life itself is a miracle. “One of
the most charismatic young authors on the Spanish literary
scene, she has won the Premio de los Lectores
de la Feria de Bilbao and the Premio
Nadal. Rights to her latest have been sold
to Heloïse d’Ormesson Editions
(France), Saffraan (Holland), and Kedros
(Greece). Contact Cristina Mora at
Planeta (Spain).
Family secrets
also abound in France this month, where Philippe
Grimbert’s second novel, A Secret, which
has sold 150,000 copies in France, is being praised
as a “coup de coeur” by booksellers and
critics alike. Rife with forbidden love, guilt, and
the boundless curiosity of a child, all against the
backdrop of some of the darkest chapters of the twentieth
century, the book features a young boy who invents an
older brother for himself who is stronger, better-looking,
and more confident. Later in life, he feels the need
to disclose his imaginary past, and is informed by a
family friend and confidante that the invented brother,
Simon, actually did exist, but died in a concentration
camp with Hannah, his mother and the narrator’s
father’s first wife. His world shattered, the
narrator must confront his family’s veiled past.
Rights have been sold in Germany (Suhrkamp),
Italy (Bompiani), Spain (Tusquets),
Holland (De Geus), Greece (Pletron),
and Israel (Matar), with interest brewing
in Asia, Eastern Europe, and the US. Contact Heidi
Warneke, who has taken over the rights department
at Grasset (France), from the recently-retired
Marie-H élène d’Ovidio
.
Four men and
a women are chosen at random to take part in the scavenger
hunt of their lives in German author GeorgKlein’s
The Sun is Shining on Us. Locked in a maze-like industrial
building near a harbor, they are hired by Gabor Cziffra,
a mysterious Godfather-like character to find an antique
artifact, known simply as “a sun” which
is hidden somewhere in the building. Observed by hidden
cameras and microphones, the five begin their adventure
to make a quick buck, but are soon deterred, to say
the least, by a serial killer who is haunting the neighborhood.
As fear begins to rule, the protagonists who are “always
chasing a chimera,” delve deeper into the building,
room by room and staircase by staircase, while also
digging deeper into their own pasts. Klein has been
published by DeNoel (France), and Ambo/Anthos
(Holland), among others, and Astrid Kurth
at Sanford Greenburger is offering
US rights.
Also in Germany,
drawn from her conversations with journalists, military
staff, and former prisoners, essayist and literary critic
for Die Zeit and Neue Z üricher ZeitungDorothea
Dieckmann has put together a fictional text
based on real facts in Guant á namo . In six
scenes, she tells the life of Rashid, a prisoner of
the camp, and explores the “paralysing fear, psychotic
delusions, the manic identification with Muslim fellow
prisoners, and resignation.” Born in Hamburg to
a Muslim Indian father and a German mother, Rashid travels
to India following the invasion of Afghanistan, to claim
an inheritance from his grandmother. Along the way,
he befriends a young Afghan and continues on to Peshawar,
finding himself in the midst of a heated anti-American
demonstration. He is suddenly arrested, handed over
to the Americans, and shipped off to Gitmo where he
is subjected to isolation, starvation, and deprivation
in a tiny cage. Rights to the book, called “one
of the best, if not the best German novel to be published
since the dawn of the new millennium” and likened
to the autobiographical writings of Primo Levi
or Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, are being
offered by Anna Stein at Donadio
& Olson.
Another work
of fiction spun from tragic reality that is turning
heads in Russia is Andrei Volos’
The Animator, which uses the events of the takeover
of Moscow’s Dubrovka Theatre
by Chechen rebels, as the framework for a tale of the
“fantastic and mythical history” of Russia’s
animators, an elite group of “scientists”
popular in the early 20th century, who claimed to be
able to resurrect people’s souls after death.
As one of the animators, Sergey Barmin suffers at the
hands of a long-lost love, a fact that will come to
play later in the story, Volos introduces Salakh, a
destitute young boy who is drawn into the extremist
world of the Chechen rebels in search of a hot meal
and a place to sleep. Volos adds to the mix a physics
teacher who ends up a victim of the theatre siege, a
corrupt Russian army officer who is secretly selling
arms to the rebels, as well as another who buys the
illegal arms, all the while evoking sympathies for characters
on each side of the conflict. Rights to this winner
of the Anti-Booker Prize and the National
Russian Literary Prize have been sold to Frassinelli
(Italy), and Hanser (Germany), and
US and UK rights are still available from the Linda
Michaels Agency.
Disturbing
news from Taiwan this month, where a new rating system
for books, audio, and video publications has gone into
effect. Books there are now rated in two categories:
general and restricted. Falling into the latter category
are materials “containing ‘over-description’
of such criminal behaviors as killing, kidnapping or
drug dealing; ‘over-portraying’ of the process
of suicide; ‘dramatic depiction’ of violent,
bloody, and deviant scenes, but acceptable by general
adult audiences and languages, conversations, sounds,
pictures or graphic portrayal of sexual behavior.”
In an interview with the Taipei Times, Huang
Jien-ho, general manager of Dala Publication
Co., “specializing in books with spicy
content,” criticized the new rating system as
“violent” and “ridiculous.”
As one well-informed source who wished to remain anonymous
said, “Basically the whole spectrum of commercial
fiction, is now R-rated. I guess Barbara Cartland
will pass muster. Publishers in Taiwan had a hard time
enough selling fiction.” Restricted publications
will carry a label on the cover.
©2005
Publishing Trends
