Apocalypse Now
Amnesia Hits Spain, Horror Bloodies France, and Pokémon Ravages Australia
Perhaps in compensation for the underwhelming arrival of Y2K, this month’s bestsellers have registered a potent desire for all those missed connections, fatal errors, and world-historical upheavals we were so tantalizingly promised. In Spain, Nativel Preciado’s The Narcissist plunges into the abyss of a full-blown identity crisis, following the story of the rich and powerful Baltasar, whose insular world of egotistic self-love is shattered when he loses his memory after a freak accident. As he comes to grips with amnesia, the protagonist finds that nothing in his world is quite as it seemed. According to our source, the work’s parable of abuse and subsequent loss is especially poignant in light of Spain’s current political climate, and may account for its selection as a finalist for last year’s Planeta prize. The novel has obviously found a sympathetic readership in Spain, selling 105,000 copies and attracting the interest of several publishing houses throughout Europe. Rights are controlled by the Planeta Group.
Also exploring the disconnectedness of space and time in Spain, young Basque writer Laura Espido Freire’s Frozen Peaches concerns itself with Elsa, a young painter who is obliged to leave her home when an unknown party inexplicably begins to threaten her. Exiled to another city, Elsa takes up residence with her grandfather and begins to discover the story of her own family — which includes a cousin with whom she mysteriously shares a name. Frozen Peaches received the Planeta prize last October, and has certainly not been disconnected from the market, having sold over 205,000 copies in Spain. See Planeta for rights.
Finally in Spain, Nobel prize-winner Camilo José Cela probes more stable notions of identity with his new work, which we’ve been translating as The Wooden Box but which we’re told is not easily translatable. Madera de Boj deals with the lives and adventures of the inhabitants of Galicia, in the Northwest region of Spain, who are deeply influenced by the land there. The book has been sold to Portugal (Editorial Noticias) and Brazil (Bertrand Brazil). See the Carmen Balcells agency for rights.
Soaring onto the list in Argentina is Doves Fly Away by Carlos Gorostiza. The novel dissects the intertwined personal and political struggles of Ignacio, an idealistic young man who deserts the army in his homeland of Argentina and escapes to Barcelona, where he becomes embroiled in the Spanish Civil War. Investigating life under the rule of fascism, the book takes readers up to the country’s return to democracy after the death of Franco. The novel has caught fire in Argentina, with rights still available from Planeta Argentina.
The fractured nature of the self is again on the agenda in India, where Pankaj Mishra’s The Romantics follows Samar, a young graduate from Allahabad, whose restlessness within a dissolving caste system drives him to escape a future of dead-end, small-town jobs. Having fled to Benares and surrounded himself with a book-filled solitude, Samar is quickly distracted by a cadre of expatriates that includes Catherine, the French femme fatale who will destroy Samar’s equanimity once and for all. The work is said to be rendered in vivid and unsentimental prose. For what it’s worth, Mishra has quite a tale of his own to tell. He was an editor at HarperCollins India when his friend Arundhati Roy’s manuscript The God of Small Things landed on his desk. After helping to launch Roy into the stratosphere, Mishra decided it was high time he devoted more time to his own writing, although he has recently been appointed as a consulting editor for Picador India. The Romantics will be published by Picador UK and by Knopf in the US.
Meanwhile in Holland, Lulu Wang, the Chinese-Dutch writer whose first novel The Lily Theatre sold zillions of copies when it shot to the top of the list early last year and took the Nonino Prize for Literature in 1999, returns with her follow-up, The Tender Child. A memoir of the author’s early life in China, the book blew out the doors with a first printing of 160,000 (a record for Holland), with Doubleday picking up rights for the US (due out this spring). Hodder & Stoughton will publish in the UK at the same time, and a number of other countries have signed on, including France (Grasset), Germany (List), and Iceland (Mal og Menning). Rights to the new one are controlled by Linda Michaels.
Confirming everyone’s suspicion that the French are experiencing a craving to be scared out of their wits in the new millennium, Emmanuel Carrère’s The Adversary follows hard on the heels of fellow genre-novel Hannibal (which by the way is selling a confounding three times faster than the Goncourt prize winner — go figure). The Adversary’s hero is one Jean Claude Roman, who apparently kills every member of his family after deciding he had had quite enough of them all. Press coverage in France has deemed the book nothing less than an “editorial event,” and a first printing of 10,000 sold out even before the author made an appearance on Bouillon de Culture — France’s answer to Oprah.
Italy draws on truth rather than fiction for inspiration this month with The False Note in the Chorus, a collection of articles and essays from journalist Indro Montanelli. The famous correspondent founded Milan’s Il Giornale, which he headed until 1994. The book chronicles in part the terrible years of the red brigades and the fall of communism, among other episodes. Also on the list is Millennium Flop, a collection of political cartoons published over the past two years from the savage pen of Giorgio Forattini. The cartoonist was himself in the papers recently when Prime Minister Massimo D’Alema launched a legal action against him over a cartoon published in La Repubblica.
And offering definitive evidence that the world is just begging to be punished, Pokémon has arrived on the bestseller list in Australia. According to Mel Cox, Contracts and Foreign Sales Manager for Scholastic Australia, the Christmas season drove sales of this “official” handbook to one million units. The book is a guide to the Pokémon characters, and joins the scores of story and sticker books already flooding the market. Publishers, meanwhile, are privately consulting their Tarot cards to see if Pokémon will manage to avoid the one-hit wonder status that has dimmed the glory of other licensed product. For now, Cox says, all omens are in the affirmative: “Kids are mad about it.”
