Blowin’ in the Wind
Grandes Gusts in Spain, Bewitchery in Greece, And Crazy Birds Flutter Aloft in Israel
Breezes, gales, gusts, and tempests swirl like suspicious characters through this month’s bestselling Spanish novel Difficult Airs, the latest effort from well-known erotica queen Almudena Grandes. The author’s fifth novel sets out to map the meaning of wind as a kind of mutable metaphor for the human condition. Amid an expansive backdrop of the Bay of Cadiz, the two actual protagonists, Juan and Sara, determine to reinvent their lives amid a sea of moral ambiguities involving revenge and money. (Heat-seeking readers are advised, however, that “there are erotic scenes, but to be found after page 300.”) Grandes’ first book, The Ages of Lulu, was deemed a “powerful essay into the darker side of female sexuality,” and noted for its “louche sexual hedonism sanctified by the aura of the artistic.” Or, as one reader exclaimed: “Finally! Some decent erotica!” That book was published in the US by Grove in 1994, in addition to 20 other territories, and collectively sold more than a million copies. Her subsequent title, Atlas of Human Geography, sold 120,000 copies in Spain and has been published in France, Italy, Germany, Portugal, and Brazil, among other nations. The 42-year-old Grandes won Italy’s prestigious Rossone Prize in 1997, and several of her projects, including Lulu, have made a splash on the big screen. Thus far, rights to Difficult Airs have been sold to Italy, France, and Germany, and US rights are still open, according to Delia Louzán at Tusquets.
Also in Spain, The Guitar Player by Luis Landero is strumming up a storm, telling the story of teenage Emilio as he dreams of ditching his machine-shop day job to strike out on the path to bohemia as a flamenco guitarist. He’s soon finger-picking away, and, lo and behold, he suddenly finds himself giving private guitar lessons to the vixenish young wife of his boss. Arriba, as they say. As Landero’s fourth novel, The Guitar Player borrows from the author’s own exploits; he himself worked grungy day jobs before becoming a renowned flamenco player and touring the globe. About 37,000 copies of the new one have been printed, and at press time, all foreign rights were open from Tusquets.
In Greece, The Witches of Smirni by Mara Meimaridi has bedazzled readers with the story of Katina, a ruthless woman from a ghetto of Asia Minor who is inducted into the world of magic after meeting a Turkish witch. Katina uses her newfound wiles as sorceress to marry one man after another, each bumping her up one more peg on the social ladder and offering her a hand in their own businesses; soon all of Smirni is groveling at her feet. Author Meimaridi is an anthropologist in Athens, who has written on nutrition for newspapers and magazines, and is now, yes, brushing up on her astrophysics. All rights are available from Kastaniotis.
In Israel, Tamara Walks on Water by Shifra Horn has hit the list’s #2 slot after several weeks of steady ascent. The book tells the story of three generations of women in the ancient city of Jaffa, and focuses on Tamara, who falls head over heels for an eccentric Greek-Orthodox monk. As it happens, this boy-pal soon drowns in the Sea of Galilee, jolting Tamara to full awareness of her love for Yosef, who hails from mixed Jewish and Arab ancestry. The author’s previous books have been translated in Germany, France, Italy, Holland, Japan, and other nations, and her first novel, Four Mothers, sold 65,000 copies in Hebrew and tells a magical-realist story of five generations of Jerusalem women. Critics called it an “enchanting, almost stunning” work and noted, “That the tale is dense, ponderous and sincere is part of its charm as a novelized Israeli genealogy.” Horn’s second novel, The Fairest Among Women, sold well over 70,000 copies in Israel and was published in the US by St. Martin’s. Meanwhile, world English rights for the new one are being negotiated with Piatkus, but other rights are open from the Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature.
Elsewhere in Israel, critics are falling over themselves to laud the virtuosic Heatwave and Crazy Birds, which one admirer flat-out deemed “one of the ten Hebrew novels of the past decade which I would take with me to a desert island.” This “ambitious, complex, superbly written novel” chronicles heroine Loya Kaplan, an Israeli flight attendant “living between heaven and earth” who returns home after 20 years to find the world she knew upended. The book goes on to weave a “lush embroidery, ceaselessly enriched by the heroine’s wide-ranging knowledge” which serves as a kind of archaeology of an Israel of generations past. Author Gavriella Avigur-Rotem was born in Argentina but emigrated to Israel in 1950, where she works as an editor at the Haifa University Publishing House. Her 1992 first novel Mozart Was Not a Jew met with wide success in Italy (Tartaruga), Portugal (Imago), China (Flower City), and Arabia (Al Dar Al Arabia), and is due out in the US (Syracuse U. Press). Rights to the new one have been sold to France (Actes-Sud) and Italy (Baldini & Castoldi). See Ayala Carmeli at the Institute for Hebrew Literature.
In Sweden, the “unusually vigorous and fluently vivacious” novel Underdog by Torbjörn Flygt is jam-packed with family violence, shoplifting, teenage pregnancies, and the lurking pedophiles of your average working-class boyhood of the Malmö of the 1970s. This unsparing autobiographical novel is narrated by the boy’s now middle-aged and disillusioned self, and spans that mind-blowing gap “from the World Cup in 1974 to the Springsteen concert in Gothenburg in 1985,” eventually landing the narrator smack in the “materially comfortable — but culturally and spiritually disoriented” bourgeois life of a company lawyer. Livid with “lengthy, fizzing emotional outpourings,” the book is a giggle-packed, brilliantly bitter description of boys growing up in the Swedish welfare state. See Norstedts for rights.
On a last note in Sweden, that “most prominent ironist in Swedish literature” Torgny Lindgren’s Hash takes its title from the Swedish dish made from offal and grain (think haggis), and is a “steamily funny novel” chronicling the tuberculosis-ravaged Sweden of the ’40s, and inventing a striking, extended metaphor for the world. “In short,” said one amazed critic, “life is an offal-hash dish!” We couldn’t have put it better ourselves. Lindgren has been translated in about every nation imaginable (yes, even Iceland), and the new one has been sold in Denmark, Norway, Germany, France, and Italy. See Maria Bohn at Norstedts’ Pan Agency for rights.
