My Generation
Down and Out in Denmark, Angot Gasps in France, And Sweden’s Crime Duo Hits 30
Junkies, pushers, ‘narco-tarts’, and their degenerate demi-monde come crackling to life in Denmark, as Jakob Ejersbo’s novel Nordkraft (the title translates roughly as “Northern Power”) barrels up the list with its “oddly encouraging” tale of a generation searching for light at the end of the shooting gallery. In what could pass for a chapter out of Penelope Eckert’s cultural studies oeuvre Jocks and Burnouts, Nordkraft juxtaposes three intertwined stories (“Junkie Dogs,” “The Bridge,” and “Funeral”), opening with the beautifully bedraggled Maria, a drug courier who looks for salvation by way of an Iranian dude named Hossein. Meanwhile, ex-sailor Allan is a machinist haunted by demons lingering from an oil-tanker fire. Lastly, a young addict named Steso flashes back to his fateful steps down the road to overdose. Called a “delightfully cliché-free group-photo,” the book apparently offers up “the most beautiful and the most shocking testimony yet written in Danish about the generation that should have become adult during the 1990s but that catapulted itself out of life and into a drug orbit.” The 34-year-old Ejersbo is a journalist who previously dabbled in epistolary novels (Fuga) and short stories (Superego), but has now delivered something critics claimed would never be written: the “Great Danish Contemporary Novel of Realism.” The book is headed for a fourth print run after only two weeks, and rights have been sold to Norway (Aschehoug) and Finland (Otava), with a sale pending in Sweden. See Gyldendal for all other rights.
Also in Denmark, hormones were on high alert as Lone Kindberg’s novel Natasha’s Nights made a sultry splash on the charts. Begun five years ago when Kindberg was a budding twentysomething, Natasha’s Nights tracks one young woman’s rising sexual self-consciousness: heroine Therese has just dumped a man she finds boring in his utter perfection, and soon shoots to starlet-dom in a feature film about a young prostitute named Natasha. Cut to a steamy scene or two with the director, and you’ve got enough to warrant a second printing, putting the total at 4,000 copies in print (a considerable figure in Denmark, especially for a first novel). Though it has dropped off the list this month, the book has been riveting Danish media hounds, as Kindberg herself apparently has that certain je ne sais quoi (ravishing looks, outspoken ideology) that gets eyeballs glued to the tube. Danish film companies are prowling around the project, and queries for translation rights have been pouring in from Sweden, Norway, and Iceland, though nothing firm has been reported as yet. US and UK rights are available from Medusa.
A ludicrous Parisian dinner serves as our entrée into Christine Angot’s satire of love and high society, Why Brazil?, which hits the charts in France this month. Deemed a “strip-tease of the heart,” the author’s first love story tackles the evolution of an intimate relationship, warts and all, delving into its passions, foibles, and bare-knuckle violence. Thickening the plot, Why Brazil? includes characters named after and modeled on real personalities, including film director Laetitia Masson, publisher Paul Otchakovski-Laurens, journalist Jean-Luc Douin, and writer Frédéric Beigbeder, all of which has propelled the book past the 40,000-copy mark in France. One critic’s heart-thumping verdict: “the text does not breathe: it gasps. We read it like an electrocardiogram.” The new one has been on submission to Tropen (Germany), Seix Barral (Spain), Kanakis (Greece), Einaudi (Italy), and Sea-Sky (China), all of which published Angot’s last novel, Incest, but no deals had been made at press time. See Fabienne Roussel for UK rights and the French Publishers’ Agency for US rights.
Also in France, Nicolas Fargues puts on a rousing One Man Show with his third novel, a “corrosive study of manners” which stars a young married writer who up and decides to revel in his own “dark tendencies,” eventually throwing all dignity to the wind and plunging into the abyss of commercial French television. Said to be a “ferocious satire” of literary Paris and a “caustic critique” of our televised world, the book ultimately takes aim at “most men’s cowardice towards women and life in general.” The 30-year-old Fargues hails from Madagascar, and his earlier novel, Tomorrow If You Really Want It, was called a playful but tender portrait of a disillusioned, postmodern generation of “false artists, conceited truths, idealistic neo-proletarians, [and] ex-soixante-huitards.” The new book currently has 45,000 copies in print, with no foreign rights sales as yet. See France Editions for rights.
A historic novel of “epic proportions” heats up in Greece this month, as Athina Kakouri’s saga The Kite kicks off amid the newly formed Greek State of 1871, when Greeks were whooping it up for the 50th anniversary of the revolution against the Ottoman Empire. Central to the author’s potent exposé of political pride are the rich silver mines of Laurion, an area on the southeast coast of Attica, which have piqued historians’ interest as far back as Thucydides, who estimated that the mines churned through the lives of more than 20,000 slaves. Kakouri mingles nostalgia with political intrigue as her beloved Athens gets trampled under its own detritus, yet still manages to remain an enduring thing of beauty. The author’s earlier work The Knife of Fortune was published in France (Alteredit Editions), and English rights to both titles are available from Hestia.
And here’s the question of the hour in Sweden: Take an American billionaire with an Elvis-look-alike for an assistant, a Russian countess, a Swedish estate owner, and a lawyer with a face like Karl XII’s death mask, and send them all off on a luxury cruise liner. What do you get? Murder on Board, the 30th installment in the crime series by former Director-General of the UN Jan Mårtenson, featuring redoubtable anti-hero Johan Kristian Homan and Siamese sidekick Cleo. As usual, the murders take place in between chapters, sparing readers all that gratuitous gore. (As Mårtenson once explained: “There is more red bordeaux than blood in my detective novels.”) The ultra-popular series has sold a total of 500,000 copies in Sweden, and Mårtenson, who published a well-received memoir two years ago, has been exported abroad in numerous languages, including English (Ram, UK), French (Champs-Élysées), and German (Neue Berlin). Rights for Murder on Board (outside the Nordic countries) are available from the Linda Michaels Agency.
