Cuckoo Cavaliers
Three Pests in Gavron’s Mess, Down and Out in Gdansk, And Gala Rings Twice in Spain
John Belushi meets the Coen brothers — or maybe the three stooges — this month as a trio of young Israelis land in New York to strike it fabulously rich but soon put the pedal to the metal on a rollicking, star-crossed road trip in Moving, Israeli author Assaf Gavron’s latest quasi-autobiographical tale (he worked in a New York moving company to write the book). It’s the spring of 1998, and Izzy, Jonesy, and Shlomi are schlepping away at “Sababa Moving and Storage” near Times Square. They soon split with the owner’s blue moving truck (which stows a trove of paintings owned by an aging couple from New York who have shipped out to Florida) and a few misadventures down the road, stolen slot machines are added to the booty. Problem is, the slots are rigged to discharge the “big win” to members of the Russian mafia, and our trio is soon tailed by an embittered band of hooligans. These mobsters, in turn, are stalked by FBI agents, among them a Jewish man frantically worried about whether he’ll make it to his overbearing mother’s Passover seder. Chock full of fateful encounters, wide American spaces, road-bleary rest stops, and an Indian woman falling head over heels for a federal agent, this “fascinating, funny, and thrilling” novel takes aim at both the American and Zionist dreams, and ironically comments on the very notion of homeland. The London-based Gavron (who has released three albums with cult pop group Hoof and Mouth) is the author of Ice (1997) and the short story collection Sex in the Cemetery (2000), part of which was adapted for Israeli theatre. Some of the author’s stories have been translated into Russian, but rights are open for the new one from Deborah Harris at the Harris/Elon Agency.
In Poland, middle-aged Gdansk law professor Jacob flunks a student during a final exam, then brushes her off when she confronts him in Stefan Chwin’s morbidly fascinating new novel, Golden Pelican. When word of a student’s suicide reaches him, however, the thought of possibly having provoked her death opens the floodgates of malaise, kicking off with the professor’s petty thievery in grocery stores and devolving into homelessness and humiliation before eventual rebirth. Drawing upon “the basic duality of modern society” — that is, life is passing us by, yet we can’t be bothered about it — Chwin aspires to the likes of Pawel Huelle and Günter Grass as he probes the unseemly side of his native city and revels in the rich ambivalencies of his protagonists. Also known for forays into the adventure genre for young readers (illustrating them himself, no less), as well as critical studies of literature, the 53-year-old Chwin has been acclaimed for Hanemann, a novel about Gdansk as a free city in the 1930s and under Polish administration after the war, and was awarded the Andreas Gryphius Prize in 1999. Unabashedly fixated on high-profile suicides (“Chwin masterfully describes a world of things expiring in fires, falling into the hands of strangers, and decaying in an alien atmosphere,” explains the catalog copy), Chwin has nonetheless been lauded as a sort of spiritual genealogist of Polish-German relations. Negotiations are under way with Rowohlt (Germany), and rights are available from Krystyna Lars (Tytul).
In the social-realist sockdolager we’ve all been waiting for, Danish writer Jan Sonnergaard takes on nothing less than “the intoxication of yuppies at finally being liberated from all the solidarity and hippie crap from the 1960s and 1970s.” In I Am Still Afraid of Caspar Michael Petersen, which is the third and final volume in a trilogy of short story collections (after Radiator and Last Sunday in October), the “ravishing” Sonnergaard follows up his studies of hardship on the margins (the unemployed, perennial students, alcoholics) and stand-up members of the middle class, respectively, to target the careers and intrigues of the raised-pinky upper crust that resides north of Copenhagen. From the successful adman who steamrolls his way through life to the illegal alien who is hounded by authorities, Sonnergaard shows that he’s “without compare in portraiture and linguistic-musical empathy” when describing these millennial times. Go get ’em, Jan. The book has been sold to Germany (Achilla), Italy (Pendragon), Iceland (Bjartur), and Holland (Skanderbeg). See Gyldendal for rights.
Positively shrugging off “all the recent trends in Dutch literature,” hit-maker Thomas Rosenboom comes out of the corner swinging with The New Man, hitting us with obscure Dutch towns and marvelously bilious, vengeful characters. A two-time recipient of the prestigious Libris Award (the Dutch equivalent of the Booker Prize) for Public Works — over 200,000 copies sold — and Washed Meat, Rosenboom writes of Berend Bepol, a philosophical sixty-something shipbuilder unperturbed by the 1920s downturn in shipbuilding, instead fixated on finding a suitor for his unmarried daughter. When his foreman, Niesten, jumps at the opportunity, a taut, shameful drama ensues between the two men amidst a background of crushing economic hardship. Hailed for its “impeccable structure” and “mesmerizing tension,” the book is up to its seventh print run in two months, and sparking interest all over Europe, though no rights have yet been sold. Contact Floortje Jansen of Querido, soon to be rights manager at a new agency set up by Querido, Nijgh & Van Ditmar, Athenaeum-Polak & van Gennep, and Querido Children.
Finally, heartbreaker and dream-maker Antonio Gala searches for the source of love’s bitter sting in his latest, The Owner of the Injury. When love turns treacherous, Gala wonders, is the injury “owned” by the person who inflicts it? Indeed, who owns a letter — the sender, the receiver, or even love’s middle man: the post office? In this collection of stories held together by a common amorous thread, Gala gets ever more obsessed with archer Cupid’s marksmanship. Garnering his greatest success as a playwright, Gala has been published in Germany (Eichborn), France (Lattès), Italy (RCS), and Greece (Livani), among many other nations. Rights to his latest and to Guests in the Garden (see PT, 7/02) are both available from Cristina Mora at Planeta.
