He Who Laughs Last
Fontanarrosa Grabs Guffaws, Shades of Scorsese in Italy, And Germany’s Answer to Oprah
Pull up a barstool and lend an ear to the simply Seinfeldian comic strip artist and author Roberto Fontanarrosa, whose latest book, You’ll Never Believe Me, is stirring up all manner of giggles and guffaws in Argentina this month. A mix of colloquial charm and universal wit likened to that of Mark Twain — even dubbed, if you can believe it, a “pastiche of the style of Gabriel García Márquez and the Reader’s Digest” — this collection of 22 short stories is written in the style of an excitable sort who arrives at a party and exclaims, “You’ll never believe what has just happened to me!” There are the two angry bourgeois parents who reprimand their young son for having stolen a toaster from a supermarket — but have a miraculous change of heart when they discover that he also inadvertently swiped a handbag stocked with cold, hard cash. Then, in the title story, there’s an amateur soccer scout, confident that he has found a future sports legend, who learns that the boy has, in fact, run off with the circus. In another story, amid the turbulent shipwreck of a transatlantic cruise liner, a millionaire passenger spends some quality time in the ship’s library, choosing three books to read on the desert island where he surmises they will land. Fontanarrosa, with three novels, nine volumes of short stories, and forty volumes of daily cartoons (some of which have appeared in US newspapers) to his credit, is a hit just about everywhere in Latin America and has been published in Spain (RBA and Alfaguara), as well as Italy (Feltrinelli). Contact Daniel Divinsky at Ediciones de la Flor for US rights and see Ángeles Martín (amliterary@bsab.com) for Europe.
Also in Argentina, Rosa Montero concocts an aphrodisiacal cocktail of fact and fiction in her uncanny, category-busting latest, Madness in the Attic, which also appears at #1 on the non-fiction list in Spain and which has received high praise from such notables as Mario Vargas Llosa. A torrid history of the love affair between Montero and her own imagination, the book is essentially her spin on the origins of fiction and on the presence of fantasy in even the most documentarily proven biographies. While undertaking a trip to her own interior (and revealing juicy details of an early affair with an actor), Montero tells reputed tales and curiosities of some of her personal heroes, including Goethe and Tolstoy, incorporating fictitious variations along the way. In a book in which the imagination is the protagonist, Montero turns out a perfect soufflé of biography, autobiography, and novel, declaring that “all autobiography is fiction and all fiction is autobiography” and leaving it up to her readers to tell the real from the surreal. Adding to the author’s mystique is the adaptation of her book The Cannibal’s Daughter by director Antonio Serrano in his hit film Lucia, Lucia — “a crafty marriage of detective genre and feminist liberation parable” which details an author’s search for her missing husband and which claimed Mexico’s third highest box office opening on record earlier this year. Rights have been sold to Portugal (Asa) and France (Metailié), with negotiations under way with Frassinelli in Italy and with more offers expected from her usual publishers in Brazil, Germany, Holland, Greece, and Poland. English rights are available for all of her works; contact Carmen Pinilla at Carmen Balcells.
Dateline New York, 1903: Cousins Diamante and Vita (aged 12 and 9) arrive at Ellis Island from a minute village in the province of Caserta in Southern Italy in Melania Mazzucco’s novel Vita, which is said to share the ambience of Martin Scorsese-directed Gangs of New York. Trekking to number six on the Italian list, this winner of the prestigious Strega Prize details the frustrations experienced by immigrants in a new world, where 12,000 foreigners disembarked daily (the cousins are just two of 1,500 on their ship who are under the age of 25) and where newcomers were often the victims of xenophobic threats. Deemed “picaresque” and “imaginative,” the book is based on the harsh reality of Mazzucco’s own grandfather’s arrival in New York, and is said to unite “individual destinies and collective phenomena” in a darn near polyphonic and multinational city. The title has yet to be sold in the UK and US, but will be published in France (Flammarion), Spain (Anagrama), Holland (Moura), and Israel (Schocken). Contact Giovanna Canton at RCS-Rizzoli.
In Germany, the word is this: move over, Oprah. The nation’s own television personality/book guru Elke Heidenreich is doing her part to shape the bestseller list with her no-nonsense, yet refreshingly objective style on the new ZDF television program, Lesen! (“Read!”) A bestselling author herself, nearly all of the books she has recommended in her first two shows have appeared almost immediately on Der Spiegel’s bestseller list. Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt’s book Monsieur Ibrahim and the Flowers of the Koran went straight to the top spot after it was featured, followed closely by Jakob Arjouni’s short story collection Idiots: Five Fairytales, which was highlighted on the second episode. (Though Arjouni has been published in the UK, US/UK rights are still available to his latest. Contact Susanne Bauknecht at Diogenes.) “I’ve only got thirty minutes. Should I use that time to tell people what they shouldn’t read?” says Heidenreich, a former sitcom star. Featuring guests like talk show host Harald Schmidt and literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki (who, incidentally, recommended Undine Gruenter’s seasonal sensation Summer Guests at Trouville; see last month’s PT), the show garnered an audience exceeding two million in its first broadcast. Publishers have been rushing to order additional print runs when they find out that one of their books is scheduled to appear on the show, and bookshops have set up special displays for her recommendations. Even those featured titles that do not immediately jump on the bestseller lists experience a noticeable surge in sales. Sound familiar? As a case in point, Max Aub’s historical novel Bitter Almonds, set during the Spanish civil war, sold fewer than 10,000 copies between the novel’s publication date in April and the first show on June 10. But in the week following Heidenreich’s endorsement, 6,500 additional copies were quickly vacuumed off the shelves. (Carmen Balcells holds world rights on behalf of Max Aub’s estate.)
Finally, please take note that rights to Unni Lindell’s The Night Sister, covered in last month’s issue, are held by Bengt Nordin.
