Italians Battle Reclusive Tenants, Food Taster Plays With Fire, Tony Soprano Takes Normandy
Like an episode of House Hunters gone terribly awry, the latest offering of Italy’s Andrea De Carlo, Wind Shear, sets two well-acquainted couples (along with their trusty real estate agent) off from Milan to visit some country houses which they hope to buy and refurbish. As they approach the picturesque hamlet, they take a wrong turn and find themselves stranded in a ditch in an isolated, hilly part of the woods, the words “Can you hear me now?” but a distant echo as the boonies are outside of their cell phone network’s coverage area. They spot a few dim lights in the distance as they wander through the darkness and rain, and are soon invited into a house, discovering shortly thereafter that their hosts are the survivors of a peculiar community that has chosen to cut off all ties to the outside world. The happy couples soon realize another disquieting thing, namely that the house is part of the group of cottages that they wanted to buy and that the inhabitants are a bunch of gritty squatters. Tempers flare when the two groups meet head to head and several accidents prevent the couples from leaving. The tale gives a “piercing and vivid portrait of what we are like today,” complete with contradictions, aspirations, obsessions and fears. And starting on October 20th, a special edition of the book will be released, featuring a CD with music (composed by De Carlo as a sort of soundtrack for the book) and 24 pages of his photographs, drawings, and words, all meant to offer new and unknown details, curiosities, and impressions of the characters and locales in the novel. Talk about interactive media! Contact Elisabetta Sgarbi at Bompiani for rights.
“An incomparable [novel] based on humor, gastronomy, eroticism and crime,” Scorpion Soup is Spanish author and script writer Juan Bas’ walk in the shoes of Pacho Murga, a doltish and work-shy Bilbao resident who recounts the unusual launch of El Mapamundi de Bilbao — “the Rolls-Royce of tapas bars.” Its peculiar cook and owner, Antón Astigarraga, a man with a dreadful past, was serving as Franco’s food taster in 1962, when he was enlisted by a group of Basque nationalist militants and members of ETA to try to end the dictator’s life. Many years later, a rag tag team of shady characters, including a rich priest who is on his way to becoming bishop, an opera singer, a leader of the military branch of ETA, and an important nationalist politician will be among the key characters in Astigarraga’s beleaguered life. Rights have been sold to Gallimard (France), Frankfurter Verlagsanstalt (Germany) and Machaon (Russia) and are available from Laure Merle d’Aubigné at A.C.E.R. (Spain).
“I don’t know this man,” Christian de Houwelandt replies when he is asked to give a speech at his grandfather’s eightieth birthday party in John von Düffel’s moving family chronicle, Houwelandt, which has been likened to Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections by German book guru Elke Heidenreich. Esther, the wife of family patriarch Jorge, an ascetic God-seeker, is planning the party of the century for him at their home in the north of Germany, which they’d recently abandoned for the splendors of the Spanish coast. The classic curmudgeon’s son Thomas inherits control of the estate, but continues to writhe under the thumb of his authoritarian father. Christian, the third generation drawn into the de Houwelandt family fracas, makes all attempts to avoid family business. On Esther’s shoulders falls the task of gathering the far-flung family for a final reunion. Praised as “an exceptionally gifted word artist…and a great storyteller,” von Düffel is one of only two German authors invited to the Goethe-Institut’s “Best of the Frankfurt Book Fair” on November 30. Mark your calendars! Rights have been sold to Albin Michel (France) and earlier books have been published in Finland (Otava), Italy (Mondadori), Spain (Ediciones del Bronce), and Taiwan (New Sprouts Publishing). Contact Judith Habermas at DuMont (Germany).
Also in Germany, the accomplished “enfant terrible” Martin Walser hitches the fate of Gottlieb Zürn, a 70-something retired professor and real estate agent, to the buoyant optimism of Beate Gutbrod, a young German post-doc in Chapel Hill’s philosophy department in his latest tome, The Moment of Love. Beate first encounters Gottlieb while conducting research for her dissertation on the reception of the hedonist philosophy of Julien Offray de La Mettrie in Germany. Gottlieb had published two essays on the philosopher twenty years earlier and their common admiration for him sparks an instant but seemingly irrational attraction. After they spend a few blissful hours on the sunny porch of his mansion, Gottlieb’s snarky wife, Anna, comments on the impossibility of an affair between the two because of the forty year age difference. But when Beate wangles an invitation for Gottlieb to speak at an international la Mettrie conference at Berkeley, they spend three days releasing their pent-up desire in a California hotel. When Gottlieb’s lecture is attacked by one of Beate’s colleagues, he flees the conference and sends his relationship with Beate into a tailspin. Upon returning home, he hears news about her that might make him regret his decision to leave. Reminiscent of Philip Roth’s The Dying Animal, this “accomplished satire about intellectuals” has sold over 100,000 copies in Germany. Walser’s oeuvre has an impressive foreign history and rights to his books have been sold to Laffont (France), Lumen (Spain), Shanghai Translation/W&K Publishing (China), De Geus (Holland), to name a few. His look at the Third Reich from the perspective of a young boy in The Springing Fountain was published several years ago by Arcade, but US rights to his more recent books are still available from Astrid Kurth of Sanford Greenburger.
When the Blakes, an American family with more than a few heads in their duffel bag relocate to a tranquil town in Normandy, nothing can prepare the locals for the chaos that will ensue in Tonino Benacquista’s riotous rendition of a larger-than-life ex-mafioso, Malavita. The Blakes attempt to fit in, but become the focus of local gossip, no thanks to a team of FBI agents and police who are tracing their every step. Mr. Blake, it turns out, is a former East Coast mafia boss who sold out his former “business partners” and who is now enrolled in the witness protection program. Regardless of the ocean that separates him from his past life, his former “friends” might not be as far away as he thinks. When Blake starts to write his memoirs, the White House steps in with a thunderous “Fuhgeddaboudit!” Contact Anne-Solange Noble at Gallimard.
Note: While the above-mentioned titles are hot items in their respective countries, they fall just shy of the top-10 lists.
