As a member of the first internet-savvy generation, the Brazilian Daniel Galera (who was born 1979) naturally looked to the web when he first started writing stories ten years ago. He wrote for and edited literary websites before switching to paper and co-founding Livros do Mal (Evil Books), a publishing project responsible for bringing some of the biggest names to the fore in the new surge of young Brazilian writers. With his latest novel, Horse Hands (Companhia das Letras), Galera tried something new: a conventional publisher. Critically acclaimed when it came out last year, Horse Hands juxtaposes the defining, crucial moments of several people’s lives, showing how even a single second during childhood can change the course of someone’s destiny. Until now, the solitary and half-hearted protagonist, Hermano, has lived an unexamined life. Seemingly out of the blue, he finds himself on the brink of adulthood and heading into a lifeless marriage. Dormant memories surface and Hermano must deal with a past of turbulent emotions, complicated sexual experiences, and death. Fragmented insights from the stoic Hermano are interspersed throughout the narrative. “[Galera’s narration] reminds of the scientific detailing of Ian McEwan in Saturday,” a critic says of Horse Hands. A film adaptation of a previous novel is on its way later in 2007 directed by the renowned Brazilian director Beto Brant. Rights have been licensed in Italy (Mondadori) and France (Gallimard). For more information, contact Piergiorgio Nicolazzini (piergiorgio.nicolazzini@pnla.it).
Slipping just below the top ten in France this month is The Suicide Shop (Julliard), a black comedy and first novel by Jean Teulé. No stranger to bestsellers, Teulé has previously published popular biographies of Villon, Rimbaud, and Verlaine. It was during research for the latter that he found a turn-of-the-century literary review called The Suicide Shop. When Teulé began to imagine what a store for suicides would look like, his novel was born. Stocked with nooses, poisoned apples, swords, and revolvers, the shop has been in the Tuvache family for ten generations. With the motto “Dead or your money back!” proprietors Mishima and Lucrèce are blessed with equally morbid children who eventually will take over the family business as long as they can resist the allure of its products. Life couldn’t get any better, or worse depending on your point of view, for the family until Alan, the product of a broken condom, is born. To the horror of his parents, Alan develops the one flaw that could prove fatal for the shop: optimism. His sense of humor and cheery voice push customers out the door and away from the cash register. When Mishima notices how little Alan’s love of life infects everyone around him, even his own wife and children, the paterfamilias starts to panic. In vain he reprimands Alan for sending customers off with “see you later” instead of “goodbye,” but his hands are tied and ten generations of suicidal success end with one little boy. Rights have been licensed in Israel (Pandora Box) and South Korea (Yolimwon). For more information, contact Greg Messina (gmessina@robert-laffont.fr).
The French must be feeling macabre lately as another dark novel, this one with more blood and less comedy, rounds out the top twenty. Goncourt-winning novelist Jacques Chessex based The Vampire of Ropraz (Grasset) on real events that took place over a hundred years ago just past his garden gate in rural Switzerland. Within months of each other, the graves of three young women are unearthed with the bodies mutilated. The mark of the vampire is everywhere. The body of innocent Rosa, dead at twenty from meningitis, shows tooth marks on the inner thighs and a gaping hole where the heart once was. Children find the scalped head of Nadine near another newly opened grave. Terror spreads from village to village fueling longstanding prejudices and igniting new ones. Everyone wants to trap the vampiric villain, but with no leads for a real suspect, a scapegoat is found in a mentally disabled farmhand named Favez who has a history of abusing horses in the stable. Tried, convicted, and imprisoned, Favez is subjected to psychiatric experiments until all trace of him disappears for good in 1915. A critic says of The Vampire of Ropraz that “the author has created a short, angular book with the pure, whetted edge of a horse-butcher’s knife or a mirror-cutter’s diamond.” German (Hanser/Nagel & Kimche) and Dutch (Voltaire) rights have been licensed. For more information, contact Heidi Warneke (hwarneke@grasset.fr).
While the French are filling up on grisly details, Germans are more curious about the holy, propelling What Fits in Two Suitcases: Years in the Convent (Goldmann) up to the third spot on the German non-fiction list. When she turned 21, author Veronika Peters decided to reject her spot in the upwardly mobile middle class to search for life’s deeper meaning. In a conversational yet refined voice, Peters begins her narrative as she arrives at the convent where she will go through the five-and-a-half-year process of becoming a nun. Struggling to resist the urge to smoke just one last cigarette before opening the door, Peters meets Sister Placida who informs her that from that point on, she will be addressed using the formal pronouns in German. Then Sister Hildegard takes her to the austere “cell” where she will sleep and pray. As she adjusts to the new vocabulary and physical discomforts of the cloistered lifestyle, Peters struggles to obey all the convent’s rules, spoken and unspoken. After six months as a postulant, she earns the right to wear the white veil of the novice. After two more years, she takes the preliminary vows that will bind her to the community for three years: stability, conversion to a cloistered life, and obedience to the standards that govern the convent. Twelve years after her last cigarette, Peters emerges from the convent to begin an entirely new life as a photographer and writer in Berlin. The title is currently on auction in Italy. Contact Gesche Wendebourg (Gesche.Wendebourg@Randomhouse.de).
