This page features 'A View From This Bridge', our weekly blog on international literature and the art of editing by editor Briony Everroad and various guests. We also pick a 'featured read' and have a regular 'Armchair Traveller' piece about the literature of a particular country. You will find previous 'Armchair Traveller' pieces archived in the left-hand menu. (To see the full blog archive click here.)
A VIEW FROM THIS BRIDGE
Blog 48: Vampires in the British Library
Editor Briony Everroad talks about an eventful week in London’s Zone One.
What a week it has been for international writing. Monday brought the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, a very pleasant occasion as always. It wasn’t just the champagne or the beautiful interior of the RIBA – it was the sense of a true celebration. Everyone in that room was there to celebrate not just the shortlisted authors and translators but the power of writing in translation.
Read the complete blog
FEATURED READ
This month we are very proud to publish an extraordinary debut novel, HHhH by Laurent Binet. It has taken Europe by storm and is receiving fantastic reviews in the UK. It is the story of Operation Anthropoid, a daring mission to assinate Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Nazi secret services. All the characters in HHhH are real. All the events depicted are true. But alongside the nerve-shredding preparations for the attack runs another story: when you are a novelist writing about real people, how do you resist the temptation to make things up?
HHhH is a panorama of the Third Reich told through the life of one outstandingly brutal man, a story of unbearable heroism and loyalty, revenge and betrayal. It is improbably entertaining and electrifyingly modern, a moving and shattering work of fiction.
'HHhH is a highly original piece of work, at once charming, moving, and gripping.' Martin Amis
'Extraordinary first novel…a literary triumph…The book’s final section... is a masterpiece of tension, and its closing pages are extremely moving. Very few page-turners come as smart and original as this.' The Times
'Laurent Binet has given a new dimension to the non-fiction novel by weaving his writerly anxieties about the genre into the narrative, but his story is no less compelling for that, and the climax is unforgettable.' David Lodge
You can watch a video of Laurent talking about the book here.
ARMCHAIR TRAVELLER
Raphaëlle Liebaert, an editor at Christian Bourgois in Paris, talks about a French idiosyncrasy: la rentrée littéraire
Today, as we wait for the second and final round of the French presidential election (6th of May 2012), book sales are at a standstill. It has been like this for a couple of months already. It seems that potential book buyers are too busy reading newspapers, listening to the endless debates between candidates and to the latest poll analysis to buy books, let alone literature. Bookshops’ activity has significantly decreased and the few books that seem to find their readership are the ones written about or by the candidates.
Booksellers, publishers and authors are all waiting for sales to pick up and all hopes are pinned on September and its incomparable rentrée littéraire. One might ask what is exactly the rentrée littéraire? It is one of the many French cultural idiosyncrasies and has become an institution. It marks the end of the summer holiday period and runs from late August to around mid-October. At a time of year when children go back to school (so called rentrée des classes) the publishing houses, which have held back new publications for the past few months, release their most important titles for the year. Indeed, most publishing houses choose not to publish any books between mid-June and late-August, only to make a spectacular comeback on the literary scene around 20th of August. The preparations for the rentrée usually start early in the year and last until the books actually come out: schedules are set around February, books are presented to reps and booksellers in April-May. At that point the first articles forecasting the lead titles of the next rentrée start appearing almost everywhere and the rentrée becomes the talk of the (publishing) town.
Publishing a book at the rentrée littéraire means that you’ll be able to enter it for the main literary prizes. Indeed, the most important ones (Prix Goncourt, Prix Femina and Prix Medicis which are the ones that significantly boost sales) are all announced between late October and early November. Talking about French cultural idiosyncrasies, the literary prizes in France are another one: jury members, often authors themselves, are appointed for life and, for most of them, are also published by the same publishing houses that compete for the prizes...
But let’s get back to the subject at hand. Last year, 654 novels (French and in translation) were published during the rentrée littéraire. These 654 books can be divided into several categories. The first one – and probably the most publicised – is premiers romans (debut novels). In 2011, 74 first novels were published (compared to 85 in 2010). Among them, was the highly celebrated L'Art français de la guerre (Gallimard) by Alexis Jenni which subsequently won the prestigious Prix Goncourt 2011. First novels tend to attract even more attention if they were sent to the publishing houses as unsolicited submissions (as in Jenni’s case). In a country where literary agents are still almost non-existent, finding a new author in the slush pile re-establishes the role of publisher as a discoverer of new talents. Another good example of a first novel that went on to become an international bestseller is Jonathan Littel’s The Kindly ones (who, as it turned out, already had a literary agent – a British one – at the time he was picked up by Gallimard). Sadly, most of the first novels that are published at the rentrée don’t share the same glorious destiny as the two I just mentioned and sink into oblivion just a few weeks after being published.
Then, we have les habitués: they are authors who publish a new book at almost every rentrée littéraire. The most famous example is certainly Amélie Nothomb, whose novels automatically enter the bestseller list the minute they are published.
Lastly, there are the « heavyweights ». Each year, around June, everybody starts focusing on a few books, usually by well-known authors, that are likely to eat up all the space in the press and in bookshops. Last year, Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84, Emmanuel Carrère’s Limonov and Delphine de Vigan’s Rien ne s’oppose à la nuit, were already making the headlines before they were even published. They all made it onto the bestsellers list.
It proves very difficult for most books to find space among so many titles published in such a short period of time. The turnover of titles in the bookshops is too fast and there is not enough space in the papers to talk about all the books that deserve attention. That’s the reason these past years have seen the emergence of a second rentrée, also called « la petite rentrée », which takes place in January. Some publishers choose to publish authors in which they strongly believe in this less crowded period, which can guarantee them bigger attention from the media and the booksellers. That is the choice that Grasset made in 2010 when they decided to publish Laurent Binet’s amazing first novel, HHhH, in January rather than September. It happened to be the right choice: its publication was immediately followed by a flurry of rave reviews, it won the Goncourt du Premier roman, the Prix des lecteurs du Livre de Poche, and translation rights have so far been sold in 20 countries. Laurent Binet’s new book – a non-fiction title about François Hollande’s campaign for the presidential – should be published next September in France, right on time for the rentrée…
No matter what, la rentrée littéraire remains the main event of French literary life. Once again this year everybody is eagerly awaiting the 2012 batch. It sounds particularly promising with books by Toni Morrison, Amin Maalouf and Jeffrey Eugenides being announced. Hopefully this will encourage readers to get back to literature.