'A VIEW FROM THIS BRIDGE'
Rebecca Carter, Harvill Secker editor
and Diana Evans, author.
Our guest blogger this week is Diana Evans, whose second novel The Wonder is just published in paperback, in time for this weekend’s Notting Hill Carnival (where part of the The Wonder takes place). Diana writes about what it feels like to be edited (when things go right). This blog will be balanced shortly by a guest-blogger novelist writing about what it feels like to be edited when things go wrong!
Before acquiring an editor, I had thought of writing as a lone act. The writer spends hours, days, years in solitude, laying the material on paper and crafting it to perfection. This solitude imbues the finished product with a certain purity and truthfulness, a ‘rightness’ which, for me, felt threatened by the entrance onto the scene of my editor...
SEPTEMBER'S BOOK OF THE MONTH
It’s carnival time! Diana Evans’s second novel The Wonder takes the reader on a dance through Notting Hill past and present. We see Antoney Matheus and his mother arriving from Jamaica in 1958 to stay in a dim room on the corner of Portobello and Faraday Road; we watch Antoney take his first steps as a dancer to Baba Brooks, the Mighty Sparrow and James Brown in a house on Tavistock Crescent where the Marshall Brothers, from Trinidad, put on a regular Blues party; we see Antoney’s son Lucas wandering a prettified Portobello Road in the nineties trying to piece together his lost father’s life. Check out the sixties Carnival scene on p. 106: ‘There were all kinds of folks about. Whistle-blowing teenagers, spacy Mediterranean students in stripy tops, big-haired Jamaican girls in mini-dresses, old black men slurping pints outside the pubs, shopkeepers, policemen, open-shirted steel band skivers, a well-known barmaid in her famous leopard-print coat. There were fragments in this district of the Sahara Desert and the Irish Sea, the Panama Canal and the music box of Kingston, and the happy and terrible commotion that had developed from this was that you could find a good party as easily as you could a good fight.’
ARMCHAIR TRAVELLER: NOTTING HILL (Carnival special!)
In keeping with our tribute to this weekend’s Notting Hill Carnival we asked Notting Hill bookshop Lutyens & Rubinstein to tell us what international fiction they’ve been selling this summer. Bookseller Anna Steadman reports …
Reading the Independent’s recent article about Quercus and the rise and rise of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium series, I was struck by Mark Smith’s comment that when The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo was first published back in January 2008 some bookshops refused to stock it, as their customers would apparently be put off by authors with “funny” names. When we opened Lutyens & Rubinstein in October of last year we found the reverse to be true: not only could we not keep The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest, published in hardback a few days before we opened, in stock; but we were also overwhelmed with customers seeking out international fiction, no matter how weird or unpronounceable the authors’ names.
We still sell a lot of Stieg Larsson, but have also had a lot of fun introducing people to a wealth of other Scandinavian crime fiction, from Jo Nesbø to Arnaldur Indriðason. My own favourite discovery (recommended to me by a customer) has been the Martin Beck series, a set of ten detective novels written in the 1960s by a Swedish couple, Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö. They would carefully plan each novel together before writing alternate chapters and swapping to edit. As well as being brilliant storytellers, Sjöwall and Wahlöö were pioneers of the crime novel as a device for a critique of wider societal problems, a theme that is carried through to much modern day Scandinavian crime fiction. We don’t just sell Scandinavian crime fiction though: this summer Andrea Camilleri’s Inspector Montalbano books have been popular holiday reading, as have Fred Vargas’ wonderfully weird Parisian police thrillers.
Alone in Berlin by Hans Fallada is a book that we have sold and sold since opening our doors last year. Several people who bought it from us have come back next week for another copy to give to someone else, and most of the people who buy it come in saying a friend has told them that they must read it. Melville Press have brought many other Fallada titles back into print, which we also stock. We also sell a lot of Stefan Zweig, partly perhaps because everyone that works at Lutyens & Rubinstein loves his books, and so recommends them frequently. Much like Fallada, it is Zweig’s last novel, The Post Office Girl (published posthumously) that we sell most of, though Beware of Pity ranks a close second. We’ve been surprised but also delighted that these rediscovered European classics have been some of the shop’s bestselling titles, and are also very excited about our latest discovery, Hans Keilson, the German centenarian author whose books have only recently come back into print in English. Like Fallada, his books were written during the Second World War, and based on Keilson's own experience as a member of the Dutch resistance in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam.
The majority of the more contemporary international fiction that we sell, Scandinavian thrillers aside, tends to be English language – we sell a lot of American fiction, and Christopher Tsiolkas’ controversial Booker-longlisted novel The Slap has been our third bestselling title this August. Most of the originally foreign language fiction that we sell tends to be European – Javier Marias' Your Face Tomorrow trilogy, for example, has been very popular. Since we opened last year, what has interested and encouraged me most about the kinds of books that people buy most of in our shop is how dependent it is upon word of mouth or staff recommendation. Nowhere is this more true than in international fiction, where most of what we sell, and even much of what we stock, is based on the recommendations that we make to our customers, and that our customers make to us.
