from the Columbia Daily Spectator's Arts & Culture Insert, The Eye
Shooting from the Side
amélie nothomb’s autobiographical memoir explores the complexity of language and relationships
“I’ll just choose a machine, shall I?” I ask, standing with Amélie Nothomb in the gym of the Washington Square Hotel.
About a dozen contraptions of indeterminable purpose are crammed into the tiny, carpeted room. We have met to discuss her book, Tokyo Fiancée, originally written in French. The English translation was released by Europa Editions this February.
Dressed entirely in black from her hat to her shoes, Nothomb cuts an imposing figure. As we sit on our respective exercise machines, she stares at me frankly, expectantly. I am a little intimidated. This is probably why, seconds into our interview, I lose track of my first question and blurt out that I want to be a writer.
For one who aspires to the profession, Nothomb’s work is worth emulating. Tokyo Fiancée refuses to submit to the reader’s expectations because Nothomb refuses to represent the story as something other than what it is: the nebulous struggle of two people to connect across barriers of language and culture.
Yet her honesty does not make the book unreadable or ambiguous. Rather, it posits a solution: a new kind of relationship. As Nothomb tells me, it is “the very first relation[ship] with an other ... that works.” Her happy ending defies the social expectations of romantic love and embraces camaraderie rather than marriage. And she illustrates it with bold, unconventional language.
Even the genre of the book is unpredictable. “Would you describe this book as mostly autobiographical? Is it a memoir? Is it a novel?” I ask.
“I consider it as 100 percent autobiographical memoir,” she replies. She speaks heavily accented, somewhat eccentric English. “For me, there is no contradiction ... First, it is a piece of writing, it is a novel, but the facts are 100 percent autobiographical.”
The reader senses this upon reading Tokyo Fiancée, and not only because the narrator is also named Amélie. The book feels honest. It is narrated in the first person, and, at its most striking moments, the novel plunges readers directly into Nothomb’s psyche. Surrounded by the thoughts, images, and emotions racing through her head, it is impossible not to empathize with her.
Though she wields language powerfully, Nothomb is intensely aware of its fallibility. Indeed, the failures of language, and the way humans compensate for it, fascinate her. Language fails writers, as well as their subjects, and she compares her own search for the right words to shooting a gun, aiming her forefinger at me to demonstrate:
“It’s like, if you are a shooter ... I have a feeling when you try to shoot something from the front—I don’t know why, it does not work. If you go from on the side it will work ... There’s no explanation to that, it’s just I noticed it, go on the side.”
Throughout Tokyo Fiancée, Nothomb shoots from the side. She makes literary references and describes certain elements of language to express pivotal moments in the novel’s central relationship. These techniques are hardly an effort to avoid the complexities of the relationship—in fact, they may be the only way to accurately express them.
Nothomb acknowledges that the complexity of human relationships does not always allow them to fit into conventional patterns, and that complex relationships cannot be described in a conventional way. Had she not defied convention, Tokyo Fiancée would not be as emotionally honest, or as compelling, as it is.
Nothomb’s willingness to attack the intricacies of human existence in her writing parallels her willingness to attack them in life. As she states explicitly in the novel, she has always conceived of herself as being comprised of multiple identities. She tells me that she discovered this “thanks to the great poets I wrote—I read in my life.”
That verbal mix-up seems at first merely to be a struggle with language. Nevertheless, I am struck by the idea of her “writing” the great poets of her life. Her sentence does not obey the conventions of grammar, yet it allows me, in two words, to understand what she must have felt upon reading these poems for the first time: that a great mind has written something that speaks to you so clearly that it becomes a part of your identity—that someone has written you so perfectly that you feel as though you’d written the poem yourself.
She specifically mentions poet Arthur Rimbaud as an inspiration: “He wrote that, that very great sentence: ‘Je est un autre,’ which you can translate by ‘I is an other,’ not I am an other. ... which is very true.” I begin to see what enables Nothomb to navigate human relationships so skillfully. Not only her writing, but also her very being seeks to embrace the other, to incorporate it into herself. This is evident in her admiration of Rimbaud, her tendency to conflate his life with her own. She suggests that this ability is not a rare gift, but a human characteristic.
A man opens the door and leans in, clearly hoping to use the gym. We stare at him for a moment and he leaves, but it is evident that the interview is coming to a close. Nothomb, with an eloquence that I sense is not unusual for her, unites the themes of her novel and her life in one stunning comment.
“Who’s ‘I’?” she wonders. “We have no idea and maybe we change ... several times without even noticing it, or sometimes we notice. ... It’s natural, we are not liars—it’s just that—we are—we are not stones.”
It does not sound like a recipe for publishing success: a roster of translated literary novels written mainly by Europeans, relying heavily on independent-bookstore sales, without an e-book or vampire in sight.
But that is the formula that has fueled Europa Editions, a small publisher founded by a husband-and-wife team from Italy five years ago. As large New York publishing houses have laid off staff, suffered drastically reduced book sales and struggled to adjust to a digital future, Europa turned its first profit last year and is enjoying a modest but growing following.
The company, which operates out of a pair of tiny offices near Union Square in Manhattan, also has its first best seller with “The Elegance of the Hedgehog,” a French novel by Muriel Barbery narrated by a secretly intellectual concierge in a fashionable Parisian apartment building and a precocious preteen girl who lives there with her wealthy family. Filled with philosophical ruminations and copious references to literature, art, film and music, the book is in many ways as much of a surprise hit as its publisher.
The novel, released in the United States in September, has spent six weeks on the New York Times trade paperback fiction best-seller list, as of last Sunday. According to Nielsen BookScan, which tracks about 70 percent of sales, it has sold 71,000 copies.
That might seem minor, compared with the blockbuster sales of a single title from the “Twilight” series by Stephenie Meyer, but for Europa, it is proof that the company can do more than fulfill an earnest cultural mission.
“We don’t want to be in that small-press translation ghetto,” said Kent Carroll, Europa’s publisher and a veteran of independent publishing who worked at Grove Press for 11 years. He was a co-founder of Carroll & Graf, the publisher, now defunct, that rereleased out-of-print gems and introduced writers like Beryl Bainbridge to American readers. “Our ambitions are large,” he said.
Europa Editions was the brainchild of Sandro Ferri and Sandra Ozzola Ferri, the founders of Edizioni E/O, a Rome-based publisher that releases many works in translation in Italy. “I have a universal, global feeling that everywhere people should read and could read books from different countries,” Mr. Ferri said in a telephone interview. “Even if up to now, only 3 percent of the American books are books in translation, I think that this is not a reason that it should always be like that.”
Emulating many European publishers, the company releases books only in the trade paperback format. It developed a distinctive look for all its titles, with French flaps, a consistent font on the book spines and a logo of a stork that appears with the publisher’s name on the front of each volume.
Europa’s first title, “The Days of Abandonment,” an Italian novel by Elena Ferrante, was published in 2005. The book garnered positive reviews and immediately took off at independent booksellers. Other titles — including “Old Filth” by Jane Gardam, an English writer; “Dog Day,” a mystery by the Spanish writer Alicia Giménez-Bartlett; and “Cooking With Fernet Branca” by James Hamilton-Paterson, an English writer living in Austria — helped earn Europa a loyal following among booksellers and readers. Some books sell only a few thousand copies, but book buyers like the brand identity.
“We have a lot of faith in their editorial sensibility,” said Sarah McNally, owner of the McNally Jackson bookstore in Manhattan.
Mr. Carroll said the company rarely spent more than $10,000 on advances. He is the only full-time staff member in New York, with a part-time freelance assistant and two interns.
“Hedgehog,” a novel that had been a sensation in France and that Edizioni had already translated into Italian, had also proved popular in Germany and South Korea. Mr. Carroll, in turn, was determined to make the novel an American best seller. He blitzed booksellers and reviewers with postcards, galleys, letters and phone calls months before the book was published, reminding them of the novel’s international track record. Sales representatives from Penguin Books USA, which distributed the book, also pushed it heavily.
American booksellers were captivated by the voices of both Renée, the concierge, and Paloma, the girl, and recommended the book to customers. Readers began telling their friends.
“Now everybody’s buying it because everybody’s buying it,” said Mark LaFramboise, a buyer at Politics and Prose in Washington. “Hedgehog,” he said, is “one of the hottest books in the store.”
Some larger publishers are starting to envy Europa’s selection and its frankly retro publishing model. Mr. Carroll “finds things, picks things up for a little bit of money and makes a lot out of them,” said Jonathan Galassi, publisher of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. “Most of publishing was once that way. It wasn’t about big money so much. He’s sort of preserving the old values of it’s-all-about-the-book and connecting the book with readers.”
Inveterate traveler, cultural ambassador, doctor of sociology, and bestselling author Amara Lakhous appears to be on a three-week tour of America sponsored by the US state department through its International Visitor Leadership Program.
Word of his whereabouts continues trickling through to the Europa editorial offices, where editors eagerly await the manuscript of his third novel.
Most recently, a journalist in Grand Island, Nebraska, claims to have seen Lakhous in his newspaper's offices, and even goes so far as to say that he interviewed the errant author of Clash of Civilizations of an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio. Stories, stories, and more stories.
This weekend's Globe and Mail reported on the appointment of Rachna Davidar as general manager of the new Toronto branch of McNally Robinson bookseller. The profile of Davidar and the excitement her appointment seems to be creating on the Toronto book scene was interesting in itself, but the highpoint of the article comes when the article relates a conversation between Davidar and Tory McNally:
As she leans in to Ms. Davidar, her serious business face blooms into a fangirl's smile. Ms. Davidar leans in, too, her left hand on Ms. McNally's right shoulder in a conspiracy of literary ecstasy. "And The Elegance of the Hedgehog, I just loved it," Ms. Davidar says of the recent sensation by Muriel Barbery. "It's perfect in all ways," Ms. McNally agrees.
"So few books get better with every page," Ms. Davidar says. Then, remembering there is someone sitting across from her, she turns.
Over at the Book Design Review they're commenting on our aesthetic. Most of the comments (from what we assume to be graphic designers themselves) are not very positive, and here at Europa we're pondering this conundrum: readers (who write to us or whom we meet at fairs etc.) and, above all, booksellers are mostly enthusiastic about the majority of our covers, yet graphic designers are not. Why might this be?
Regardless of the answer, we suppose we ought to be happy that they're commenting on our look at all: at the very least, this means that we HAVE a look that can be identified and commented on by others. And yes, it's a "branding thing."
Hirsh Sawhney, who edited and contributed a story to Delhi Noir, out this summer from our friends at Akashic Books, gave Europa a nice mention in his Guardian blog post this morning. His article posits small indpendent presses as the potential saviours of publishing and literary culture in this time of widespread woe in the book trade. The post has already provoked loads of comments.
We've acquired north american rights to the novel Broken Glass Park by Alina Bronsky, Germany's hottest literary property right now. The book caused a sensation last year in Europe and is now creating shockwaves at Europa as Tim Mohr's stunning translation begins to arrive. B.G.P. is scheduled for publication in april 2010. Launch party, author tour, stuff to give away, galleys galore... and more. There's going to be loads of talk about this book. So, stay tuned.
In the meantime, here's a snippet (in German) from Youtube with the author talking about B.G.P. (Scherbenpark)
Roma Tearne's novel about love during time of war and set in modern-day Sri Lanka has been shortlisted for the 2008 LA Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. Winners will be announced at this year's LA Times Book festival at the end of April.
All of us here at Europa Editions would like to congratulate Roma Tearne, whose next novel, Bone China, will be available everywhere from July 2009.
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