In November MacLehose Press will publish Accabadora by the Sardinian author Michela Murgia, acquired from the Turin-based publisher Einaudi. Accabadora has been a critical and commercial success in Italy and has won no fewer than six literary prizes, the most prestigious of them being the Premio Campiello. There seems to be a renewed confidence in homegrown Italian (as opposed to translated) fiction at the moment. Gomorra by Roberto Saviano and La Solitudine dei Numeri Primi by Paolo Giordano both sold huge numbers of copies, and with sales of 120,000 almost 250.000 copies in 2010, Accabadora looks to be continuing the trend.
Now a part of the Mondadori Group – by far the largest of Italian publishing conglomerates, with a market share of 28.4% – Einaudi was founded in 1933 by Guilio Einaudi in collaboration with a number of friends from the Liceo Classico D’Azeglio: Leone Ginzburg, Massimo Mila, Norberto Bobbio and Cesare Pavese. Italy was at that time controlled by the Fascist regime of Benito Mussolini, and Einaudi’s father, Luigi, was the editor of Riforma Sociale, a liberal, anti-fascist magazine…
Read more over on the MacLehose Press blog…
Those lucky enough to find themselves in the Italian town of Pordenone between the 12th and the 26th of March may find ample diversion in the 17th DEDICA Festival, which this year is dedicated to the great Cees Nooteboom, novelist, poet, travel writer and art critic.
Cees Nooteboom credit Simone Sassen
Each year the DEDICA Festival focuses on one significant cultural figure, aiming to deepen the body of knowledge on their work, analyzing it through different mediums, including concerts, art exhibitions and readings. The event was first held in 1995 and has since hosted writers Paul Auster, Nadine Gordimer and Claudio Magris amongst others. More information can be found on both the festival’s and Mr Nooteboom’s websites.
The festival will include a theatre show based on Nooteboom’s short story, “Heinz”, which will be published in English by MacLehose Press in June as part of the collection The Foxes Come At Night. The winner of the 2010 Golden Owl Award, The Foxes Come At Night includes eight stories translated by Ina Rilke, a pre-eminent translator from Dutch, French and Flemish who won the Scott Moncrieff in 2002 for Dai Sijie’s much-loved Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress:
Set in the cities and islands of the Mediterranean, and linked thematically, the eight stories in Foxes read more like a novel, a meditation on memory, life and death. Their protagonists collect and reconstruct fragments of lives lived intensely, and now lost, crystallized in memory or in the detail of a photograph. In “Paula”, the narrator evokes the mysterious, brief life of a woman he once loved; in “Paula II”, the same woman is aware of the man thinking of her. No longer a body, she is slowly fading into the distance, remembering the time they spent together, and his fear of the black night when the foxes appear. And yet the tone of these stories is far from pessimistic: it seems that death is nothing to be afraid of.
In October 2012 MacLehose Press will be publishing Nooteboom’s Berlin 1989 – 2009, a meditation on the fall of the Berlin Wall and an overview of his experiences in the city. It is currently being translated by Laura Watkinson, whose blog can be found at www.laurawatkinson.com.
David Abbott selected for Culture Show‘s New Novelists Programme
As reported in the Guardian this Saturday, David Abbott has been selected for the BBC2 Culture Show‘s programme showcasing first-time authors for his novel The Upright Piano Player, due to be published in paperback on March 31.
New Novelists: Twelve of the Best From the Culture Show will be broadcast next Saturday, and will include an in-depth panel discussion chaired by John Mullen.
David Abbott (top left) with his eleven fellow "New Novelists"
Abbott is one of 12 authors selected from 57 submissions from publishers for inclusion in the programme.
The novelist Helen Oyeyemi, one of the five panelists, summed up their thoughts of The Upright Piano Player:
David Abbott‘s The Upright Piano Player (MacLehose Press) is not unlike a nocturne in its tone and mood; it is a melancholy and evocative treatment of a man’s post-retirement crisis. Henry Cage is sketched with just enough subtlety, and allowed just enough sympathy – no more, no less – to make his failings devastatingly real.
To date, David Abbott is the only British writer to publish a first novel with MacLehose Press, and we are all delighted that he has been recognized in this way.
Booktrust Interview with Christopher MacLehose and Katharina Bielenberg
Catharine Mansfield has interviewed Christopher MacLehose and Katharina Bielenberg for the Booktrust Translated Fiction website:
Last Monday morning I arrived at the London Review of Books’ bright, airy café to meet with Christopher MacLehose and Katharina Bielenberg of MacLehose Press. Just down the road from the Quercus headquarters in Bloomsbury Square, the café has become something of an unofficial office for these two big names in the world of translated fiction publishing. When I arrived they were just finishing one meeting and when I left it was time for the next. After all, the LRB café is a fitting meeting place. The adjoining bookshop has always showcased the best of translated literature and many MacLehose titles feature amongst the tempting collection of books on display. This is just one sign of the spectacular success experienced by the imprint since its first titles were published in 2008 . . . (read more)
Miska, the canine senior editor for MacLehose Press was not available to be interviewed, nor was he photographed for the online feature. So to redress the omission:
Miska on the "the Mountain"
Miska at the Palu Literary Festival in Croatia after one of his readings
Phantoms on the Bookshelves
Phantoms on the Bookshelves, by Jacques Bonnet, was reviewed to great acclaim before the turn of the year, and has now found favour with Paul Duguid, writing in the TLS:
From vaunting arguments about how books furnish the democratic mind, it is a relief to turn to Jacques Bonnet’s wittily written and elegantly translated reminder that, as Anthony Powell told us, they also furnish a room. It is tempting to call works like this “charming”, but that would misrepresent the enjoyably sharp edges in Bonnet’s account. A bibliomaniac rather than a bibliophile, he recognizes that his “monstrous” obsession is indefensible (while casting around broadly to find other obsessives in fact and fiction) and that reading may be no more than a means to keep tedium at bay. It’s enjoyable to find someone so roundly read discussing The Twilight Zone in detail. The Phantoms of the Bookshelves is a book that reinforces its intent, rather than undermines it. Self-deprecating throughout, it opens with a nice story about Pessoa and ends bathetically thumbing through a Portuguese–French phrase book. And in support of the argument that the coherence of a private library is primarily a function of its owner, Bonnet leads us confidently from book to book, however dissimilar each may be from the one before.
Bonnet’s incurable – and commendable – bibliophilia is further illustrated by this photograph of one of his outhouses:
If you have any photographs of your own overflowing or idiosyncratically ordered bookshelves you would like to send us, we will be delighted to present them on our forthcoming website and blog.
On March 31st, MacLehose Press will publish the paperback edition of The Upright Piano Player by David Abbott, which came out in hardback last year. Longlisted for the Desmond Eliott Prize, it is Abbott’s first novel. David Abbott has worked for many years in the advertising industry, and was a founding partner of Abbott Mead Vickers, now the largest agency in the UK
Paul Engles: What first gave you the idea for writing The Upright Piano Player?
David Abbott: I didn’t know that I was going to write this specific book, but I always knew that one day I would try to write a novel. I put it off for forty years because I had a job as an advertising copywriter and, frankly, that exhausted whatever creative juices I had. I also wanted to be a good copywriter and I didn’t think I could be, if I did it only to pay the rent, while my heart was really engaged with fiction. So, I waited until I retired and then I started keeping a notebook. In 1999, on the eve of the Millennium, my wife and I actually made the homeward journey that Henry Cage makes in the book. Of course, I wasn’t attacked, but that walk was the genesis of the book.
Paul Engles: When you started writing The Upright Piano Player did you have a good idea of how it would end, or was writing it a journey of discover for you?
The plot pretty much developed from the character of Henry Cage. I had no clear idea of the action other than I knew I would have to put him under some kind of pressure. I gave him a business background because I believe business is rarely treated accurately in contemporary novels. If the characters work in industry, they are invariably stupid or evil. That wasn’t my experience. I often came across intelligence, discernment – and even honour. As to the ending, I had that in my notebook. On holiday in Florida in 2002, I clipped a small item from a local newspaper, which detailed a similar tragic death. Putting the end at the beginning of the book was a big decision and several people advised me not to, but I felt it was too strong to end the book. As a reader, I would have felt manipulated and cheated. It had to be at the beginning.
Paul Engles: Can you tell us a little more about the character of Bateman? Have you ever come across anyone so malicious?
David Abbott: Bateman is entirely imagined – thank God. I had the idea of making him a little like Henry, the reverse in some ways of the same coin. For example, they both like photography. They are both fastidious. They are both slightly out of step with the world they live in. But, of course, Colin is unhinged, a violent and immoral man. A Daily Telegraph reader who can hammer a nail through a dog’s skull. There is no accounting for him.
Paul Engles: I think that more than a few people will mistake the painting on the cover of your novel for a Hopper. Who is it by, and how did it come to be on the cover?
David Abbott The painting is called “Rue des Boutiques Obscures – Scene 1.” The artist is Denis Fremond, a contemporary French painter. I bought the work about six years ago in Paris. I loved it at first sight, not only because it reminded me of Edward Hopper, but because of the subject matter. I spend countless happy hours reading books in such places and since I had given Henry Cage the same habit, it seemed natural to use the painting on the jacket of the book. Happily, the gallery, the artist and Christopher MacLehose agreed.
Paul Engles: The Upright Piano Player has now been sold to quite a number of foreign publishers, in the USA, France, Holland, Russia and beyond. Which sale
pleased you the most? Have you had much contact with your translators?
David Abbott: I am delighted to be published anywhere. I was not really involved with the Dutch edition that was published in August. In Holland, the book is called “The Grandson” as the English title does not translate. With the German edition, I have worked closely with Patricia Reimann at DTV, the publishers. There, the novel is called The Late Harvest of Henry Cage and is due in April. In America, the English title was retained and The Upright Piano Player will be published there on June 7th. I am looking forward to buying it in Crawford Doyle, my favourite bookshop in New York where over the years I have bought Cheever, Tyler, Yates, Salter and the like. It will feel like a miracle when my book appears on the same shelves.
Paul Engles: After spending so much time with the novel, what was it like working with an editor?
David Abbott: I loved it. I am a compulsive reviser.
Paul Engles: You are very well known in the advertising industry, first as a
copywriter and then as creative director and founding partner of Abbott Mead
Vickers. How do you think copywriting prepared you for writing
fiction?
David Abbott: In advertising, even when telling a story, you have to keep things short. When I wrote the J.R. Hartley commercial for Yellow Pages, I had less than 30 seconds to work with. (If memory serves me right, I used 82 words.) Even a long copy press ad rarely runs to more than 500 words. On the whole, I think this brevity is a good discipline to bring to fiction and I can’t see myself ever writing a doorstep novel, but I did have to learn how to give each scene more air and texture. Strangely, as a copywriter I wasn’t that interested in the niceties of writing. Naturally, I had to express myself precisely and persuasively and I tried to make the words vivid, but my main responsibility was to have relevant and noticeable ideas. Often, these would be visual ideas not involving words at all. When I was writing the first part of The Upright Piano Player I saw it as the opening scene of a film, right down to the location and the background music. When I write, I read the words out loud to check the flow and I picture the scene in my head. I suspect I haven’t really answered the question, so, yes, I do think advertising is good training for fiction. To succeed in either, you have to be fascinated by people and eager to find out what makes them behave the way they do.
Paul Engles: Do you have any favourite writers?
David Abbott: There are many, so I will limit myself to one man and one woman. James Salter is the man – for his novel Light Years and for his recollection Burning The Days. There is just something about the tone of his writing that makes me smile with pleasure. Elegant, spare and moving – the absolute master of telling detail. My woman writer is Elizabeth Bishop, for the exactness and feeling of her poetry and the richness of the letters in ‘One Art.’
Paul Engles: MacLehose Press mainly publishes authors in translation. What is your favourite novel in translation?
David Abbott: I guess it would be tactful to choose a Christopher MacLehose production? In that case, I will be nostalgic and choose Miss Smilla’s Feeling For Snow. A wonderful book, and still available.
Paul Engles: There is a section in The Upright Piano Player where Henry Cage visits an independent bookshop to browse. Is bookshop browsing one of your favoured pastimes?
David Abbott: I am addicted to bookshops, but I don’t merely graze, I chomp and have to smuggle the bought books back in to my home when my wife is not looking.
John Sandoe Books in Chelsea, the real-life bookshop which Henry Cage visits in the novel
Paul Engles: I once saw you clutching a copy of Phantoms on the Bookshelves a book about book collectors. Do you have a large library at home?
David Abbott: I have never counted my books. I fear I have several thousand.
Paul Engles: Are you working on a second novel? If so, is it another outing for Henry Cage, or something different?
David Abbott: I am working on a second novel, but it isn’t about Henry. Though I do plan to write more about him one day. He still lives on in my mind.
This year’s P.O. Enquist Award has been given to Icelandic author Jón Kalman Stefánsson, whose novel Heaven and Hell we recently published in paperback. The Enquist Award honours a writer who has begun to make his or her international breakthrough, and was inaugurated in 2005 on Enquist’s seventieth birthday. P.O. Enquist is a Danish author whose own made international zenith came with The Visit of the Royal Physician, which won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2003 (with translator Tina Nunnally) as well as France’s Prix Femina Etranger and Sweden’s August Prize.
