In this week's Book Club, publisher David Godine explains the process of acquiring new work for translation, and describes how he "discovered" Nobel Prize-winner Le Clezio.Every October publishers from around the world gather at the Messe in Frankfurt for the International Book Fair. If you can imagine five football fields (some two stories), arranged by country, filled with booths displaying books from around the world, and jammed with people speaking every language under the sun, you have some idea of the scope of this event. American publishers come to both sell and scout. Most rights managers have been dealing with the same people for years, and after a small introductory courtship dance, books are discussed, both present and future, deals are made and the essentials of a contract are finalized.The challenge for a small publisher, with few contacts and a small purse, is in the scouting. Every country has its favorite sons and daughters and, by and large, very few are known in the United States, where fewer than three percent of all books published are translated from a foreign language, as opposed to roughly fifteen-twenty percent in the rest of the civilized world. What I have found is that sales figures per se mean nothing; it seems that any author of real merit sells a minimum of 150,000 copies in the Netherlands, but that number doesn't "travel" at all in the US. The question you have to ask is "Who are your best authors, and who will people be reading a decade from now." And this is a question that can be asked as cogently about the frontlist as the backlist, and is generally one that the better rights directors are eager to answer. Especially from an American. That is how we found our way to Georges Perec, certainly our bestselling foreign author.This is also how I "discovered" Le Clezio. Gallimard has a literary reputation second to none in France, and when I met with its rights director at the Fair in 1982, I simply inquired who she thought were the best contemporary authors on their list who had never been translated into English and were unknown in America. She suggested three: Sylvie German (a total newcomer), Patrick Modiano (whose work had appeared sporadically in the US) and J.M.G. Le Clezio who had, in fact, been published previously by Atheneum but with the demise of the firm, and its remarkable editors Mike Bessie and Harry Ford, had not been heard from in years. I bought all three. I had long hoped to start a list of uniform books in translation and The Prospector (978-0-87923-976-3) was the first book on that infant initiative. It was reviewed occasionally-and sold-marginally. For reasons I have yet to understand, we printed 6,000 copies in hardcover; when the Nobel Prize was announced this year in October, we still had 600 in stock some twenty-five years later. The book was selling at the rate of about twenty copies a year. We never remaindered or overstocked it. We had, by and large, forgotten about it, although we had, most fortunately, contracted for and begun the translation of Le Clezio's masterpiece Desert that is due out Spring '09.What, if anything, does this prove? Perhaps that it pays to listen to the suggestions of smart people, or that working the floor and asking questions is as effective a way of discovering talent as sitting in a booth or a hotel bar and hoping the information will find its way to you. Like all of publishing, it's a crapshoot. In this particular game, we won in the end. But could we have predicted it? Certainly not. Did we expect it? Be serious. It just goes to show that there probably is some justification for publishing what you consider superior fiction and hoping that whatever God there is in heaven will someday throw a favor in your direction.The Verba Mundi list now has over thirty titles and includes authors as diverse as Aharon Appelfeld, Robert Musil, Isaac Babel, Dino Buzzati, Georges Perec, Anna Seghers, Christa Wolf, and Goran Tunstrom, as well as Le Clezio, Germain, and Modiano. -David R. Godine, PublisherThis article was first published in ForeWord magazine (Jan/Feb 2009). Download an excerpt at my link text
It begins here:As far back as I can remember I have listened to the sea...And it begins here:The island of Mauritius. It is Alexis L'Etang who listens to the sea. First on Mauritius in 1892, a multi-cultural boy on a multi-cultural island. But you know how these things go. Even there are racial strata. Alexis is not black. There are early lessons. The idyllic life of Alexis is shattered, first by a storm, then by the death of his father. His family (Alexis, his mother and sister) is financially ruined, and beholden now to Uncle Ludovic, not so much a character as an abstract idea of harsh capitalism.His father's legacy is a fool's quest: a cryptic map and notes by the legendary Unknown Corsair, a hidden treasure.And so, when things seem bleakest for the family, Alexis quits his position with Uncle Ludovic and takes to the sea, to the nearby island of Rodrigues, to look for gold. "On the west coast of the island at a spot where the sea pounds the coast there is a stream. Follow the stream to its source, where you will find a tamarind tree. Eighteen feet from the tamarind tree the stonework that hides an immense treasure begins."Sounds adventurous, if self-centered, but Alexis is no Maqroll. He finds the Corsair's hiding places*, and he finds himself bewitched by the beautiful Ouma, a Manaf. Ouma dives into the lagoon, harpoons an octopus for them to roast. She rubs sand over her black body, then his white one. A local custom. It is Ouma who imparts what wisdom there is:"Gold is worthless. You mustn't be afraid of it. It's like scorpions who only sting those who are afraid of it."And:"All of you out there, you desire gold above everything because there is nothing more powerful. You make war for it. People everywhere will because of this obsession."Prescient she is. Soon there is indeed talk of war. Alexis signs up. Why not? He is at Ypres, he is at The Somme. There are no novices by that time. Eventually he is sickened. Typhoid. The doctor takes his temperature and squeezes his stomach, then says with a certain sadness, "In the end it's lice who win the war."That's as much of the story as I'll tell, except to say that he finds himself on a beach wailing Ouma-ah! Ouma-ah! Kinda like Rocky and Adrian. It's told in a first-person somnambulist style - As I walk on the blood pounds in my head and I feel feverish. - which I'm told is a rich French literary tradition. This is best read as a kind of reverse nesting doll, how a small story or vignette exposes a larger idea, and then a larger one. Reading this, that stink bug of colonialism kept popping into my mind. Le Clézio draws a kindly colonial (Alexis' father) as distinct from the brutal one (Uncle Ludovic). Ouma teaches us they are one and the same._____ _____ _____ _____ _____* Not saying if he found the treasure.
What do You think about The Prospector (2008)?
Le Clezio created a gentle portrayal of a man haunted by visions of his ideal childhood. The round of seemingly endless summer seashore days and lessons at the knee of their mother, comes to an end for Alexis L'Etang and his sister Laure with their father's financial ruin and his death. The elder L'Etang's one legacy is an obsession with the treasure of the "Unknown Corsair," supposedly buried on Rodrigues Island. Determined to recapture their earlier prosperity, Alexis leaves for Rodrigues in 1910, where he is bewitched by the quest for the treasure, by the soothing routine of sunny days and by the love of a native girl, Ouma. It was a lovely quiet read.
—Linda Heaney
The writing is very lush and meditative, but on the other hand you get really lost in the persistent vacillation between an abstract setting and the narrator's thoughts. You never really feel like you're 'there,' as pathetic a critique as that might sound. Rilke does something very similar, but with far greater insight and poetic grace.The themes covered in the story--the loss of innocence, the corruption of wealth, etc--all seem reminiscent of very familiar stories and personally remind me of a Terrence Malick film. Now that I've critiqued the book I would also add that compared to much of the drivel that passes for literature today this is a fantastic and even in parts brilliant book. One gets the feeling that this type of high caliber writing is on its way out and one is actually morning its passing by reading it. It's really snobbish to point this out but, on the other hand, there is not enough sophisticated or even illuminating criticism reaching the public (everyone seems to emulate A.O. Scott's lets not say anything significant format, which purposely fails to acquire a centralized governing principle that would offer a larger narrative and line of trajectory with which all criticism might dovetail) so that our standards are abysmally uninformed and mediocre. Fine, though. That's just how things go, right? A voice such as Juvenal's speaking in a satirical vain about the dissolute and horrendous mediocrity of second century Rome would be welcome here except for the snappy conservatism that seems to evoke. I won't go on. I just get down about the hidden potentialities not being realized by people because the underlying parameters of thought simply squeeze the genuine creativity dry from their imaginations, and leave the real creative artists in the lurch--why? Because they're not marketable to a public who's been created by the market!!!
—James
Normally I might give this book 3 or 4 stars, but having had the pleasure, no, privilege of reading it while in Mauritius, I have to give it top billing. Due to it's description of the island, and the book's ability to take you back to life on the islands in the late 19th and early 20th century, I learned to forgive the sometimes overly dramatic and flowery language.Some excerpts..."... the muted agitation that precedes metamorphosis." (p. 61)description of sitting out a hurricane... p. 74"I left so I could return." (p. 132) and later, "I left to put an end to the dream, so that my life might begin." (p. 152)"Besides, with my long hair and beard, my sunburned face and arms, my dirty clothes and my bare feet, I must be a strange kind of white!" (p. 135)- I can relate"There is no mystery in this world - that is the source of my regret.""Despite the noise of the sea and wind there is nothing but silence and my loneliness shimmers in the light." (p. 222)"Now I have what I lacked before: faith. I have faith in the basalt rocks, in the ravines, in the narrow river, in the sand dunes. Where did it come from? Perhaps from the sea that encircles the island, from its deep and vibrant roar. Everything here is a part of me; I finally understood this by coming back to English Cove. It is a power that I'd believed lost. So now there isn't any need to hurry." (p. 296)
—Matt
