Booksellers’ picks of the year: international fiction

Canadian booksellers contacted by Q&Q all pointed to American author Erin Morgenstern’s debut novel, The Night Circus, as one of the top books of 2011. “The buzz has been huge, and all the reviews I’ve seen have been raves,” says Christopher Johnson, a manager at Nicholas Hoare in Toronto.

Michael Hamm, manager of Bookmark in Halifax, credits much of The Night Circus’s buzz to the fact that early adopters of Harry Potter and the Twilight series have grown up reading supernatural tales. “Now that they’re adults, they’re looking for a fantastical book, and this one certainly fits the bill,” he says.

Another top seller this fall is The Marriage Plot, U.S. novelist Jeffrey Eugenides’s follow-up to Middlesex, which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2003. “A lot of people hold Middlesex in such high regard that it’s kind of hard to top that,” Hamm says, “but I read [The Marriage Plot] and I loved it.”

Booksellers contacted by Q&Q also consider The Sense of an Ending, British writer Julian Barnes’s 2011 Man Booker Prize–winning novel, one of the year’s biggest successes. “That was selling well before it was given the award, and now it’s selling even more,” says Ian Donker, manager of Book City in Toronto, adding that The Sense of an Ending is an in-house favourite.

Japanese writer Haruki Murakami’s ambitious new novel, 1Q84, has been extremely popular in Canada since its release in October, according to booksellers. Other top 2011 titles include Nobel Prize–winning Portuguese author José Saramago’s posthumous novel, Cain; British novelist Alan Hollinghurst’s new title, The Stranger’s Child; and American writer Stephen Mitchell’s translation of The Iliad.

Tranströmer wins Nobel Prize

In a year that saw literary punters make Bob Dylan the odds-on favourite (and in which Canadian readers continued to carry the torch for their own, be it Alice or Margaret), the 2011 Nobel Prize for Literature, announced in Stockholm this morning, was awarded to 80-year-old Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer, a towering figure in Scandinavian literature.

Tranströmer, long considered a contender for the $1.5 million (U.S.) prize, won “because, through his condensed, translucent images, he gives us fresh access to reality,” the Swedish Academy says in its citation.

Tranströmer’s main English-language translator is Scottish poet Robin Fulton, whose The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems was published by New Directions in 2006. The collection includes poems Tranströmer wrote after suffering a stroke that had left him unable to speak.

In 2007, Tranströmer received a lifetime recognition award from the Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry.

Politician and author Douglas Roche nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize

Former Canadian senator and author Douglas Roche has been nominated for the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize. Roche, who served as an Edmonton MP from 1972 to 1984, has written 20 books. His latest, How We Stopped Loving the Bomb: An Insider’s Account of the World on the Brink of Nuclear Disarmament, will be published by James Lorimer & Company in March.

The former politician also served as Canada’s UN Ambassador for Disarmament from 1984 to 1989, and in 2009, the city of Hiroshima named Roche an honorary citizen for his nuclear disarmament activism.

Roche was nominated for the Nobel Prize by the International Peace Bureau, which wrote in its nomination letter: “Aside from existing Nobel laureates, it is hard to think of a single individual who has worked as hard for disarmament as he, and with such persistence and determination, at the top levels of world politics.”

The award-presentation ceremony takes place on Dec. 10, 2011, in Oslo, Norway.

Nobel Prize–winner Saramago dies at 87

The Associated Press is reporting that José Saramago, the only Portuguese writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, has died at age 87. Born in 1922, the author left his job as a metalworker after his first novel, Country of Sin, gained him some recognition (although few sales) in his home country. He is especially noted for his novel Baltasar and Blimunda, published in English in 1988, and Blindness, published in English in 1997 and made into a movie by Fernando Meirelles in 2008.

From AP:

Publisher Zeferino Coelho was quoted on the website of the Portuguese newspaper Publico as saying Saramago died at his home in Lanzarote, one of Spain’s Canary Islands. Coelho said the author’s health had worsened after a recent illness. It gave no further details.

Saramago was an outspoken man who antagonized many, and moved to the Canary Islands after a public spat with the Portuguese government in 1992.

His 1998 Nobel accolade was nonetheless widely cheered in his homeland after decades of the award eluding writers of a language used by some 170 million people around the world.

“People used to say about me, ‘He’s good but he’s a Communist.’ Now they say, ‘He’s a Communist but he’s good,’” he said in a 1998 interview with The Associated Press.

Reaction to Herta Müller’s Nobel Prize win

The Romanian-born German author Herta Müller has won the 2009 Nobel Prize for Literature. If you’ve never heard of her before, that’s understandable: while she’s widely read in Eastern Europe and is one of Germany’s most acclaimed novelists, only four of Müller’s books have appeared in English, the most recent translation of her work being 2001′s The Appointment. Müller’s novel, The Land of Green Plums, won the 1998 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

Among English-language media, Müller’s win has caused some head-scratching and the odd complaint that the Swedish Academy should get out more. A roundup of coverage:

• Müller is profiled by The New York Times, the BBC, and Times Online
• In a mostly positive review, New York Times reviewer Peter Filkins writes that The Appointment is “more a test of endurance than a pleasure”
• The Associated Press offers a partial list of Müller’s work, while the Complete Review offers a more extensive overview
• Writing in Time magazine, Lev Grossman says that Müller’s surprise pick is really no surprise at all
• A blogger at Entertainment Weekly complains that the Swedish Academy has “once again … selected a virtual unknown,” before confessing to being a myopic American poorly read in non-English lit

Who will win the Nobel?

It’s not quite the biggest reward that can be given to a writer (that would be inclusion in Oprah’s Book Club, or maybe Richard and Judy’s), but the Nobel Prize for Literature is nothing to sneeze at – just look what it has done for last year’s winner, J.M.G. Le Clézio (who?). The prize is to be handed out tomorrow, and the international book media abounds with speculation. That the head of the prize  recently remarked that the Nobel has been too “Eurocentric” in its picks has caused some to believe this is America’s year, with maybe Philip Roth or Joyce Carol Oates heading to Stockholm.

As far as the oddsmakers are concerned, however, the prize is most likely to go to Israeli writer Amos Oz. According to the odds posted at Ladbrokes.com, Oz has a 3-1 chance of walking away with it, the same German author Herta Müller (who?).

Alice Munro is farther down the list at 25-1, the same odds as Bob Dylan(?). Atwood is 40-1, and Ondaatje is 50-1.

Whoever wins, the odds of someone posting, within 24 hours of the announcement, a video mashup on YouTube featuring Kanye West interrupting the ceremony in Stockholm are about 2-1.

Le Clezio’s work will appear in The New Yorker for the first time

Earlier this month, Quillblog copped ignorance to Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio’s work, since there was only one English title available on Amazon. Apparently, the announcement of Le Clezio the winner of this year’s Nobel Prize for literature piqued the curiousity of the insular and ignorant North American masses, and so The New Yorker will publish one of Le Clezio’s short stories, The Boy Who Had Never Seen the Sea, in the Oct. 27 print issue.

“We thought lots of people would be very interested to see what his work was like,” said New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Treisman, whose translation of the short story The Boy Who Had Never Seen the Sea will appear on newsstands Monday. “We also wanted to move fast and publish it while people still remember his name.”

Treisman had also not read Le Clezio’s work before the Nobel was announced. An abstract of Le Clezio’s story will appear on The New Yorker‘s website, though for now there’s a one-sentence write-up that sums it up: “Short story about a boy who runs away from school to be near the sea.”

Bookmarks – Nobel Prize winner sued, Redhill on Henighan, and more

Some book-related links:

• Nobel Prize-winner sued by Canadian author (Forbes.com)
• Smoking bans: who will think of the writers? (The Telegraph)
• Michael Redhill responds to Stephen Henighan’s Giller rant (Geist… more here)
• Orhan Pamuk the greatest living writer? (Harper’s)
• Grass is greener dept.: Books booming in India (Hindustan Times)

Quote of the day:

“I hope that after Lisa Moore slaps him at the next Toronto cocktail party Henighan bitterly decides to go to, that Margaret Atwood walks up to him with a letter from her lawyer.” – Michael Redhill

Pamuk wins Nobel

Well-known Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, who has been much in the news lately for his freedom-of-speech struggles in his homeland, has won this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature. Given the cries of who? that often accompany a Nobel announcement, Pamuk’s win is good news for booksellers, who can now start stacking those displays of Snow and My Name Is Red without having to do a few hours of research and sourcing first. The Guardian has the story, as well as links to several recent Pamuk-related items.

In other award news, the U.S. National Book Awards shortlists were announced yesterday. There’s kind of an edgy feel to the fiction list, which includes 9/11-themed books like Jess Walter’s The Zero and (Quillblog fave) Ken Kalfus’s A Disorder Peculiar to the Country as well as Mark Z. Danielewski’s experimental Only Revolutions.

Related links:
Click here for the Guardian‘s Orhan Pamuk coverage
Click here for the full National Book Awards shortlists

Pick a writer, any writer

The winner of the Nobel prize for literature will be announced any Thursday now, as Reuters UK reports. (Likely the 12th or 19th of October, to be more precise.)

The news service featured an item about the prize on Monday in which it stressed the Nobel Academy’s notorious secrecy: “The Academy never reveals its shortlist, and the names of the few hundred nominees the literature committee usually receives — by invitation only — will stay a secret for five decades.”

This means of course that all the potential winners mentioned in the Reuters story might as well have been drawn from an exceedingly large top hat.

Related links:
For more Nobel speculation, read the Reuters story here