Alta Ifland's Blog: Notes on Books - Posts Tagged "italy"

After so much anticipation, some disappointment was expected. The REMAINDERS PAVILION: I had imagined a huge hall full of devilishly tempting books, all waiting to be bought at ridiculously low prices. The hall was big, all right, but the construction of the setting for the book exhibit was still going on, so there was a lot of unpleasant construction material around; there were some enticing books (by which I mean literary fiction, which is what I am mostly interested in) but most of the books on display were colorful travel guides or children’s books. And, after finding a collection of short stories by Primo Levi and one by Nathaniel Hawthorne, and getting ready to pay, what do I find out? That I can’t buy them because all that was for wholesale not for individual buyers. So much for my book orgy!

Monday, was, in fact, the pre-BEA day (officially, BEA starts on the 24th). The main event of the day was the Italian Forum, which consisted of conferences regarding book publishing in/from Italy. I had traveled all night, so being very tired, I only had the strength to attend the last part of “Buying and selling Rights,” and “Import and Export of Italian Books in the USA.” All the panelists confirmed what I already knew: that importing books from other countries (in this case, Italy) and publishing them here is a HEROIC enterprise. American publishers want to export their authors, but are not interested in buying anything (one of the reasons being that they don’t have the governmental aid other publishers have). Still, it appears that there is another country even less open than the States: Great Britain. An Italian publicist said that if she tries to sell a book to a Chinese publisher, her chances of success are about 80%; in the case of an American publisher, her chances drop to about…2 in a thousand! The one good thing (from the publishers’ perspective) about publishing in the States is that when a title is successful, the success can translate into huge profits (because the market is so large). And there were some “success stories” of some Italian publishers who have managed to penetrate the American market, but even those were depressing. One of them (whose name escapes me) publishes “art books” on famous topics (eg., the history of Harley Davidson, the Rolling Stones), travel guides, calendars. They sell hundreds of thousands of copies (!) per title, and most of their sales are through…Costco or other similar clubs. As if the junk produced in the States were not enough, and we need Italian publishers to give us more of the same!

Piperno’s The Worst Intentions (Europa Editions, 2007) has been compared, with some justification, to Ph. Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint. In fact, Piperno’s novel is better. As a big reader of Proust (I had read all the volumes of A la Recherche… by the time I was 22, and wrote my BA thesis on it) I can say that this is the closest equivalent to Proust’s masterpiece. I usually don’t like such comparisons because they are rarely founded, and even when they are, they indicate that the author of the “equivalent” is no more than a talented epigone. But what makes the comparison to Proust justified in this case is not only the fact that Piperno has deeply absorbed the work of his predecessor—a French scholar, he is the author of a work of literary criticism, Proust Anti-Jew—but also the fact that his novel is extremely contemporary. It is an updated version of Proust in the sense that it gives us a remarkable portrayal of Italian “high” society from the fifties until 2001. The snobbery of this society, while reminiscent of the old-fashion mannerisms of Mme Verdurin’s and Mme de Guermantes’s inner circles, is at the same time very contemporary. Piperno’s snobs are universal because any high-school student who wishes to be “popular” can recognize himself/herself in them; and yet, they are so…Italian. Never before have I read a novel whose protagonists are so concerned with appearance, especially fashion.

Another Proustian element of the novel is the construction of desire (with its corollary, jealousy and/or envy). Daniel, the half-Jewish narrator—who later becomes the author of a successful book with a provocative view on the Jews—is hopelessly in love with the most beautiful, the richest and most popular girl in his school, Gaia. Gaia is a cross between Nabokov’s Lolita and Proust’s Odette—inaccessible (though, as in Proust, it turns out that she is inaccessible only for the narrator, and quite accessible for the others), very desirable and very shallow (the narrator compares her to Britney Spears).

What I find amazing about The Worst Intentions, a novel written in long, complicated, Proustian sentences (translated with sophistication by Ann Goldstein), is that it was a best-seller in Italy.