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Last night I went walking along the riverfront searching for Johann Wolfgang v. Goethe. Goethe, you think…well, that’s a fool’s errand young Werther — he’s long gone from this world. No, no, no…Johann Wolfgang v. Goethe the party boat that cruises up and down the Main river for sightseeing tours. On Monday night, the ‘Goethe’ was commandeered by the Book Fair for a party to celebrate the last day of its annual publishing Fellows program.
The 2007 fellows gathered 18 people from 15 different countries, including Spain, Russia, India, Israel and China, for a week of meetings with German publishers.
The fellows mingled with luminaries, such as Fair director Juergen Boos, Cape Town Book Fair director Vanessa Badroodien and Joachim Adjovi, president of L’associaiation des editeurs francophones au sud du Sahara (the Association of Sub-Saharan Francophone Publishers).
Among the 2008 fellows was Daniela Rapp, an associate editor at St. Martin’s Press in the US. Rapp, who is German but has lived in America for more than a decade (she originally moved to New York to be an actress). She reported that after a week on the road with her fellow fellows, everyone has ‘stopped being polite,’ but has also ‘really bonded.’ One highlight of the week was traveling to the many distant cities. ‘I’d may have grown up in Germany,’ she said, ‘but there’s so much I’d never seen. I’d never been to Hamburg, for example.’
Dinner finished, coffee and dessert served, a Latin-sounding funk band kicked in and the crowd of 100 or so quickly divided into dancers, who filled a tiny dance floor, and smokers, who fled to the top deck to take in some, er, fresh air.
Seeded among the guests were fellows from years past, such as 2004 fellow Peter McGuigan. A literary agent who recently opened his own firm – Foundry Literary and Media, McGuigan was busy trying to find out the score of the New York Yankees/Cleveland Indians baseball playoff (the Yankees won Peter). A friend stopped him to give him a mini sarcophagus of Tutankhamum with the words ‘Now you are an actual Egyptian.’ McGuigan promptly popped the plastic Pharaoh into the breast pocket of his suit coat, giving him a fine perspective on the festivities.
McGuigan has been busy brokering foreign rights. In August, he sold the new, hipster Brooklyn publisher Bazillion Points, the world English rights to Finnish heavy metal legend Andy McCoy’s memoir, Sheriff McCoy (a deal made on behalf of Finnish publisher WSOY).
Seid Serdarević, publisher of Croatian publisher Fraktura and a 2006 fellow, used the example of Bosnian Saša Stanišić’s acclaimed 2006 novel Wie der Soldat das Grammofon Repariert (How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone) to demonstrate how new immigrants are transforming the German language. ‘They don’t feel the burden of classical German literature and history and are thus a little more free to write as they wish,’ said Serdarević.
Stanišić is a literature fellow in the US at the University of Iowa this year and I’m looking forward to reading the novel when it is published next April in the US by Grove. He told me the book fair and similar social events are a key part to his business: ‘With the internet and email, you can do rights deals anytime,’ he said, ‘but you can’t replace meeting people face to face. That’s why you come to Frankfurt.’
Serdarevic said he’s had good luck publishing American writers in translation in Croatia, including Anthony Bourdain and Jonathan Lethem. ‘I think Motherless Brooklyn is brilliant,’ said Stanisic, but says he would have cut 200 pages from Fortress of Solitude. Nevertheless, he’s on the lookout for books with a literary sensibility that’s similar to those of his favourite writers, Robert Musil and Imre Kertész. He may even find them. After all, I found my Goethe.
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