Steady Abroad

Under the Covers with Justin Bauer

by Justin Bauer

When Horace Engdahl, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, proclaimed early last month that no American writer would win this year's Nobel because "the U.S. is too isolated, too insular," the degree of backlash was entirely predictable. After all, everybody likes it when the home team wins.

Based on the numbers, though, the away team seldom even gets on the field. The New York Times interviewed Chad W. Post, director of the University of Rochester's translation-only Open Letter Press, who estimated that only 330 of 15,000 new books published in the U.S. so far this year were by foreign writers.

I can guarantee that some of the foreign titles for next year will be by newly minted Nobel laureate Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio — but the greatest cultural insights and contrasts come not from the literary lions who create singular, unprecedented work, but from the stuff that sells.

Fortunately, there is a small, growing trade in foreign best sellers. Publishers have rolled out, with varying degrees of fanfare, the late Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (A.A. Knopf), a Swedish hit; the French best seller The Elegance of the Hedgehog (Europa), by Muriel Barbery; and Austrian writer Thomas Glavinic's Night Work (Canongate). Although each have their cousins on American best-seller lists, they all jump off onto paths American writers might skip.

Larsson's book arrives with the biggest reputation, the best sales figures and an impressive advertising campaign. It also fits most comfortably into genre expectations, with a taut thriller's structure, an appealing male-female duo at its center and an awfully topical financial-corruption plotline. Larsson delivers a story that stands with the best work in his genre, putting together a satisfying locked-room mystery without the coldness most Scandinavian writers convey in translation, and working with a different mix of sex and violence from Hollywood expectations. In fact, the book fails only when it gives in to a too-easy unveiling of its villain — the tone drops, logic disappears and it takes a hundred pages for the narrative to recover.

Muriel Barbery's Hedgehog, on the other hand, occupies the space on French shelves between Alain de Botton-style pop philosophy and where something like Marley and Me might sit: a heartwarming story about appreciating those around you, looking beyond appearances, living life in the extended Proustian moment. That the book is about the relationship between a precocious, ignored schoolgirl with suicidal tendencies and her apartment building's concierge — and that we are routinely instructed with small lessons about Husserl's philosophy and the intricacies of the tea ceremony, conveyed in the prickly clear observations of concierge Renée — may be an argument for the superiority of the French common reader.

Night Work is the strangest of these books. Glavinic's scenario repeats, as if by rote, a standard post-apocalyptic science-fiction trope. Jonas is the last man on Earth. He steps out of his apartment one morning, waits for his accustomed bus and only slowly realizes that he can see no living thing — no traffic, no pedestrians, no animals. This scene carries so much familiarity that you expect certain things to follow, whether a Twilight Zone ironic twist (all the time in the world to read, but clumsily breaking his only pair of spectacles) or a Crusoe-like paranoid survivalist fantasy (where our hero either works to re-create the society he's lost alone, or prepares himself to do battle with the elements to continue his existence against some oncoming threat). Glavinic does neither.

It's only roughly halfway through the book that Jonas' undirected movement and free-floating paranoia begin to shape his actions. Following a course of action reminiscent of Tom McCarthy's Remainder, less compulsive if no less neurotic, Jonas spends his days with all the time and resources in the world re-creating his childhood home. As he looks backward, he also begins planting surveillance cameras to watch his present, looking for any evidence of change, as if daring a tree to fall in the woods without him hearing it. When he finally finds movement, at night and from his sleeping self, that paranoia acquires concrete shape. By drawing out slowly and clearly Jonas' struggle to maintain his personality alone, Glavinic does more than just sketch out a Freudian parable about the uncanny or the division of the conscious and unconscious self — he works out a single-character horror novel, entirely isolated and insular.

(j_bauer@citypaper.net)