Stars for a day
American authors bask in the Gallic limelight
at the 16th Paris Book Fair
By RICHARD COVINGTON
PARIS-- Riding in from the wilds of Montana, New Orleans, Tallahassee and the Hamptons, a posse of American writers, editors and publishers descended on Paris this weekend for the 16th annual Paris Book Fair. The U.S. is this year's guest country of honor at the Salon du Livre, as the festival is titled, and such literary notables as Thomas McGuane, Richard Ford, Joseph Heller, Thomas Sanchez, Jayne Anne Phillips, Walter Mosley, Bob Shacochis and Tobias Wolff flew in to be fussed over and feted by the throng of French fans at the vast Exposition Center here. Philippe Douste-Blazy, the French minister of culture, awarded a dozen authors and publishers the medal for the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, one of the government's highest accolades, for their various contributions to literature. Within the past two years, sales by American authors in France have jumped by 20 percent, according to industry figures.
But if French appreciation for American authors is running high, this attraction is apparently not mutual. During the same two-year period, sales of French books in English translation have dropped an equivalent amount. Overall, only around three percent of all titles published in the U.S. are translated works.
"Why are we not reading French authors in America?" wondered Bill Buford, fiction editor of The New Yorker, during a panel discussion that brought together American and French editors and critics. "Are they really not that good?" he inquired provocatively and only half in jest. Buford said he was distressed by the dominance of English-language authors in world publishing, a situation that made "foreign writers doubt their existence unless their works were translated first into English."
A handful of contemporary French authors like Patrick Chamoiseau, Hervé Guibert, Tahar Ben Jelloun and Andrei Makine are starting to attract an international following, thanks largely to risk-taking independent publishers. But, for the most part, the U.S. market remains a daunting edifice for overseas authors. Book editor Morgan Entrekin of Grove/Atlantic reminded another panel that getting a book translated and published is child's play compared to securing wide distribution. "When I try to persuade the buyer for Barnes & Noble's 5,500 stores that the chain should be stocking the work of a Polish author I've discovered, he gives me disconcerting looks of incomprehension, then buys 100 copies just to be nice," said Entrekin.
The literary game is not for the fainthearted, other speakers pointed out. Irish poet Seamus Heaney, 1995 winner of the Nobel Prize for literature reminded his audience that "literature was not a grand institution, but a scruffy fighting place."
But for the festival's honored American guests, the scrappy arena of writing and selling their work seemed at least temporarily forgotten. For a day or two, they were the objects of a type of cultural adoration they rarely enjoy in their native country. In the U.S., observed Buford, "writers suffer from insecurity at the threat of being shoved off center stage by Sharon Stone and other celebrities," while in France they continue to enjoy star treatment.
In choosing to focus on Western and Southern U.S. authors, the Paris book fair celebrated what the New Yorker editor termed "dirty realism," a spare, conversational style honed by writers like Thomas McGuane and Richard Ford, a style that is anything but self-consciously literary. "The attraction is that it is so far afield from what is being written in France and what the French-- and foreigners in general-- have come to expect of American writing," Buford continued.
"The French seem to get more in touch with new currents in American literature faster than other European countries," observed McGuane. "From what the local writers and critics tell me, they feel imprisoned by their own language; that is what attracts them so much to contemporary American literature and language."
