On Jonathan Franzens Intersection and Tamsin Calidas’ I am an island After the ‘Top 100 of the best-selling books of 2021’ presented last week, there was no serious foreign literature. Now that is not so strange, because to get to that top you have to sell more than 23,000 copies of your book. And since places 1, 7, 11, 24, 28, 31, 34, 35, 52, 53, 55, 75, 81, 92 and 99 are occupied by books by Lucinda Riley, and the other ranks are occupied by self-help sports, crime and burning love books, there is little room left for anything else.
At first glance, this is not a disaster. Because according to the CPNB, the representative of the Dutch book industry, the turnover in the book market rose by 8 percent last year and 5 percent more books were sold than in 2020. In a fit of hope I see those 43 million books about the counter flies, whether or not in bol.com packaging. I also remember the copies of Franzens Intersection in the living rooms of my friends and acquaintances, who have bought the book but have not yet read it and sometimes even confess that they will never read it, because they don’t feel like taking that fat pill. But even that is no drama, because you can see their purchase as a donation to the bookstore, just like you give a tenner a month to the kidney foundation.
However, I am concerned about a larger development. Because translated foreign literature has been selling poorly in recent years. There will also come a time when those books are no longer published, because they are a loss item. Bestselling authors such as Michel Houellebecq and Daniel Kehlmann will undoubtedly be spared that fate, but I can imagine that much less famous, but often better authors will eventually no longer appear in a Dutch translation.
An example of such a ‘threatened’ writer is the German-Turkish Emine Sevgi Özdamar, the dean of migrant literature in Germany, whose books were also published in the Netherlands in the 1990s. With her new 760-page autobiographical novel Ein von Schatten limiter Raum I have been spending pleasant hours for a few days now. Özdamar takes you from the Turkey of the 1971 putsch to the stage world of Berlin, Paris, Bochum and Frankfurt, where she is usually assigned the role of a cleaning lady as an actress and Turkish woman. Her book is both an artist’s development history and a quest for a lost time, teeming with migration stories and extermination histories of Armenians, Jews and Muslims. It even features the Bataclan attack.
Özdamar is no Lucinda Riley and her novel is aimed at ‘advanced’ readers, who want more than exotic fairy tales. Her book covers the whole of modern European history, from Edith Piaf to the refugee crisis. And that is what makes it so special.
Moreover, Özdamar gives you insight into both your own life and the new world around you. For that reason alone, this novel should be translated. It is already a profit if 1000 copies are sold in the Netherlands. Lucinda Riley’s publisher, who must have made a fortune in the past year, should dare.
A version of this article also appeared in NRC on the morning of February 4, 2022