Though the announcement that Elfriede Jelinek had won the Nobel prize for literature was met in the U.S. book industry with a resounding cry of "who?", it was a great joy for Peter Ayrton, who has published her for nearly 15 years as editor and publisher of Serpent's Tail Press in London. His independent house, which specializes in writers in translation, stays afloat with bestsellers like Catherine Millet's The Sexual Life of Catherine M. and Melissa P's 100 Strokes of the Brush Before Bed, but experimental writers like Jelinek are the reason Ayrton is in publishing.
"I come out of the same kind of political tradition as she does," he said, placing Jelinek's corrosive depictions of contemporary Austrian life in line with works by that country's fin-de-siècle satirist and playwright Karl Kraus (1874—1936) and Thomas Bernhard (1931—1989), whose fiction and plays exposed his country's denial of complicity in the Holocaust. "It's no surprise that she's the [German] translator of Pynchon," Ayrton added. "She's trying to capture the dissonance of everyday life, different voices. That's why she's been writing quite a lot for the stage lately."
Although Ayrton fielded offers at Frankfurt for U.S. rights to the three Jelinek novels he licensed from German publisher Rohwolt, he didn't accept any of them, partly because a new edition might miss the three-month sales window following the Nobel announcement, and partly out of loyalty to Consortium, his U.S. distributor of 15 years. "If we'd paid an enormous advance we needed to recoup, it might be a different story," Ayrton admitted. "But the advances earned out many years ago and were extremely modest. If we're given the opportunity to translate her other novels, we might do it with a large American house."
He has ordered a 20,000-copy reprint of the 2001 movie tie-in edition of The Piano Teacher for the U.S. market, and about 10,000 copies of Jelinek's other novels—Wonderful, Wonderful Times; Lust; and Women as Lovers—all of which will arrive here the first week of November, about a month after the Nobel announcement was made. While that 20,000 figure is respectable for a U.S. printing of literature in translation, it's also around half the average run for a title chosen by the Today Show Book Club—which most booksellers regard as an unreliable vehicle for moving books.
Ayrton is candid about his disadvantages in the U.S. market. Not only is he operating an ocean away from the U.S., but his agoraphobic author is unlikely to attend the December 10 Nobel ceremony in Stockholm (she plans to send a speech instead), let alone travel to England or the U.S, where she has never been. And freelance publicist Meryl Zegarek is granting only a limited number of e-mail interviews with Jelinek to U.S. publications—a shame because the few that have appeared in English over the years are piercing, unpredictable and riveting. ("I seek to cast an incorruptible gaze on women, especially where they are the accomplices of men," she said in an interview on Kino.com)
Then there are the critics. "It's safe to say that Jelinek's work doesn't leave critics indifferent," Ayrton said dryly. "A lot of the male critics and some women get so obsessed with some of the sexual scenes, they completely lose it and don't see the politics, the feminism and the formal inventiveness. It's depressing." In both the U.K. and the U.S., her most enthusiastic appraisers have been other writers, he said, citing John Hawkes and Walter Abish.
On Amazon.com, the 16 customer reviews for The Piano Teacher are wildly divided. Some praise the novel ("as well written as it is shocking, as mesmerizing as it is terrible"), while others are oddly hostile (in a "puritanical society where the baring of an actress' breast on TV warrants a hefty fine from governmental regulators... readers may be left to wonder about the judgment and mental acuity of those who surprisingly elevated this work from well-deserved obscurity.")
Given how rare it is for the Nobel to make a substantial success of writers who are largely unknown in the U.S. before the award, it may be up to the booksellers to deliver Jelinek to her rightful audience. Karl Kilian at Brazos Bookstore in Houston nabbed three of Consortium's few remaining copies of The Piano Teacher by calling at 6 a.m. the day the prize was announced, and will display a big pile as soon as the new edition arrives. "You make a stand on these things," he said, explaining that his 30-year-old store has several long-running book clubs that always read Nobel winners.
"She's the voice of the avant-garde," said Ayrton. "In a way it's a problem with the Nobel prize. It provides a mass readership for writers who don't write for one."
