Italian bitter oranges form a metaphor in a debut novel that Giunti’s Bompiani is sending to Frankfurt this year. Image – Getty iStockphoto: Francesco Frilli
By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson
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‘The Human Soul of a Woman’
When you get to Frankfurter Buchmesse (October 16 to 20), you’ll find that the cover of the 2024 fall rights list from Bompiani pictures a novel on its cover.
Come l’arancio amaro—Like the Bitter Orange—is part of our Rights Roundup today (July 12), and lists no rights sales as yet because it was published less than three weeks ago. But Giunti’s Leeann Bortolussi tells us that the piece is so highly regarded by the company that it’s getting not only that cover treatment for the list at Frankfurt but also a 30,000-copy print run to begin, in paperback-plus-jacket. For rights directors and agents, a partial translation in English is available.
So far, so good: The book premiered in Italy as a Top 10 bestseller in late June.
A Sicilian family saga, the book turns on how “a young woman born from generations of ancestral pain holds a beauty and strength that can be found in no other.” And the title comes from the fact that the bitter orange tree, “with its thorns and sour fruit is nevertheless, the most fertile plant on which to graft the sweet blood orange.”
What caught our attention and prompted us to ask Bortolussi about this very new title is the fact that its Palermo-born author has a career as a curator, working in Italy’s notarial archives to preserve “the economic memories of towns and cities, and for many years the manager of the archives in Salerno, where she lives today.
What else might interest you about Milena Palminteri? She was born in 1949. And this is her debut publication, a work set in the 1920s and 1960s and based on some of the records she found in Salerno’s archives.
‘Democracy Is Inherent in Publishing’
Recent weeks’ events haven’t been particularly kind to issues around age and aging in some of the markets of international publishing—especially in world politics. So we put several questions to Bortolussi and to Palminteri’s editor at Bompiani, Giulia Ichino. We asked, for example, if the fact of such maturity in a “new” author is something that can come into discussions with rights colleagues about the value of a work?
Leeann Bortolussi
“As much as publishing celebrates youth and fresh ideas,” Bortolussi says, “I think that a democracy is inherent in publishing because we will love a good story no matter the age of the author.
“Being able to relate to an author can bring new readers in, or can help readers to find new worlds. But at a certain point, readers tend to read a good book no matter who it was written by. When a story transports you, everything else falls away, and the age of an author isn’t important. In this case, experience brings a mind capable of seeing all of life’s peaks and valleys.
“Here we have an author who has worked many years and built a strong career, and who has also dedicated a good amount of her free time to writing, and has gained a lot of experience.”
Giulia Ichino
Ichino, in her role as editor of the book, agrees, saying, “This novel is also a demonstration of how there are issues that never cease to concern us.
“The story of Sabedda and Nardina is very close to what we would call being a surrogate mother today: women’s choices about their generative destiny, about their bodies and their feelings in this novel, are staged in the 1920s but they also have something profoundly current.”
With such an impressive rollout of this title, we’re also interested in the investment the house is making in the book. Bortolussi tells us, “It’s true that this is a debut, but as has happened in the past with certain Giunti and Bompiani debut authors, this is a debut with the full force of the publishing company behind it.
“First of all, the editor knows that this is a book that can ride to the top of a competitive market. In the rights office, we fall in step with that, whether it’s because of the topic or the literary style. Numbers have always been important, and they’re even more so right now; there’s a difficult climate in many markets. Therefore, we’re always careful to communicate information regarding sales and performance to our international publishers, they’re important elements in the mix of what tells one that a book will do well in translation.”
“This novel has a special strength,” Ichino says, “because it has all the freshness of a debut but also all the richness of long life experience, like that of the author. Milena Palminteri came across the real-life story at the heart of the novel in the early 1980s, while working at the notarial archives in Salerno. She still waited to retire, to raise her children, to attend creative writing meetings held by the Neapolitan writer Antonella Cilento for 10 years before writing this book.
“In it,” she says, “flows all the knowledge of the human soul of a woman who has lived a lot. So it’s a debut that has the breath of a mature literary work.”
‘Something Relevant to Life’
“In terms of territories and languages” in which Like the Bitter Orange might thrive, Bortolussi says, “I think they’re all good. It’s one of the things that the rights team loves best: we often don’t see barriers. I think that this story will travel to almost any country.
Milena Palminteri
“Our European neighbors are often the first to join, perhaps only because an editor reads Italian, one has lived in Italy or has family in Italy: we can be closer and literally more interconnected. But it happens when there are oceans between us, as well, so it’s very difficult to say” which market may be the quickest to respond to Palminteri’s book.
“This a family saga, of course,” Ichino says, “but it’s a novel written in an intense language, which carries the traces of history: clearly in translation something of this may be lost, but this richness becomes almost a perceptible ‘taste’ that makes this novel a bewitching Sicilian experience.”
Bortolussi says the sales strategy put together for Palminteri’s arrival will leverage the 267 bookstores of the company’s Giunti al Punto chain across Italy. “There’s also a lot of energy being invested in communication,” she says, “to be sure that readers know about this book.”
And at Frankfurt, making Like the Bitter Orange the first book that she and colleagues will present to international counterparts on the cover of the company’s list means, she says, “that we’ll be doing everything to make sure it finds its way into every language and onto film and television screens as well.
“The feedback has been very positive,” Leeann Bortolussi says, “because although it’s fun and entertaining, it’s a story with a certain quality that leaves the reader with the sense of having gained something important, something relevant to life.”
More from Publishing Perspectives on international translation and publication rights is here, more on Guest of Honor Italy at Frankfurt this year is here, more on the Italian market is here, and more on Frankfurter Buchmesse is here.