The Pantagraph from Bloomington, Illinois • Page 43

Books E5 Sunday, February 12, 1995 Dalkey Press' brings German writer to the world From the Bookshelf ARM HMIDT 1 Fiction Normal Public Library Acceptable Risk, by Robin Cook; The Murderers, by W.E.B. Griffin; The Raiders, by Harold Robbing; The Magic Bullet, by Harry Stein. Bloomlngton Public Library The Heart of Justice, by William Coughlin; Great Stories of the American West, by Martin Greenberg; Description of a Struggle: The Vintage Book of Contemporary Eastern European Writing, by Michael March; Red Dust, by Paul McAuley. Non-fiction Normal Public Library Winnie-the-Pooh on Management, by Roger Allen; Perfect Weight, by Deepak Chopra; Long Walk to Freedom, by Nelson Mandela; Food, by Susan Powter. Bloomlngton Public Library The Abuse Excuse: And Other Cop-outs, Sob Stories and Evasions of Responsibility, by Alan Dershowitz; The Cosmological Milkshake: A Semi-Serious Look at the Size of Things, by Robert Ehrlich; We're in This War, Too: World War II Letters From American Women in Uniform, by Judy Litoff, Westmoreland: A Biography of General William Westmoreland, by Samuel Zaffiri.

Juvenile fiction Normal Public Library Wait and See, by Virginia Bradley; Beyond the Magic Sphere, by Gail Jarrow; Listen to the Rain, by Bill Martin Jr. and John Archambault; The Best School Year Ever, by Barbara Robinson. Bloomlngton Public Library Do You Know How Much I Love by Donnna Tedesco; Mole's Hill: A Woodland Tale, by Lois Ehlert; Jennifer Jean, the Cross-Eyed Queen, by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor, The Baby Blue Cat and the Whole Batch, by Ainslie Pryor. 0 By SCOTT RETTBERG Special to The Pantagraph One of Germany' most important postwar authors, Arno Schmidt (1914-1979) is often compared to James Joyce because of his penchant for linguistic experimentation and his encyclopedia array of esoteric allusions. To read this collection of novellas is to be exposed to much of western history, and must of western literature, as it is filtered through the lens of Schmidt's own eccentric mind.

Arno Schmidt was born in Hamburg in 1914 Almost immediately after he passed his high school exams in 1933, he went to work at a textile factory. He was drafted into the Wehrmacht in 1939 and sent to a flak base in Norway, where he spent the war until 1945 when he was sent to the Western front and captured by British troops. He settled in Lower Saxony and began to write full time, publishing his first work, "Leviathan" in 1949, beginning a career that was both prolific and innovative. His career divides into two parts; the "Early" period from 1946-1964 of increasingly experimental work, and the "Late" period of huge metanovels, including "Bottoms Dream" and "Evening Edged in Gold," the latter a translation which garnered Woods both an American Book Award and a PEN Translation Prize. Although only now after his death is a substantial amount Arno Schmidt's work being brought into English, it has been the subject of a virtual industry of scholarly criticism in Germany.

The Dalkey Archive collection of novellas contains 10 novellas that span Schmidt's career from 1946-1957. Even in this early volume, Schmidt, the experimentalist and linguistic maestro, demonstrates that the standard conventions of forced him to flee Lower Saxony to the more liberal north. We can see references to his experience with censorship in later novellas, as when the narrator is told of the rules of the underworld in Tina," "The heaviest punishment of all, and one that is very seldom meted out roughly comparable to your death sentence up top is for sending 'inspirations' up to the earth's surface. That's when some scribbler grubbing in a library (or even dreaming) suddenly has an "Republica Intelligentsia" is the most polished of the novellas in the collection, formerly published in English as "The Egghead Republic." This novella, written in 1957 and set in the 21st century, is not only a speculative cold war parable, but a linguistic tour through world history and literature, complete with a stop at James Joyce's grave. Schmidt's stylist and syntactic peculiarities take a bit of getting used to, but once past that hurdle, "Collected Novellas" is an extraordinary introduction to the labyrinthine mind of a 20th-century master.

If Schmidt's contentious and sometimes petty observations occasionally dampen his wit, we are well rewarded for our patience by the swirling grace he brings to his prose on a line-by-line basis. The "Collected Novellas" are the work of a rare and original mind, and the volume is well worth reading. "Collected Novellas" is the first volume of a four volume collection of Schmidt's early work, which will include several more novellas, two full novels and short stories. "No-bodaddy's Children," the second volume of this monumental translation, will be released this year, to be followed by "Collected Short COLLECTED NOVELLAS: Collected Early Fiction 1949-1964, Volume I By Arno Schmidt Dalkey Archive Press, $22.95 plot, narrative, character and continuity need not apply. Instead, we are swimming in and out of place and time in these fictions, carried from allusions to quotations to contemporary and ancient history to meditations on continental philosophy to the life and times of James Fenimore Cooper to descriptions of food to erotica to Schmidt's own opinions and petty epiphanies.

Although the setting of the novellas vary widely, from Greek and Roman antiquity in "Enthymesis," "Gadir," "Alexander," and "Cos-mas," to 21st Century America in "Republica Intelligentsia," in almost every instance there is return to the context of Adenauer Germany, and the circumstances of Schmidt's own life. We find in his writing the anxiety of a German Intellectual, proud of the German tradition and disgusted with the ugly stains that Hitler's war has left on his nation's heritage, and then in turn disgusted by the cow-ishness and prudery of Adenauer Germany. "Alexander" is a fairly straightforward analogy to Hitler, and "Leviathan" takes a universalizing approach to the Hitler parable to absolute power, including Western culture as a party to blame for the holocaust: "We owe our first detailed descriptions of a well-equipped concentration camp to the most Christian, perverted fantasy of Dante." Schmidt's initial publication of "Lake Scenery with Pocahontas" in 1955, contains some playful erotica tame by today's standards that nearly got him arrested for blasphemy and pornography and 1 IF I -'jAJu UI that has become the subject of a growing chorus of international literacy acclaim. Stories" in 1996 and "Two Novels" in 1997. The Schmidt project is the latest in an award-winning run of trans lations published by Dalkey Arch- Scott Rettberg is a creative writing ive Press, a local Normal press instructor at Illinois State University 'Miss Spider's Tea Party' makes splash in publishing world TTZJPT 1 It 'US 1 1 "Jmrt 'zJi 'n 1 Compiled from data from large-city bookstores, bookstore chains and local best-seller lists across the United States.

The first number in parentheses is the book's previous week's ranking; the second is the number of weeks the book has been on the best-seller list Fiction 1. The Celestine Prophecy. James Redfield. Warner, $17.95 (1, 50) 2. Politically Correct Bedtime Stories.

James Finn Garner. Macmillan, $8.95 (2, 31) 3. Kiss the Girls. James Patterson. Little, Brown, $22.95 (3, 5) 4.

Original Sin. P.D. James. Knopf, $24 (6,3) 5. Acceptable Risk.

Robin Cook. Putnam, $22.95 (7, 4) 6. Self-Defense. Jonathan Kellerman. Bantam, $22.95 (5, 6) 7.

Eyes of a Child. Richard North Patterson. Knopf, $24 (4, 6) a The Murderers. W.E.B. Griffin.

Putnam, $22.95 (8, 3) 9. From Time to Time. Jack Finney. Simon Schuster, $23 (13, 2) 10. The Bridges of Madison County.

Robert James Waller. Warner, $16.95 (10, 128) Non-fiction 1. I Want to Tell You. OJ. Simpson with Laurence Schiller.

Little, Brown, $17.95 (1, 2) 2. Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. John Gray. HarperCollins, $23 (2, 97) 3. The Hot Zone.

Richard Preston. Random House, $23. (4, 18) 4. In the Kitchen with Rosie. Rosie Daley.

Knopf, $14.95 (3, 42) 5. Raging Heart Shelia Weller. Pocket Books, $18 (-, 1) 6. Doctor, What Should I Eat? Isadora Rosenfeld, M.D. Random House, $25 (5, 2) 7.

Crossing the Threshold of Hope. John Paul II. Knopf, $20 (6, 15) 8. Food. Susan Powter.

Simon Schuster, $24 (8, 4) 9. Illuminata. Marianne Williamson. Random House, $20 (7, 7) 10. Couplehood.

Paul Reiser. Bantam, $19.95 (-, 22) Mass market Sold at newsstands, supermarkets, variety stores, bookstores 1. Tom Clancy's Op-Center. Tom Clancy. Berkley, $6.99 (1, 4) .2.

The Day After Tomorrow. Allan Folsom. Warner, $6.99 (2, 4) 3. Icebound. Dean Koontz.

Ballantine, $6.99 (3, 5) 4. Family Blessings. LaVyrle Spencer. Jove, $6.50 (8, 3) 5. Accident Danielle Steel.

Dell, $6.99 (-, 1) 6. Fatal Cure. Robin Cook. Berkley, $6.99 (4, 4) 7. Lovers.

Judith Krantz. Bantam, $6.99 (5, 4) 8. Disclosure. Michael Crichton. Ball-J antine, $6.99 (6, 22) $.

The Robber Bride. Margaret At- wood. Bantam. $6.50 (-, 1) rmfiffiWW am "rrto- AP window display. The big push helped "Miss Spider" tiptoe around some early lukewarm reviews in influential trade publications.

Publishers Weekly called Kirk's rhyming text "slack and predictable," while Kirkus Reviews thought a story on a friendly spider seemed "wrongheaded and though the art here is arresting, the doggerel verse hasn't enough merit to outweigh the flawed premise." The book did get a plug, though, two weeks after publication from National Public "Radio's "All Things Considered," which featured an interview with Kirk, who read the book. Meanwhile, Callaway was aggressively' violating the conventional kids-book rule' of product licensing: Wait until you have a'hit character. Even before "Miss Spider" Twas released, he signed toymaker Dakin Inci to produce a spider doll and dangled the book and toy package in front of top executives at the upscale FAO Schwarz toy chain. Schwarz had shelves full of spider dolls in its stores just weeks after the book came out, and the colorful arachnid was displayed on the cover of the retailer's fall catalog. Kirk went on a chainwide tour last fall.

In early December, he showed up unannounced, at the Manhattan Schwarz store to sign books and quickly sold 175 copies, helping "put "Miss Spider" among the five top-selling holiday books at the chain. Now Miss Spider is weighing some pretty, serious adult offers. Callaway says a major; Hollywood studio has offered to acquire animation-film rights to both books. He is lso negotiating with a major software company to develop a Miss Spider CD-ROM for 1996, and a theme park is dreaming up Miss Spider attractions. All the attention would have been hard for outsiders to predict, but the last lines of "Miss Spider's Tea Party" suggest that the neophyte Kirk had a wily marketer's sense all along: Miss Spider's reputation grew.

Before too long our hostess knew Each bug who crawled or hopped or flew And all their lovely children too. By PATRICK M. REILLY The Wall Street Journal NEW YORK A friendly female spider is showing the children's book-publishing world how to spin a hit book, and the industry, troubled by overexpansion, is watching closely. "Miss Spider's Tea Party" was one of about 4,500 new children's books published and shipped to bookstores last year. But its publisher, Scholastic beat the competitive odds, turning it into a bestseller by ignoring the marketing principles usually used to produce winning children's books.

Scholastic bent the rules by teaming up with an outsider to children's publishing: Nicholas Callaway, the slick book packager and publisher who created Madonna's "Sex" book. Meanwhile, Callaway, who has considerably more entrepreneurial hustle than the usual children's book publisher, offered a huge advance to an unknown toy maker who had never written a book. "Miss Spider," with more than 200,000 copies in print since its publication in April 1994, scurried into the top 10 in the Publishers Weekly children's best-seller list (Typically, publishers are happy with sales of 15,000 or so for a book by a first-time children's author.) And though American children's books rarely succeed abroad, Callaway has already locked up international deals for "Spider" in Australia, Japan, Germany and France and signed up Scholastic to publish the sequel, "Miss Spider's Wedding," this fall. The success of "Miss Spider" comes even as many other publishers are cutting their kids' lists, and giants like Random House Inc. are trimming their juvenile staffs.

Between 1982 and 1993, juvenile book sales rose more than 300 percent to $1.16 billion, and publishers bet that demand from new parents would continue to grow. But sales of children's hardcovers dropped 8 percent in 1993, the only major book category to decline, and many publishers are reporting a similar drop for 1994. "Miss Spider" crept into this market via a circuitous route. David Kirk, the author and illustrator, had spent most of the 1980s running two toy companies that ultimately Nicole Jagerman, 6, of California, looked at David Kirk's "Miss Spider's Tea Party" on display at a New York FAO Schwarz toy store recently. that goes into finding ways to say no," Callaway says.

In particular, the publishers didn't like Callaway's demand for a large guaranteed first printing. Based on Callaway's price for the book, publishers figured they would have to list it at close to $20 to make their normal profit a risky price for a first-time author. Scholastic, though, had a powerful competitive weapon: The 75-year-old publisher has a vast array of established distribution channels in U.S. schools, including teacher-sponsored book clubs and school-organized book fairs. It gambled it could sell "Miss Spider" for $15.95, making up in volume what it lost in profit margin.

It also took another risk, shunning the popular holiday season and introducing the book in the springtime. Then came an unusual marketing blitz. Scholastic littered bookstores with special kits for "Miss Spider tea parties," including a Pin the Legs on Miss Spider Game, and offered prizes for the best "Miss Spider" failed. His only illustrations appeared on the sides of his toy boxes. Callaway stumbled onto his work in a Manhattan toy store as he shopped for his two-year-old daughter, and instantly pronounced Kirk "a genius." Eager to enter the growing kids' market, Callaway tracked the artist-toy maker down at his upstate New York home.

Kirk already had a modest $5,000 advance from Rizzoli International Publications Inc. for a book about a spider, but Rizzoli was planning a low-profile printing of about 7,000, according to Kirk. When Callaway offered a $20,000 advance, Kirk asked to get out of his contract, and Rizzoli obliged. Kirk produced a slender rhyming tale with rich, vivid illustrations of a dreamy garden. Like many children's books today, it has a socially uplifting theme, as a lonely spider wins over a clique of dismissive insects with courtesy and tea cakes.

At first, though, the publishers Callawav approached were every bit as dismissive as the story's bugs. "It is amazing the creativity Divorce Affordable fees Attorney Frank Hoffman Ph. 827-7667 SALE ON OVER 75 STYLES OF CABINETRY (NOT JUST ONE STYLE) SELLING AT OX.x HEADACHE? BACK PAIN? If you haven't tried chiropractic, you haven't tried. Headaches and back pain are two of the most common aliments treated by chiropractic. Often, a Doctor of Chiropractic can bring relief by simply taking the pressure off a pinched nerve.

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