Separating Fact and Fiction in the U.S., Europe - 6/27/2007 10:19:00 AM - Publishers Weekly
In the U.S. and U.K. autobiographies are routinely classified as nonfiction, but in much of continental Europe those works are put on the fiction bestsellers lists. When German Nobel laureate Günter Grass’s autobiography Peeling the Onion was released this week in the U.S., for example, it is clearly understood as a work of nonfiction.
It is a book “full of the bravado of youth, the rubble of postwar Germany, the thrill of wild love affairs, and the exhilaration of Paris in the early fifties”, as the publisher promotes it, in which Grass admitted to have been a member of Nazi Waffen SS at age 16. Upon its original publication in Germany in summer 2006, the memoir triggered a hefty political debate on whether or not such a revelation would damage Grass’s reputation as one of Germany’s foremost and most controversial moral authorities for roughly half a century.
Nobody had any doubt about the veracity of Grass’s account—that is, Peeling the Onion was clearly not another Grass novel, despite his occasional and seemingly wilful blurring of fact and fiction. Yet, when the book instantly got on the bestseller list, it was listed as ‘fiction’, in accord with the general practice in most of Europe (with the most notable exception of Britain), where, autobiography is classified as fiction. But why is that the case? In France, it is “the literary character and the novelistic dimension which define a work as ‘fiction,’” explains Fabrice Piault, deputy editor in chief of the book trade magazine Livres Hebdo when queried by PW.
Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish Nobel laureate of 2006, had a book out last year about his childhood memories in Istanbul, a particularly delicate and beautifully written book, with private black-and-white photographs by one of his uncles, of places that had shaped the author’s mind as a child. Istanbul, as Piault notes, “absolutely has its place on a fiction list as a novel” because it is not the result of learned research, but “an intimate vision of a city, hence a work of literature”.
In non–English language Europe, the author seems to prevail over the topic and the angle of a book. One of the more extreme cases is John Grisham’s The Innocent Man, in which the novelist argues against the death penalty in the U.S. The book, a nonfiction bestseller in the U.S., was successful in Europe as well, driven both by the notoriety of the author and the prominence of the cause which, for many Europeans, is one of those topics that seems to highlight the gap between the values of the old continent and the New World. The book hit several bestsellers lists on the fiction charts.
Olivier Nora, head of the prestigious house Grasset, now part of the Hachette universe, adds both pragmatic as well as fundamental pieces to the riddle. On the one hand, he says that only fiction titles can be picked for certain prestigious awards that are often a key to success in France. But, more profoundly, he points to that long tradition of French “auto-fiction”, of “telling the world”, or even, in the words of the poet Louis Aragon, of “mentir vrai” (or, “to lie truthfully”), which all push those narratives towards fiction.
The differences of perception go back to antagonistic traditions in philosophy and cultural history, says Bernhard Fetz, a Vienna-based researcher with the Austrian National Library, specializing in biographies and autobiographies: “While Germany, or France, have a mostly idealist tradition in culture, Britain, and hence the U.S., have always had a more pragmatic approach.” Essays by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, or Goethe, always combined factual accounts with personal intuitions and selfreflections of the author, giving autobiographies also a political angle by defining a life story as exemplary for a nation. The Anglo-Saxon tradition was instead much more and much earlier influenced by science, and therefore supposed to rely on facts, and less on intentions, Fetz says.
Grass’s is sure to stir some debate now as Onion is published in the U.S. by Harcourt. The author is discussing the book tonight with Norman Mailer at the New York Public Library. Mailer, whose career has often blurred the line between autobiography and fiction, may well be the ideal colleague to bring out exactly what Gass’s relation is to truth and fiction and how much these ideas are rooted not only in personal aesthetics but cultural ideologies.
(Maxine notes: I have lived and read in the UK for many years, and have never noticed that autobiographies are put onto fiction lists. I will watch out the next time I see a Bookseller (UK equivalent to PW).)
