The Mexican Literary World is in Mourning Again Said Mr Tovar Y De Teresa
After Years of Solitude, Spanish Literary Champion Takes Partner
BARCELONA — Carmen Balcells was never just a literary agent. Nicknamed La Mamá Grande, after a story by Gabriel García Márquez, she served as a confidante and coach, someone who paid her writers' dentist bills and deftly resolved their domestic problems while promoting the greatest Latin American and Spanish authors across the globe, including Mr. García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa and many more than.
During the smash in Latin American literature in the 1960s and 1970s, when political turmoil shook that region and Franco ruled in Madrid, Ms. Balcells became a crucial liaison connecting Spain and Latin America with the rest of the globe and helped a generation of Spanish-language writers find audiences in English.
Today the boom is over, but the backlist lives on. Facing the prospect of a waning empire and no articulate successor (her son does not want to accept over), Ms. Balcells, 83, announced concluding month that she had signed a letter of the alphabet of intent with the New York literary agent Andrew Wylie to grade a new venture, the Balcells-Wylie agency, in which her writers would come under joint direction with Mr. Wylie.
"I desire things clean and ironed," Ms. Balcells said, switching into Catalan from Spanish in an often elliptical, multilingual conversation last week in her airy apartment on the elegant Avenida Diagonal hither, the heart of Spain'southward publishing manufacture. Nonetheless formidable, fifty-fifty in a wheelchair, she was wearing i of her trademark white dresses.
In play is the literary manor of Mr. García Márquez — who died in April and who Mr. Wylie said was estimated to have sold more than 50 one thousand thousand books — as well every bit the fortunes of 300 or then other writers represented by Ms. Balcells, including Mr. Vargas Llosa, Isabel Allende, Javier Cercas and the estates of Carlos Fuentes and Pablo Neruda.
If the deal goes through, the joint venture would give Mr. Wylie a far deeper accomplish into a lucrative and growing marketplace as the center of gravity in Castilian-linguistic communication publishing is moving away from Espana, hit hard by an economic crisis, to Latin America, where sales are on the rise.
The articulation venture besides marks the end of an era. For years, Ms. Balcells spurned the advances of Mr. Wylie, one of the most powerful literary agents in the earth. No living author has ever defected from Ms. Balcells to Mr. Wylie, and she one time quipped that he would have to keep chasing widows. Merely defective someone to assume her role, Ms. Balcells, who founded the Carmen Balcells Literary Bureau in 1956, said she had approached Mr. Wylie this year. The outline of the deal remains unclear, and there is always a chance that Ms. Balcells could modify her mind.
Still, Mr. Wylie said he was pleased at the prospect. "She has clients of significant interest to me," he said in a phone interview, adding that, of those, "about twenty" were of item involvement. The Wylie Agency already represents the estate of Jorge Luis Borges, also every bit that of the Chilean author Roberto Bolaño, previously represented by Ms. Balcells, and living Castilian writers including Antonio Muñoz Molina. "We've had our toe in the water," Mr. Wylie said. "This would go u.s. in deeper."
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Mr. Wylie added that the proposed Balcells-Wylie agency would be an entity separate from the Wylie Bureau, just that he hoped the new venture would help the 1,000 writers already represented by his agency to be published in Spanish translation. The author and translator Alberto Manguel wrote in El País that some of Ms. Balcells's authors might suffer because Mr. Wylie was simply interested in best-selling authors, an thought that Mr. Wylie rejected. Only for the almost part, the Spanish publishing world has generally welcomed the new venture.
"For her information technology's coin and continuity that she couldn't discover any other manner," Elena Ramirez, the director of the Castilian publisher Seix Barral, said. "For him it's a way to finally put his feet in a land where he tried three times before." She continued, "I think it'southward a very clever move for both."
Over the years, Ms. Balcells changed the rules of Castilian publishing. Before, writers would sign open-concluded contracts with publishers, who gave meager advances and took near-total control of all rights. Ms. Balcells began negotiating meliorate advances and fixed-term contracts, as well equally circuitous licensing and rights arrangements. Today, she is fighting to get her writers better deals for electronic and film rights.
Ms. Balcells's parties are legendary. Once, she hosted a dinner for the Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes and his wife. When their plane was delayed for hours, she had the dinner served, then had the entire table cleared and ready once again and then that when the couple finally arrived information technology appeared equally if the political party was just starting.
"She'southward a force of nature," Ms. Allende, the Chilean novelist, said in a phone interview. "She's generous and splendid and over the top." Ms. Allende said that after Ms. Balcells sold translation rights for her first novel in 1981, she invited the writer to a party at her home in Barcelona. "I looked like a peasant, I was coming from Venezuela, I had no idea what the literary world was all about, I'd never read a book review, never studied literature," Ms. Allende recalled. "And she received me every bit if I had been a famous writer already."
For a adult female who went on to befriend members of the Spanish purple family and most prime ministers (subsequently the Franco era, which ended in 1975), Ms. Balcells came from humble origins. She grew upward in a small hamlet in Catalonia in a home without heat or running water. She studied business, but has no academy degree.
"I never wanted to be of import," she said. Under Franco, when a woman couldn't open up a banking company account without the signature of her father or husband, "I wanted to be independent, democratic at a time when a woman without a rigorous education, without a powerful family, couldn't cull what to do on her own," she added.
She met Mr. García Márquez in Mexico in 1965 and sold the United States rights to his 1967 novel "One Hundred Years of Confinement," which sold one million copies almost immediately. In a at present-famous story, the novelist once asked Ms. Balcells if she loved him. "How tin I respond that?" she told him. "You're more than than thirty percent of my business!" (Ms. Balcells said that was even so the example today.)
Asked what she considered her legacy, she paused. "The dream of my life was to start a literary agency and to have a writer similar Gabo," she said of Mr. García Márquez. And she achieved it. "I concur," she said, her optics lucid and mischievous. "I am a remarkable adult female."
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/20/books/literary-agent-carmen-balcells-forms-joint-venture-with-andrew-wylie-spanish-and-latin-american-literature.html
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