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Carmen Balcells, legendary literary agent to Nobel prize winners, dies

Spain's Carmen Balcells, a literary agent who represented some of the biggest names in 20th-century Spanish language literature has died aged 85.

Published: 22 September 2015 08:57 CEST

Carmen Balcells, legendary literary agent to Nobel prize winners, dies

Carmen Balcells died in Barcelona on Sunday. Photo: El Diario.es

Balcells, who represented Nobel-winning authors Mario Vargas Llosa and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, died on Sunday in Barcelona, a spokesman for her agency told AFP without giving further details.

“The family wants privacy. They will issue a statement on Tuesday,” she added.

Balcells, who never attended university, is credited with being one of the forces behind the so-called “Latin American Boom”, an unprecedented burst of creativity, genre-bending works and success that came out of Latin America in the 1960's and 1970's.

She discovered Garcia Marquez after she read a draft of the Colombian author's short story “Big Mama's Funeral” which gave her the nickname as the “mama” of the Latin American Boom.

She went on to represent other big names such as Argentina's Jorge Luis Borges, Chile's Pablo Neruda and Isabel Allende, and Uruguay's Juan Carlos Onetti.

“I can't imagine my life without Garcia Marquez,” she said during a television interview in 2012.

“All of a sudden I found myself surrounded by geniuses,” she added, referring to the writers she represented, many of them who were living in Barcelona at the time.

Born in 1930 at Santa Fe de Segarra, a small village in Catalonia in northeastern Spain, Balcells began her career by working at the agency of Romanian author Vintila Horia before opening her own agency in 1960.

After finding success with Latin American writers, she turned to Spanish authors and represented Camilo Jose Cela, among others.

In 2014 her agency merged with one owned by US agent Andrew Wylie, creating Balcells & Wylie, one of the biggest international literary agencies.

Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy hailed Balcells as an “indispensable figure” in Spanish literature in a Twitter message after her death was announced.

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'Lost' manuscript of pro-Nazi French author published 78 years later

It is a rare thing when the story of a book’s publication is even more mysterious than the plot of the novel itself.

But that might be said of Guerre (War) by one of France’s most celebrated and controversial literary figures, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, which arrives in bookstores on Thursday, some 78 years after its manuscript disappeared.

Celine’s reputation has somehow survived the fact that he was one of France’s most eager collaborators with the Nazis.

Already a superstar thanks to his debut novel Journey to the End of the Night (1932), Celine became one of the most ardent anti-Semitic propagandists even before France’s occupation.

In June 1944, with the Allies advancing on Paris, the writer abandoned a pile of his manuscripts in his Montmartre apartment.

Celine feared rough treatment from authorities in liberated France, having spent the war carousing with the Gestapo, and giving up Jews and foreigners to the Nazi regime and publishing racist pamphlets about Jewish world conspiracies.

For decades, no one knew what happened to his papers, and he accused resistance fighters of burning them. But at some point in the 2000s, they ended up with retired journalist Jean-Pierre Thibaudat, who passed them – completely out of the blue – to Celine’s heirs last summer.

‘A miracle’
Despite the author’s history, reviews of the 150-page novel, published by Gallimard, have been unanimous in their praise.

“The end of a mystery, the discovery of a great text,” writes Le Point; a “miracle,” says Le Monde; “breathtaking,” gushes Journal du Dimanche.

Gallimard has yet to say whether the novel will be translated.

Like much of Celine’s work, Guerre is deeply autobiographical, recounting his experiences during World War I.

It opens with 20-year-old Brigadier Ferdinand finding himself miraculously alive after waking up on a Belgian battlefield, follows his treatment and hasty departure for England – all based on Celine’s real experiences.

His time across the Channel is the subject of another newly discovered novel, Londres (London), to be published this autumn.

If French reviewers seem reluctant to focus on Celine’s rampant World War II anti-Semitism, it is partly because his early writings (Guerre is thought to date from 1934) show little sign of it.

Journey to the End of the Night was a hit among progressives for its anti-war message, as well as a raw, slang-filled style that stuck two fingers up at bourgeois sensibilities.

Celine’s attitude to the Jews only revealed itself in 1937 with the publication of a pamphlet, Trifles for a Massacre, which set him on a new path of racial hatred and conspiracy-mongering.

He never back-tracked. After the war, he launched a campaign of Holocaust-denial and sought to muddy the waters around his own war-time exploits – allowing him to worm his way back into France without repercussions.

‘Divine surprise’
Many in the French literary scene seem keen to separate early and late Celine.

“These manuscripts come at the right time – they are a divine surprise – for Celine to become a writer again: the one who matters, from 1932 to 1936,” literary historian Philippe Roussin told AFP.

Other critics say the early Celine was just hiding his true feelings.

They highlight a quote that may explain the gap between his progressive novels and reactionary feelings: “Knowing what the reader wants, following fashions like a shopgirl, is the job of any writer who is very financially constrained,” Celine wrote to a friend.

Despite his descent into Nazism, he was one of the great chroniclers of the trauma of World War I and the malaise of the inter-war years.

An exhibition about the discovery of the manuscripts opens on Thursday at the Gallimard Gallery and includes the original, hand-written sheets of Guerre.

They end with a line that is typical of Celine: “I caught the war in my head. It is locked in my head.”

In the final years before his death in 1961, Celine endlessly bemoaned the loss of his manuscripts.

The exhibition has a quote from him on the wall: “They burned them, almost three manuscripts, the pest-purging vigilantes!”

This was one occasion – not the only one – where he was proved wrong.

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