World View : Sizzling Bestsellers from the Global Bookstore : A summer tour of who is reading what and where--and why

Far from the burdens of office, away from skinheads and European currency wrangles, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl intends to laze away some summer days at the Austrian lakefront town of Wolfgangsee, riffling through a little light reading he brought with him: “The Power of Stupidity,” by French philosopher Andre Glucksman.

Oh, those delicious summer books, the entertainment you can carry with you: down to the Black Sea and the Red, along the Via Veneto and Nevsky Prospect, at the beach at Nice and the one at Copacabana, where it isn’t summer, but high winter.

It is “The Year of Books” in South Korea, where people are absorbed in “Friend, What Shall We Take to the Next World?” by a Buddhist monk.

In Brazil, many people are poor, and one adult in five is illiterate, but a self-help author sells a thousand volumes a day with can’t-miss titles such as “Lose Weight by Eating.”

This summer, the Japanese are chuckling over “The Sea Bream’s Head,” droll essays by the man who created the cartoon that is Japan’s Bart Simpson.

Egyptians are devouring the latest in a 22-volume series, “Pages From the History of Egypt: Ottoman Conquest to the Present.”

But Croatians escape into poetry like “Heaven/Earth.” “We’ve seen (violence) so much already,” sighed one publishing house’s graphics editor, Miroslav Salopek. “I can’t bear to read any more.”

And apart from Stephen King tinglers, Russia’s byest syeller this summer--to use an Amerussian phrase--is “Kremlin Wives: The Facts, Recollections, Documents, Rumors, Legends, and Author’s View” by Larisa Vasilieva. It costs as much as a monthly transportation pass, but it is selling like blini , for it offers politics, history and gossip, from Raisa Gorbachev’s flat feet to the tantalizing question of whether Stalin’s second wife killed herself because she believed Stalin was also her father.

So peruse the summer-stocked shelves of the doma knigi, the librairies, the bibliotecas of the world:

POTBOILERS, BODICE-RIPPERS, PAGE TURNERS

This is what summer reading is about: low-fiber escapism, the kind you can leave behind on the airplane seat.

In Israel’s best-selling detective novel “Concerto for Spy and Orchestra,” by Uri Adelman, a doctor of musicology discovers an unsolved case in the files of Israeli security and counterintelligence. It is more than a story--it is a shift in public taste.

For decades, Israeli books dealt with existential questions of the Jewish state and moral issues of life itself. They have not faded, but lighter fiction--much of it in Hebrew--has blossomed, especially detective novels like Adelman’s.

Detective novels have caught on for other reasons in Russia, among them the rising crime rate. What is “Crime and Punishment” but a detective novel from the murderer’s viewpoint? Mark Freidkin, founder of the 19th of October Literary Salon, says: “What is popular has not changed at all. It is stable and independent of the political situation.”

Brazilians love historical novels and author Paulo Coelho knows why: “While most authors these days seem preoccupied with exorcising personal demons, I tell a simple story.” In a real-life plot twist, his book “The Alchemist” was published here in May after an American picked it up at the Rio de Janeiro airport, liked it so much he translated a few chapters and sent them to a U.S. publisher.

Britain, the cradle of the ripping-yarn genre, is immersed in yet another John le Carre thriller, and yet another Jeffrey Archer political duel. Le Carre’s elegantly written “The Night Manager” is a post-Cold War tale of an ex-soldier and an arms dealer . . . and Archer’s “Honor Among Thieves” is the story of a CIA agent running across Saddam Hussein’s plan to steal the Declaration of Independence.

Even more than spying, love makes the world go round and goes round the world:

Hong Kong readers are enthralled by “Unbelievable Love,” by Eileen Chang, the story of a Shanghai man’s love for a Hong Kong widower in World War II. And Barbara Cartland, old (and flowery) hat to British readers, has a whole new audience in Russia in translation. England’s Jilly Cooper has brought forth another sex-games-among-the-landed-gentry novel, “The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous,” in her mythical county of Rutshire.

Historical novels have enchanted both Belgium and Italy this summer: Two by Belgians are “The Animator of Light,” about a knight who travels to the Orient for the palette of colors he needs to make stained glass, and “The Princess of Chimera,” based on the daughter of a Spanish banker who took a series of aristocratic lovers during the French Revolution before marrying a marquis. It was written by a woman who married a descendant of the banker’s daughter.

And South Korea’s highly respected Park Kyong Ri is said to be challenging Pearl Buck and Margaret Mitchell for saga supremacy with her latest vast novel, “The Land.”

HOW TO SUCCEED IN BUSINESS

No frivolous summer reading for the Chinese. As free trade hovers tantalizingly on China’s economic horizon, books on the economy, engineering, environment and computers are flying out of the shops, while literature languishes.

Among the favorites: “GATT and China’s Market,” about China’s effort to join the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. Page-turning chapters include “Regulations of Multilateral Trade,” intellectual property rights and anti-dumping policies.

“Five-stroke Character Model,” by Wang Yongmin, is a how-to book on using Chinese characters in computers. China Central Television uses the book as teaching material for a program of lectures.

In Zagreb, tellingly, the bestsellers at the Naprijed bookstore are Croatian language dictionaries, snatched up by foreigners--reporters or U.N. officials or international officials--come to cover the war or make the peace.

POLITICS AS USUAL

Politics won’t fade away just because the calendar reads August.

Aside from history, summer reading in Egypt is dominated by politics and religion, mostly Islamic fundamentalism and alleged Western--especially American--conspiracies against the Middle East.

One hot number is “The Great Plot,” purporting to detail how Jews and Americans destabilize Arab regimes by terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism. Obscure but also popular: an Arab analysis of the borderland Assir region between Saudi Arabia and Yemen.

In another troubled part of the world, Croatian readers have been scrutinizing their own history through revisionist texts that re-evaluate the Balkans in World War II. At the Mladost bookstore in Zagreb, clerk Zdravko Damjanic says: “Now, we want to tell it like it is. The question is, will we fall closer to the truth?”

And in Russia, where the political domino fell hardest, the bottom has fallen out on political books: “They used to sell quite well a long time ago,” said Andrei Medvedev, a book peddler at Moscow’s Belarus train station. “But when people found out how boring, misleading and deceptive the books are, they stopped buying them.”

Yet Japan, on the verge of expected political reform, can’t get enough political books, starting with “Plan to Reconstruct Japan,” by Ichiro Ozawa, the former Liberal Democratic Party secretary general, now of the neoconservative Japan Renewal Party.

Ozawa sets out his ambitious plan to reshape Japan’s government by ending one-party rule, shifting policy-making power from bureaucrats to politicians, ending the cozy relationship between politicians and favored industry groups and making Japan’s concealed decision-making processes more visible. Judging by last month’s elections, he was on the money.

On the other side of the world, a book by an American is selling well in South Africa. “High Noon in Southern Africa,” by Chester Crocker, the former American assistant secretary of state, is his insider account of negotiations toward the peace accord that sent Cuban and South African troops home from Angola and made Namibia independent.

Kenyans are reading “Mogadishu: A Hell on Earth,” Somali journalist Mahmoud M. Afrah’s diary of his days covering that nation for the Reuters news agency. It is notable too for its cover photos, taken by Dan Eldon, one of four foreign journalists killed by a Somali mob last month.

Chileans, who may be suffering from an overdose of politics in their own recent history, love reading about another nation’s problems: “Castro’s Final Hour,” by Miami Herald reporter Andres Oppenheimer.

Their country’s own official sins are absorbing Argentine readers. Four of the five nonfiction bestsellers are about corruption, among them “The Boss,” about President Carlos Saul Menem and his family, written by a reporter for a muckraking daily . . . “Behind the Mirror,” a prosecutor’s details of several recent, infamous corruption cases . . . and juiciest of all, “Diplomatic Immunity,” by a Chilean journalist, accusing Oscar Spinosa Melo, Argentina’s former ambassador to Chile, of blackmail and orgy-organizing. It was banned by Chilean courts but clandestine copies pass widely hand to hand.

And then there’s the man who would rather write than be president.

Failed Peruvian presidential candidate and successful novelist Mario Vargas Llosa is on bestseller lists all over South America with “A Fish in Water.” It is alternately dense and acidulous, his recounting of his brief political career and the days of his youth.

German novelist Johannes Mario Simmel’s mocking political adventure takes on German xenophobia in the person of Mischa, half Prussian and half Jewish-Russian Communist, an East Berlin plumber and inventor of an eco-toilet who makes his way through Baghdad, Moscow and Sarajevo to Los Angeles.

RELIGION, SELF-HELP, HOW-TOs

The deaths of aging “political utopias” have left people longing for other answers to the same questions.

There’s a religious revival on a Chilean newspaper’s bestseller list: The new “Catechism of the Catholic Church,” and a religious novel on the life of Saint Paul, “Saul, Why Dost Thou Persecute Me?”

A Belgian summer bestseller is a French book, “God and Men,” by Abbe Pierre and Bernard Kouchner, a dialogue between the priest--a sort of male, Gallic Mother Teresa--and Kouchner, founder of the humanitarian Doctors Without Borders.

Ethics and morality sell well in Mexico too, where modern life has changed society. Many young Mexicans, especially, feel Catholic doctrines are no longer relevant, and books strive to reach from dogma to daily reality.

“Ethics for Amador,” by Fernando Savatera--a philosopher from Spain’s Basque country who wrote the book for his teen-aged son--aims to replace religious textbooks for young people 14 to 17. “Youth in Ecstasy: A Novel of Reflections on Premarital Sex” targets the same audience, evaluating premarital sex without moralizing or libertinism but striving to maintain “fundamental values” with a “modern” viewpoint.

Seoul’s No. 1 bestseller, “Friend, What Shall We Take to the Next World?” by Buddhist monk Sok Yong San, exalts inner fulfillment over the material at the moment in South Korean events when strong government reforms are making greed and corrupted wealth the objects of public scorn.

Across the Sea of Japan is the more earthbound “Hints to Live By,” by Hiroyuki Itsuki, one of Japan’s best-known authors. Its chapters on such subjects as work, sadness and talk advise readers to try to feel joy at least once a day, whether seeing Mt. Fuji from the train or getting a cab on a crowded day.

In Egypt, the printed sermons of Sheik Omar Abdul Rahman, the controversial blind cleric now under arrest in the United States, have a small but loyal audience--strictly underground, for Egypt bans them.

Reminiscent of the American fascination with trivia and the small mysteries of life, Thailand’s No. 2 seller, “108 Mailed Questions,” answers queries like “Why are Americans crazy about baseball?” and “Why can’t you be cremated on Friday?”

(On baseball: “Maybe it is because this sport has something that reflects American characteristics--it is a sport of intelligence, skill and wit as well as a sport of speed and energy. . . . “ On cremation, it’s a matter of “sympathetic magic” related to Friday’s reputation as a “happy day.”)

On to more practical books: a huge bestseller in South Korea is “Welcome Logic,” a logic-made-easy book that uses wit and engaging writing to make the academic palatable.

Lair Ribeiro may hate the moniker, but he is Brazil’s king of self-help. His prose is simple and didactic: make money, lose weight, achieve great things. “Emagreca Comendo” (Lose Weight by Eating) has sold 300,000 copies in about a month.

Another how-to book, “Fit for Life,” is selling widely in Hong Kong in Chinese translation, with its plan for eating in sync with one’s natural digestive cycles.

And in Britain, where the Princess of Wales used to vomit up her dinner and the Prince of Wales talks to his plants, and books about both still sell hugely, the summer’s top nonfiction sellers are cookbooks and the Encyclopedia of Gardening.

TRUE STORIES

In print, as on TV, true stories--sentimental or tell-all--find a rapt following.

The British are mad for “Diaries,” by Alan Clark, a Cabinet member in the government of former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher who offers indiscreet but insightful commentary on Parliament and the nation.

Across the Channel, “A Voyage of Life,” the account of a 28-year-old Belgian philosophy professor who has since died of AIDS, has held fast as a bestseller all year, and “Quarantine,” a Dutch author’s account of another sort of suffering in concentration camps, has captured Dutch readers.

A Turkish political autobiography, “The Suspect Private,” is selling once again, now that it is posthumous: Its leftist author was murdered in January. And a journalist’s autobiography deserves honors for its title alone: “The Unbearable Lightness of Attacking Ataturk.”

HUMOR

Social satire, a moribund genre in the United States, is enjoying a revival in places where such social whimsy has been banned. Political change in South Korea has made for more than a dozen books caricaturing President Kim Young Sam and other politicians in a manner unthinkable under earlier military regimes.

In Turkey, two pocketbooks of social satire--”Lessons of Life in the Moonlight” and “Off the Cuff”--are just the size and stuff of light summer reading. And Japan, which has a reputation for taking its hierarchies seriously, is laughing at “The Rules of a Government Office,” by Masao Miyamoto, a civil servant who offers readers such droll advice as how to prepare fuzzy answers for parliamentary committee hearings.

FAMILY HISTORY

No nation can resist the endless fascination of its own family album:

Valentin Lavrov, whose 1992 book “The Bloody Block” laid out two centuries of Russian crime, speaks for most modern readers: “They want to read about crimes, but also what people in the last century ate, the prices of goods, the shops and restaurants.”

Russia’s czars are undergoing re-revisionism. Like baseball, “The Last Czar: The Life and Death of Nicholas II,” first appeared in the United States, but its enormous first printing in Russia shows the passion for looking anew--and askance--at official history of the imperial Romanovs.

“It is a reaction to the past,” says Moscow News culture editor Olga E. Martinyenko. “People are beginning to have a normal attitude toward the czars, that it wasn’t all good then, but neither was it all bad.” And then there was that massacre of Romanovs: “The average reader thinks that the way they were treated was irresponsible. At least in the French Revolution the nobility was killed in public.”

In Egypt, two books are critical if not cash successes. “Aunt Sophia and the Cloister,” by Behaa Taher, details the relationship of Muslims and Christians in Egypt’s past, and “Deep Inside Human Fate,” by one of Egypt’s best-known writers, Gamal Ghitani, is a volume of short stories about Egyptians who leave home to work in Arab countries in the Gulf.

If “docu-novel” were a word, it would describe Lee Eun Sung’s tale of a legendary 16th-Century Korean herb doctor. The title, “Dong E Bogam,” is also the name of the herb doctor’s medical text, still in use by herbalists four centuries later.

Mexican literary master Carlos Fuentes’ new book, “The Orange Tree, or the Circles of Time,” is really five short stories about fertility, interbreeding and conquests from Rome to Spain to Mexico. Like many new Mexican books, it scrutinizes the present through the lens of Mexico’s past. Fernando del Pasos’ “News From the Empire” is about the brief reign of imported monarchs Maximilian and Carlota, and Laura Esquivel’s “Like Water for Chocolate” is about love in the time of revolution.

Novels that span some of the century’s most profound social turbulence--from the 1911 revolution to the Communist one in 1949--have captivated the Chinese; one of them, “White Deer Plain,” tracks the generational conflicts between two families--land thieving, sex traps, rapacity, banditry, murder and revenge, ending with an apology and reconciliation.

CROSSOVERS

In Moscow and Hong Kong, they are reading Sidney Sheldon. Germany’s transportation minister is reading Al Gore’s tome “Earth in the Balance” and when that gets heavy, “The Pelican Brief,” by John Grisham. “Jurassic Park” was July’s No. 2 hit in South Korea and No. 1 in Argentina.

And in Germany, where tastes between east and west are usually still as divided as if the Wall were standing, Grisham topped the charts at both ends of the country.

In Belgium and the Netherlands, they love a different American, Donna Tartt, whose book “The Master of Illusions” is about murderous students in ancient Greece.

South Africans are plunking down their rands for Grisham and “A Suitable Boy,” a huge Indian epic by Vikram Seth. And Mexicans have discovered “Coffee Grounds,” by Uruguayan novelist Mario Benedetti, about a young man trying to get a grip on his life by reading portents in coffee grounds.

Authors’ Corner

“In what other countries have writers fought such fierce battles to seek their identity? Korea was the focal point where all kinds of ideology collided and struggled. Products of this fierce battle should not be compared with all the sex stuff of Updike and the like.”

--Cho Jung-Rae, South Korea *

“It’s apalliong, but Hong Kong is not terribly hospitable to authors

--Lynn Pan, Hong Kong *

“Is there a meaning to human existence? I don’t know, but I tend to strictly say ‘No.’ . . .Had I been asked prenatally whether I wanted to be born, a single glance at, say, a German news magazine would have made me cry out: ‘No! Please, please let me stay her in my mother’s womb!”

--Johannes Mario Simmel, Germany *

“I don’t invent anything. I don’t have imagination. What I do is gather what I find.”

--Elena Poniatowska, Mexico *

“Don’t classify me. Read me.”

--Carlos Fuentes, Mexico *

“I like banana trees; I don’t like bananas. But the name banana carries the meaning of taking it easy in peace, of making money by not doing anything.”

--Banana Yoshimoto, Japan *

“Writers should never get involved in politics. It’s a dirty business. Politics is the death of a writer.”

--Edvard Radzinsky, Russia *

“I think the world is deformed because women don’t occupy their rightful place in society. Women’s ideas don’t exist on the societal level. They only exist inthe family, and when a person leaves the family, he lands in a bachelor’s pad. The whole world is a bachelor’s pad.”

--Larisa Vasilieva, Russia *

“I believe that one’s childhood is a storehouse of ideas for any writer, because it is a time in which we accept life completely as it comes, without the medium of any particular viewpoint or philosophy.”

--Naguib Mahfouz, Egypt *

“They are by no means ideal heroes or heroines for other people to emulate. They are just mortal beings with human weaknesses and even ugliness.”

--Wang Shuo, China, on the disaffected youth who populate his novels. “I love writing about sex. It’s difficult but fun. Everybody asks me why I don’t stop at the bedroom door. I can’t see why I should, really. After all, people carry on beyond it, don’t they?”

--Jilly Cooper, Britain *

“I like banana trees; I don’t like bananas. . .But when I see a fortune-teller, I was told the name banana gives you peace, and even if you don’t try hard you can get a lot of money.”

--Banana Yoshimoto, Japan *

I am a storyteller. While most authors these days seem preoccupied with exorcising personal demons, I tell a simple tale.

--Paulo Coelho, Brazil *

I write to expand ny biography--that is, to live things that I will never be able to live.”

--A.B. Yehoshua, Israel *

“The main topic of all my writings is the family, the most mysterious, most secret institution in the world. The relations between men and women, parents and children, brothers and sisters. It’s the deepest, most mysterious thing there is, and I’m looking for the secret.”

--Amos Oz, Israel *

“(Writing) fills an inner need. . .It’s one of the most enjoyable things life has to offer.”

--Sami Michael, Israel *

”. . .In many ways my view of life is very black. And quite often when I’m accused of sweetening the end of a story, it is that I just haven’t the heart to leave it as black as it really is.”

--David Cornwell (John le Carre), Britain

Notes in the Margin

* Christian bestseller. . .The world’s most widely distributed book is the Bible. About 2.5 billion copies were printed between 1815 and 1975 alone.

* . . .And Communist runner-up? About 800 million copies of “Quotations From the Works of Mao Tse-tung” were reportedly sold or distributed in 1966-71.

* The British love books. . .46% of the British public are currently reading a book, according to Euromonitor’s 1993 Book Report.

*. . .but look at what they’re reading: 40 million pages have been disgorged from word processors in a dozen big books on the Royal Family since the Prince and Princess of Wales separated last year.

* A reason for not reading. . .The average price of a new book in Brazil is just over $13, meaning that a minimum wage earner could buy four or five books a year and nothing else.

*. . .and maybe another? Jacqueline Susann’s “Valley of the Dolls,” with 28,712,000 copies sold by March 1987, was rated the world’s best-selling novel by Guinness in 1992.

* What recession. . .Book sales by U.S. publishers rose 6% in 1992 despite the sluggish economy and are expected to rise again. Recent net sales figures, in millions of dollars:

1987: 12,620

1988: 13,571

1989: 14.074

1990: 15,318

1991: 16,085 (Estimate)

1992: 17,050

1993: 18,160 (Forecast)

* The oldest publisher. . .Cambridge University Press in Britain has the longest continous history of printing and publishing, starting in 1954.

* . . .and the busiest: Progress Publishers in the former Soviet Union has been called the world’s most prolific, printing more than 750 titles each year at its peak in 1989.

* Getting to know you. . .Four years before Hong Kong comes under Chinese control, an English bestseller in the colony is “Getting Along with the Chinese,” a wry discourse on East-West differences.

*. . .And drifting apart: One in three British women chooses a romantic novel compared to one in 50 men.

* Curl up with this. . .The 1,112-volume set of “British Parliamentary Papers,” published in 1968-72, would take about six years to read at 10 hours per day.

*. . .or something lighter: The longest novel of note ever published was “Les Hommes de Bonne Volonte” by Louis-Henri-Jean Farigoule (1885-1972), which occupies 27 volumes.

* You’ll find everything here. . .The bookstore with the most titles and longest shelving--30 miles--is W. & G. Foyle Ltd. of London, says Guinness.

*. . .except Germans, maybe: In 1992, 35% of all books sold in Germany were bought at train stations and airports, by mail order, book clubs, department stores or directly by publishing houses. Sources: The Guinness Book of World Records 1992; Assn. of American Publishers Inc.; Times staff writers and researchers.