As the long, hot summer of our discontent came to a close, vacationers the world over reluctantly reshelved the books they had dipped into during their precious days of leisure, as they sought escape from the anxieties of the global recession. In the best of times, such reading is more attentive and suffused with wish-fulfillment than the harassed skimming that book lovers manage during the busy work year. But these are far from the best of times. This year, as Italians, French, and Spaniards drove to the mountains or to the Mediterranean; as Russians with rubles headed to Sochi and Cyprus; as Germans flocked to Baltic Sea cottages; as the Japanese jetted to America or Europe or trained to Tokyo's Shonan beach; and as Britons went anywhere with a forecast for sun, they packed engrossing reads they hoped would plunge them into imagined worlds more satisfying than the reality outside the printed page.
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Rarely has this kind of distraction been more needed than now, in the midst of an economic annus horribilis that has seen inflation, unemployment, and fiscal crisis rise and spread across the globe. Americans had a great hand in causing this tumult, but it was an American author, the Mormon fantasist Stephenie Meyer, who was most useful in beguiling both overseas and American readers away from their troubles -- at least for a while -- as they devoured the four volumes of Twilight, her red-hot, cold-blooded teen vampire series. Those books were bestsellers on every continent that has a bestseller list -- even if the euphemistic French romantically rechristened it Fascination and the Germans called it Bis(s), meaning "bite."
It's interesting to see, through Twilight's global reach, that American cultural hegemony persists, even as the economic catastrophe Americans helped feed has taken a bite out of everyone else's peace of mind. But despite the vampire's lure, international bestseller lists and literary experts reveal that each country also produced its own regional or national favorites this year -- books steeped in nostalgia for easier or more valiant times that offered a localized prescription for relief. Examining these homegrown contenders produces a sort of Rorschach portrait of different notions of literary escape that prevail worldwide at this unsettled moment.
In Italy, for example, which has one of Europe's lowest per capita book-buying rates, reading as a hobby has never really caught on except among elites (one specialist blames Italy's late industrialization and the attraction of the abundant 3-D sources of inspiration there: art, landscape, architecture, and caffè society). But the credit crunch has prompted anxious Italians to buy nonfiction books that analyze the economic meltdown. The most heralded novels there this year have been consoling fictions set in bygone eras, like Tiziano Scarpa's Stabat Mater, in which Antonio Vivaldi comes to the rescue of an orphaned Venetian cello whiz, and Cesarina Vighy's L'Ultima Estate, a coming-of-age story that follows its female lead from the struggles of the Italian dopoguerra, through the upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s, and on to the safe harbor of the 1990s.
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