Bookplanet: a world colonized by chick lit

The Chick-Lit Pandemic -- by RACHEL DONADIO

IN the near decade since Bridget Jones first hit the world stage — endearing, hung over and running late for work — an international commuter train of women has been gathering speed close behind. From Mumbai to Milan, Gdansk to Jakarta, regional varieties of chick lit have been sprouting, buoyed by the demographic that's both their subject and readership: 20- and 30-something women with full-time jobs, discretionary income and a hunger for independence and glamour.

Sometimes dismissed as a marketing ploy, Western cultural imperialism or a throwback to pre-feminism, chick lit is proving an extremely adaptable genre, one that has tapped into larger social shifts in places like India and post-Communist Eastern Europe, where traditional values collide in unexpected ways with a new economic order. Trailblazing imports like Bridget's creator, Helen Fielding, and Sophie Kinsella, author of the wildly popular "Shopaholic" series, still far eclipse local writers in terms of sales, but they've helped create a market, aided by "Sex and the City" (either in dubbed or knockoff versions) and local editions of Cosmopolitan. All appeal to city-dwelling office workers who came of age with more prosperity — and social and sexual freedom — than their mothers had. "I think it had far more to do with zeitgeist than imitation," Fielding said via e-mail. If the chick lit explosion has "led to great new female writers emerging from Eastern Europe and India, then it's worth any number of feeble bandwagon jumpers."

In countries "where feminism hasn't fully taken root, chick lit might be offering the feminist joys of freedom and the post-feminist joys of consumerism simultaneously," said Mallory Young, a co-editor of "Chick Lit," a collection of academic essays on the genre. Take India, for example. In Swati Kaushal's breezy "Piece of Cake," the 29-year-old heroine juggles her marketing job at International Foods and the suitors who appear after her pushy mother lists her in the matrimonials section of The Hindustan Times — under "miscellaneous." The book has sold about 4,800 copies, a respectable figure in India, though it doesn't compete with the work of traditional pulp romance writers, said Diya Kar Hazra, Kaushal's editor at Penguin India. A recent novel by Shobha De, considered the Jackie Collins of India, sold 44,000 copies. Another popular chick lit title is Rupa Gulab's "Girl Alone," about "a pseudo-intellectual (named Arti) who deals with her disappointments in love with cough syrup, rock music and existential literature," as the author told The Mumbai Mirror last fall.

Still, readers shouldn't expect an updated Kama Sutra. One big difference between Indian and Anglo-American chick lit, Hazra said, "is the amount of sex between the pages." But even in a country where modesty rules, "it's only a matter of time before India has its own Candace Bushnell," she added.

In Communist Eastern Europe, it was exceedingly rare for the young and unmarried to live on their own. Not so today. In "The Diary of Luisa Lozhkina," a young single mother in Moscow rents out apartments on the sly for cash, frets about cellulite and dreams of finding Mr. Right. Published last year, the book grew out of columns Katya Metelitsa wrote for the Moscow magazine Bolshoi Gorod. (Metelitsa is also the author of a comic-book version of "Anna Karenina," in which Anna is a cocaine addict living in today's Russia.)

In Hungary, Zsuzsa Racz's "Stop, Mamma Teresa!" — which has sold 130,000 copies in a country where novels typically sell in the low four digits — follows its idealistic heroine from the provinces to Budapest, where she shares a two-room apartment in a rough neighborhood with her recovering drug addict brother and tries to prevent her desire to help everyone — her Mother Teresa complex — from driving her boyfriends away. "To become the modern, urban, fashionable, independent individual, Kata must change, yet she cannot reject her Mamma Teresa attitude," the Hungarian academic Nora Sellei wrote in an essay in the "Chick Lit" anthology. In the new order — where both feminism and social consciousness are considered a relic of Communism — the line between independence and self-centeredness can be blurry.

In Poland, chick lit often features tragic elements, like kidnapping or the specter of suicide. Malgorzata Warda's popular "Never to Paris" centers around four young women (including an artist and an interior decorator) who grew up together in Gdansk. Two stay in their home town and two move to Warsaw, but all see themselves in relation to Nina, an anorexic who made it to Paris but returned to Poland. The book has a subplot involving rape and murder — a far cry from "Bridget Jones," in which romantic disappointment is the worst imaginable fate.

Meanwhile, Scandinavian chick lit seems marked by a certain existential angst. The protagonist of Kajsa Ingemarsson's Swedish best seller "Small Yellow Lemons" believes she has everything — a loving boyfriend, a supportive family, a job and close friends — but then they start slipping away. The Swedish actress Martina Haag's best-selling "Wonderful and Loved by All (And Things Are Great at Work)," is about an actress struggling with her career. (Haag will soon star in the movie version. "So finally she gets the big role!" said Maria Enberg at the literary agency that represents Haag.)

In Finland, the chick-lit genre is still emerging, but there are a few popular titles. Niina Hakalahti's "Breathless" is about a writing teacher who lives near Lapland and whose boyfriend has gone to New Guinea to seek enlightenment; its Finnish title can also mean "feeling out of sorts spiritually," said Terhi Isomaki, who handles foreign rights for the book's Finnish publisher. In Pauliina Susi's "Rush Year," a 30-year-old student contends with having a baby, building a house and finishing her master's thesis in one frantic year.

The Italian market is saturated with chick lit imports, though a few home-grown titles have emerged, most notably "Something's Hot in the City," by Camilla Vittorini, published by Red Dress Ink, a chick lit imprint Harlequin Mondadori established in 2002. Set in Milan, it follows Sabrina, a feisty and fashionable ad copy writer in her early 30's with a boyfriend who won't commit, close yet difficult women friends and a penchant for Milan's famous aperitivo hour. The novel is lively and believable, with one exception: it takes all the way to Page 24 for Sabrina's mother to call her. It's sold about 9,000 copies, quite respectable in Italy, where the readership in fiction is much smaller than elsewhere in Europe and a significant percentage of books are sold at newsstands, not bookstores.

While "Le Journal de Bridget Jones" has been popular in France, the country hasn't produced many of its own chick lit authors. (Either readers are too sophisticated or, with a 35-hour work week, maybe they just can't relate.) Nor is chick lit terribly popular in Japan, where women lean toward weepy adolescent love stories or darker literary fiction that deals with the "isolation and the meaninglessness of modern urban life; boredom and frustration with men and relationships and marriage, and the constraints put on women in Japanese society," according to Hamish Macaskill, a literary agent in Tokyo.

Meanwhile, there are signs of daring writing by young women in some unexpected corners of the world. In Indonesia, a genre called "sastra wangi" or "fragrant literature" — a name some of its authors find condescending — has been gaining popularity since the fall of the authoritarian Suharto regime in 1998. The genre isn't chick lit per se, although it's quite frank in its treatment of sex and politics. But "the really interesting thing," said Helen Fielding, "would be to see chick lit coming out of Africa." Not to mention another great frontier: Neither "Bridget Jones's Diary" nor any of Fielding's other books have been translated into Arabic.

(Rachel Donadio is a writer and editor at the NY Times Book Review.)