Traduit De l'américain: Thomas Keneally and the Mechanics of an International Career

4 Travel books on Ireland and the American South were fol- lowed by a memoir, Homebush Boy, which proudly proclaims the author's identity as a native of an unfashionable Sydney suburb; this was followed in turn by The Great Shame, Keneally's blockbuster history of the Irish famine and diaspora (this was in itself a family history, an Australian and American history, and another holocaust story; it was difficult for reviewers to resist calling it "Keneally's List").5 The Lincoln biography has been followed by three bulky histories of Australia's colonial settlement (as well as three nov- els and Searching for Schindler).6 The triangulation of Australia, Britain, and the United States can achieve exactly the kind of "elliptical refraction" that David Damrosch sees as char- acteristic of a world literature perspective: "instead of seeing London as the center of a circle ... we can present the literary culture of London as one focus of an ellipse, or more precisely as one focus for many different, partially overlapping ellipses, each with a second focus elsewhere" (in our case London and Sydney, London and New York).7 To follow Australian books into the American market is indeed to discover an elliptical refraction of Australian literature as a national literature-and of Australian books as Australian books. [...]the phrase tells us as much about Parisian provinciality as it does about Australia as a literary province. [...]there is a nontrivial sense in which Schindler's List is indeed an American book-a sense, too, in which Thomas Keneally translates himself into an American author. Nonethe- less, Keneally's ambitions on the international stage-and indeed his need to earn a living as a full-time writer-meant that he was serially dissatisfied with his publishers or agents in the United States or the United Kingdom for not generating sales that matched his reviews and critical reception; this was the case despite his capacity for building close, long-term relationships with his editors in both countries and with his London agent for twenty years from late 1974, Tessa Sayle (an Austrian baroness who had married an Australian journalist).17 The Viking deals no doubt helped establish Ke- neally's name in the American marketplace, most important, perhaps, in the New York book review pages-all titles following Bring Larks and Heroes were reviewed generously in the New York Times, for example, and in a long essay on Catholic fiction Keneally was described as the bes