Chick Lit Around the World

Rachel Donadio has a great piece in the New York Times Sunday Book Review this week chronicling the popularity of the oft-derided genre known as chick lit in countries around the world. It’s taken hold in India and throughout Eastern Europe. In Scandinavia, it’s marked by a “certain existential angst.” In Indonesia, it has inspired a related genre known as “fragrant literature.”

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 [Jones]‘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.”

Still, some countries remain holdouts, including Japan—women there, Donadio writes, lean toward weepy adolescent love stories or darker literary fiction—and France. “While ‘Le Journal de Bridget Jones’ has been popular in France,” writes Donadio, “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.)”

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