*****
One of the main reasons I ended up making the trip in to the big city was the (free) event with Spanish writer Nicolás Casariego, whose novel Antón Mallick Wants to be Happy I read a few days before heading to the festival. This was actually a late addition to the programme after the cancellation of another event, and many of the people who attended were actually unaware of this - the printed programme still had the old details...
The event was MCed by local academic and translator Lilit Thwaites, and considering that the majority of the people in the small ACMI Cube room had heard of neither the book nor the writer, it all went fairly smoothly. Both Thwaites and Casariego read short extracts from the novel, and they then discussed the book, particularly in relation to similarities between the writer and the eponymous hero of the novel.
The book (which I will be reviewing in early September) is the diary of a man seeking happiness, and one way in which he does so is through an analysis of self-help books and classics. Casariego said that the reading was perhaps the best part of the writing process; however, he's not a fan of self-help books himself, believing that they're rather aggressive and help to create egotistical monsters. As for the other books he read in the search for Antón's happiness, he actually preferred some of the more pessimistic ones...
Antón Mallick... is a funny book, something which Casariego says isn't true for all of his works. One of his biggest challenges was to temper the use of humour in the book, lest it overpower and overshadow the story (certainly, the early sections have a lot of scenes where getting a laugh is the main focus). The style of the novel, written in the form of a diary, is also important as it allowed the writer to play with the reader. For one thing, he was able to be a little less politically correct than is normally the case as Mallick is writing for himself, with no need for self-censorship. However, it also allows him to be a little tricky as there's no guarantee that Antón is telling even himself the whole truth...
Never one to hold back, I asked Casariego a question at the end of the session. You see, with so many loose ties at the end of the novel, I was wondering if the writer had ever considered a sequel to Antón's quest for happiness. The answer was a fairly firm 'no', but now that the idea had come up... ;) If Antón Mallick does return for a second outing, then, you know who to thank/blame :)
*****
After a thirty-minute break spent chatting to Lilit, getting my book signed by the author and cramming a sandwich down as fast as possible, it was back to the cube for the second of the day's events. This was one of the four City-to-City events designed to give insular Australians more information about some of our Asian neighbours, and the first in the series was on Shanghai. Author Nic Low was the moderator, and the guests were famed Sino-Australian writer Ouyang Yu (Sino-Australian in that he's lived and worked here for a good while) and two fellow Chinese academics, Gong Jing and Hongtu Wang.In all honesty, this was by far the weakest of the four sessions I attended. As an ESL teacher, I've spent many an hour listening to Chinese students reading a prepared script while other students struggle to understand what's being said, and this hour was like a flashback to presentation moderations of times past. Jing, in particular, merely read a text talking about her life in Shanghai and then barely offered a word in English for the rest of the hour. When you add to that the fact that the session actually had very little to do with literature, you can imagine how disappointed (and bored) I was for the most part...
Luckily, the third member of the panel was a far better, and more charismatic, speaker, and Yu entertained and informed the small audience with his Shanghai experiences. From his anecdote about his introduction to Australian literature (when getting his first academic position, all he knew about it was that in Patrick White's fiction "people farted a lot"), to the poems he wrote on his return to Shanghai, about a cheap hotel room and a student who simply could not master a point of English grammar ("She wrote 'Aftering I finished the exam, I felting bad.' - I felt bad too."), Yu was a relaxed, witty speaker - I really must get around to reading one of his books...
Still, it wasn't quite enough to make this a session I would recommend to others, and I walked out hoping that the rest of the day would be better. The good news? It definitely was - but you'll have to wait until next time to find out why ;)
