Tony at the Melbourne Writers Festival (Part Three)

As I mentioned a while back (and as regular readers would no doubt have already guessed), my main reason for attending the Melbourne Writers Festival for the first time this year was to see the session entitled Traveller of the Century, in which Argentine-Spanish writer Andrés Neuman discussed his award-winning novel.  A word of warning before we start: don't rely on me to be too objective with this one.  Most of the following was written whilst wearing rose-tinted spectacles ;)

*****
As with the Laurent Binet session, the interviewer was Radio National's Michael Cathcart, and the show was once again planned to be aired on radio.  Thankfully, it wasn't live this time...  We were back at ACMI, this time in a more intimate studio, and around seventy to eighty people were crammed into the rows of sofa-type seats (not great on my back, unfortunately).

From the very start, Neuman showed himself to be erudite, witty and fluent in English, able to keep the conversation rolling along in a way that Binet perhaps couldn't quite master earlier in the day.  After a brief discussion of the writer's roots (having left Argentina before high school, he said: "I feel half Latin-American and half European."), Cathcart quickly brought the discussion around to the book itself, one which revolves on the idea of identity, both personal and national.

Cathcart mentioned the setting for the story, the shifting town of Wandernburg, and Neuman explained how this invented place was following in the footsteps of such great writers as Calvino, Borges and García Marquez, all of whom used imaginary towns as the settings for their philosophical experiments.  Wandernburg's location, on the border of two powerful neighbours in a time of constant regional conflicts, means that the town frequently changes hands, forcing its inhabitants to master the art of swapping allegiances at the drop of a hat.  This is important when the focus of the novel moves on to the idea of the nation state and national characteristics, as the idea of 'typical Germans' makes no sense when there is no real Germany to shape the people.

A topic which appeared early in the conversation, reappearing towards the end, was the sex in the novel, which (as Cathcart rightly pointed out) only comes after a 300-page flirtation.  Neuman explained how readers today are unlikely to be shocked by sex scenes, and the way he decided to get around the readers' jadedness was to lull them into a false sense of security.  He did this by making the 'courtship' resemble something from Austen, before suddenly allowing Hans and Sophie to give in to their more physical instincts (in a rather un-Austenesque manner...).

Sophie is one of the more interesting characters in the book, and when Cathcart mentioned 'the beautiful Sophie', Neuman interrupted, asking why he thought she was beautiful - it's never really explicitly stated in the novel.  While most readers (yours truly included!) would have an image of a beautiful young woman in mind, the writer never describes her as such, instead allowing her intelligence and charisma to persuade the reader that she is beautiful.  In fact, in the scene where she is shown naked for the first time, Neuman goes out of his way to show the reader that she is not a flawless goddess, but a normal woman...

Another point Cathcart (who I suspect really loved this book) noted was that there were a couple of striking parallels in the novel, which Neuman was happy to agree with.  While Rudi Wilderhaus (Sophie's fiancé) is Hans' rival in love, Professor Mietter, the dogmatic centre of the literary salon, is just as much a rival, but an intellectual one.  And as we're mentioning the literary salon at the Gottlieb residence, what are the gatherings at the cave with the organ grinder and friends if not another kind of salon?

One of the most fascinating stories came from Neuman himself though when he revealed that the basis for the whole story lies with... Franz the dog!  As the audience looked on expectantly, the writer explained how the inspiration for the novel came from Franz Schubert's Winterreise, a song cycle with lyrics provided by poet Wilhelm Müller.  In the last of the twenty-four songs, the traveller comes across an organ grinder playing alone, with only dogs for an audience, and the traveller decides to throw in his lot with the old man.  And there you have a large part of what makes up Traveller of the Century...

I could go on all day, but I'll just mention one last area of interest.  Neuman has a background in translation himself, and he was naturally very enthusiastic about the process of having his work appear in the English language.  He worked hard with the two translators (Nick Caistor and Lorenza Garcia) and credits them with the success of the English-language version saying: "What you're reading is the translators' prose." and "It's an original creation, based on the original."  For anyone familiar with the discussion about BBC Radio's recent Front Row programme on literary translation, those are heartening comments indeed :)

*****
At the top of the review, I warned you all that my objectivity was ever-so-slightly compromised today, and there's a very good reason for that.  Not only have I now read the book twice (and loved it both times), I've also been in contact with Andrés on Twitter, and before the festival, we agreed to try to catch up when I came to his event.

I thought we might just snatch five minutes to chat, or perhaps sit down for a while over coffee; instead, once Andrés' signing duties had been fulfilled, I went with him and his lovely wife to a café and chatted for a couple of hours (which simply flew by!) about life, books and travel.  While I, naturally, was very interested in his work, he and his wife also praised my blog scribblings...  I'm happy when anybody deigns to take a look at my posts, so to have two such intelligent and erudite people appreciate what I do...

...well, let's just say that for this post, objectivity has flown out of the window :)

Tony at the Melbourne Writers Festival (Part Two)

As noted in my prelude post, the decision to attend the Melbourne Writers Festival session described today was very much a last-minute one.  However, being a fan of the longest form of fiction, a session entitled The Future of the Novel was always going to attract my attention :)  The session was one of many around the world celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the legendary World Writers' Conference held in Edinburgh, and while this session was a little more low-key than the chaotic events in Scotland in 1962, it was still entertaining.

The session was chaired by Scottish-Kiwi academic and writer Liam McIlvanney and also featured 'transmedia creator' Christy Dena (even after briefly chatting to her, I couldn't tell you exactly what that means - my fault not hers, I assure you).  The star attraction though was Teju Cole, author of the prize-winning novel Open City, and it was Cole who kicked things off with a ten-minute keynote address.

He started by explaining what he felt about the novel, focusing on works which (in the words of Russian-American poet Joseph Brodsky) 'elongate the perspective of human sensibility', with Cole saying that: "...excellence in the novel is not one-dimensional."  After a brief summary of the history of the novel, including a comment on the retreat of English-language writing into the safe realm of consensus and prize shortlists, he moved onto his main focus, Twitter, which he described as a novel with no end, evergrowing, but with no single responsible author.  Is this one form of the novel of the future?

*****
After this, the three writers sat down for a panel discussion, one which primarily focused on Twitter and other forms of social media.  Cole and Dena discussed the idea of the 'perpetual present' of Twitter, whereby the 'reader' is carried along on a stream of... well, consciousness.  In fact, it was suggested that Twitter may well be the end destination of the journey of writers like Joyce and Woolf towards penetrating the human psyche and exposing it to the world.  Nobody was saying that this is entirely a good thing though ;)

A further idea which was explored was the effect that online exposure has on a writer and, consequently, on their work.  Cole talked about readers: "finally having that conversation with the author you admire - and being disappointed", to great laughs from the audience.  McIlvanney asked whether this time spent online could affect writers and eat away at their valuable writing time, but Cole was of the opinion that, for him at least, this time was productive and helped with his thought processes.  He doesn't like the mindset which tries to convince him that he's wasting his time online and that he 'should' be working...

However, he does admit that the immediate nature of responses on Twitter can affect the writer and their thoughts.  As he wryly noted: "All opinions are valid - until you start encountering all opinions!".  It is here that the novel has a great advantage as it still offers the reader solace, in what Cole described as 'a place of perfect slowness'.  This relaxation is something you may find hard to find online...

In the following Q & A session, I asked the panellists what they thought the novel would look like in thirty or forty years (mainly as I thought the discussion had wandered away from that focus at times).  Dena thought that the print book would still be around, but mainly as a collectors' item, and she envisaged the future writer as a master of multiple media, print, social media and audio.  Cole's initial response was of information downloaded instantly to contact lenses - and everyone would be reading something like Fifty Shades of Grey ;)  Afterwards though, he said that it didn't really matter whether the print novel would survive in its current form.  There would always be people with drive and talent (or, as he put it, 'forceful creativity'), and these people would always create great works of art :)

*****
This was a great session, very entertaining and informative, even if I'm not quite sure that the speakers really stuck as closely to the topic as I'd expected.  While McIlvanney and Dena spoke well, their role was really to act as a foil for Cole, a very intelligent and likeable speaker who namedropped international writers (including Australian poet Les Murray) in a way guaranteed to endear him to me.  While it's probably a very bad idea to read books based on how nice a writer is, I may well have to check out Open City at some point soon... (postscript: I'm about half-way through the book and enjoying it immensely.)

And that's all for today, but stay tuned for my final piece from the festival.  My next post will be my report from the Andrés Neuman session; hopefully, Cole's comment about meeting authors you admire won't ring true...

Tony at the Melbourne Writers Festival (Part One)

As mentioned in my prelude post, my first event at this year's Melbourne Writers Festival was an interview with French writer Laurent Binet, here to discuss his very successful novel, HHhH.  After my long wait, I was happy to get into the room, one of the cinemas at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI), to join a fair-sized crowd of around 120 people - many of whom were middle-aged women...

...which (if I were cynical - and of course I'm not...) might be attributable to the fact that Binet is a very good-looking man, casually dressed in a top with his sleeves rolled up.  He was chatting with the moderator, Michael Cathcart, the presenter of the Books & Arts Daily show on Radio National, and before the talk started, we were informed that we'd be live on the radio :) ***

Cathcart started by asking Binet about his background and upbringing, before moving on to the writer's move from history, his first love, to literature.  Despite deciding not to pursue studies in history, Binet's background leaves him suspicious towards the novel, and he's not a fan of the traditional French model of the realistic, psychological novel (as displayed in the works of Zola and Balzac).  In fact, he said: "I was never really interested in the fate of a fictional character."  I'm not sure many of my readers would agree with that viewpoint ;)

Cathcart then interjected, talking about how Bertolt Brecht's plays constantly reminded the audience that what they were seeing wasn't actually real, and Binet agreed that his style works in a similar way, in an attempt to remind the reader of the fictional nature, not of the story, but of the details which the writer could never really know. In HHhH, Binet (or the voice of the novel) frequently chides himself for including scenes whose veracity he could never be sure of.  Which led nicely onto a discussion of...

...Jonathan Littell's novel The Kindly Ones (at which point, Binet became a lot more animated).  Littell's book, featuring a fictional SS officer, was hugely successful in France, but Binet, it's fair to say, is not a fan.  He seemed a little disturbed by the possibility of readers confusing fact and fiction, and hates that they might believe Littell's stories.  When Cathcart brought up the idea of 'novelistic truth', Binet was quick to dismissively say: "Novelistic truth?  I don't buy that." (which got the biggest laugh of the session!).

HHhH is composed of over 250 short chapters, and Binet said that when he had finished writing them, the job was still far from done as he had to decide the order - he found it hard to decide where the narrator's interjections would best fit into the 'real' story.  In fact, with the intense research he undertook (and the difficulty in setting boundaries for his research), it ended up taking him ten years to complete the book.  By the way, for those of you who have read the book, the idea of having no page numbers came from the English publishers - this was not the case for the original French-language version...

In closing, Cathcart asked Binet about his core values, and the writer responded by affirming his need for honesty and truth.  He said that he hates fakeness, and that's one reason why he's so obsessed with history.  I was interested in the way Binet seemed to be more attached to history than to literature, and after the session (when I sneaked into the book-signing queue without a book...), I asked him if he actually thought of himself as a novelist and whether he intended to write more fiction.  He said that he now considers himself to be more of a writer of fiction and that he plans to write more novels in the future.  Sadly, I had to leave it there as I'd been spotted, and the security guards were ready to haul me away ;)

All in all, it was an interesting session, and I enjoyed my first taste of a literary festival.  As some of you may know, I didn't rate HHhH that highly when I read it earlier this year, but it was still fascinating hearing the writer explain and justify the way he wrote the book and the choices he made.  One interesting piece of information I learned was that there were some major cuts made, most of which referred to The Kindly Ones.  I bet that would have spiced HHhH up a little...

*****
One down, two to go - next time, I'm hanging with Teju Cole (well, thirty metres away) as we talk about the future of the novel.  Stamp your ticket at the door, please ;)

*** The talk is currently available online at this link :)

Tony at the Melbourne Writers Festival (Prelude)

It's not often that I get up at 6.20 (and even less often that I do so with a spring in my step), but that was the case today as I headed off to the big bad city to attend the Melbourne Writers Festival - for the first time ever!

The early start was so that I could get myself a parking space at the station, saving my wife the hassle of dropping me off before the school run, but it did mean that I arrived at Federation Square, the scene of the festival, at about the same time the cleaners rolled up to make the place tidy for the day...  Still, it gave me a chance to catch up on some reading :)

I had pre-ordered tickets for two events, leaving myself ample time to relax in between.  The first, at 10.00, was with Laurent Binet, the French author of HHhH, and while I wasn't completely convinced by his book when I read it earlier this year, I was interested in hearing him discuss the book and the background (and justify his choice of style!).

My real goal was attending my second chosen event, Andrés Neuman discussing his great novel Traveller of the Century, and I was also hoping to catch up with him for a quick chat after the event.  Did I manage it?  You'll have to wait and see ;)

Predictably, though, the long wait (and the inclement Melbourne weather...) brought a change to my plans.  While I was twiddling my thumbs at 11.30, wondering what to do with myself for three hours, I noticed a line of people waiting outside one of the studios, so I asked a helper what was on.  It turned out that it was an Edinburgh World Writers' Conference session on the future of the novel, featuring (among others) Teju Cole - and it was due to start at 11.45...

...so after a mad scramble out of the centre to find the tiny box office down by the main road and purchase a ticket, I arrived back at the room, sweaty and panting, but ready for another session.

Which is why I'm going to leave you now - I need some sleep!  But Tony, I hear you cry (I have *excellent* hearing), were the sessions any good?  Well, that's a tale for another day; for now, you can just look at some pretty photos instead :)