Showing posts with label
Melbourne Writers Festival 2014.
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Showing posts with label
Melbourne Writers Festival 2014.
Show all posts
As you may have seen yesterday, the first half of my day at the Melbourne Writers Festival ended on a bit of a sour note, but after a couple of sandwiches and a walk in the unseasonal sunshine, it was time to get back into the thick of things - and luckily the next session was much more to my liking :)
*****
After a couple of low-key events in the ACMI Cube, it was upstairs to Cinema 1 for the main session of the day, an audience with well-known Australian writer Gerald Murnane. Moderator Antoni Jach introduced Murnane with a string of superlatives, including "...our best bet for a Nobel prize in the next ten years or so...", all of which are probably true. Of course, what he didn't say was that Murnane is the grumpy old man of Australian literature and with him you never know what you're going to get. Happily for us in the audience, today was a good day :)
Ostensibly, the writer was there to discuss his latest novel, A Million Windows, but this was a fairly free-range session with the discussion wandering throughout his career (although the one book I have read, The Plains - review pending - wasn't mentioned). In fact, there were several mentions of two books which haven't even been published yet - one a treatise on horse-racing (which Murnane thought was non-fiction until his publisher told him otherwise), the other (Border Districts) a book he wants to be his last (which is why it won't be published until he's sure he's done with writing).
While some interesting things were said about his approach to writing, particularly in talking of his debut work, Tamarisk Row, with his unconventional style and lengthy, overwhelming sentences, the main thing I got from the session was the way in which an accomplished writer with a distinguished background had everyone in the palm of his hand, despite the fact that he doesn't really like this kind of thing (at the end he quipped that we were lucky as we might be the last ones to ever see him do a festival session!).
Murnane is funny and irascible, prone to wandering off on tangents (Jach was well aware that his role was to allow the writer as much range as he wished) and always ready with a good yarn. At one point he brought out an essay from his university time so that we could hear the lecturer's comments bemoaning his lack of understanding of morality in literature. At which point he claimed that he still has no idea what she was talking about - but it never stopped him writing all his books...
He's also very good for quotations, and I wasn't the only one in the audience scribbling away furiously to get his one-liners down on paper. For example, on being free from the early pressure to make his work 'publishable': "I'm almost in the position where I can insult readers now." Or on being a fairly normal bloke when out in the community and not writing: "I didn't see any need to grow a beard or wear a beret - apologies to those who do." Or on his failure to become a poet, a disarming "I gave it away", an Australianism for giving something up...
There's too much to discuss here, whether it's his liking for a sympathetic narrator in the vein of Hardy or Trollope, or his dislike of dialogue (which he says conceals more than it reveals), but I definitely came out of the session wanting to read more of his work, which can only be a good thing. Mention was made of his appearance in the Music & Literature magazine, and that's something I'd like to have a look at - first, though, I want to try some more of his books :)
*****
Murnane was always going to be a hard act to follow, but the last session of the day was entertaining nonetheless. It was back to the Cube for the second of the City-to-City talks, and this time Nic Low was chatting to Liliy Yulianti Farid and Ahmad Fuadi about Jakarta. Fortunately, both are fairly fluent in English, which avoided the embarrassment of the earlier Shanghai session...
The two writers talked about the disproportionate influence the capital has on Indonesian culture (apparently 80% of national book sales are in the Jakarta region), a fact which is merely a reflection of the same trend in all walks of Indonesian life. Where in China, for example, Beijing and Shanghai are competitors, Jakarta is in a league of its own, and people from the provinces are well aware that they have to make the move there one day if they want to become a success.
However, things are changing, and both writers talked about the role they play in making things happen. Fuadi briefly mentioned Bali's Ubud Writers and Readers Festival, including (I think...) some visits to Australia by Indonesian writers, and after I asked the pair about the apparent lack of Indonesian fiction in translation, Farid outlined her work with the Lontar Foundation and the Inside Indonesia magazine. Indonesia is also guest of honour at the Frankfurt Book Fair next year, so the government is now putting a lot more energy (and money!) into getting Indonesian fiction into English and German. Hopefully, there'll be a few new authors for us to discover over the coming years :)
*****
And that's all for 2014! I greatly enjoyed my busy day in out of the sun at the festival, but I wouldn't say I'm completely happy with the whole event. The City-to-City sessions weren't really what I expected, focusing more on general information than on the literary side of the cities (although the two Indonesian writers did speak about this a little more during the question time), and the Shanghai session was only saved by the humour of Ouyang Yu.
The main issue I have, though, is that as far as translated fiction goes this was pretty much it. The whole festival runs for eleven days, but if you're looking for non-Anglophone writers, you're out of luck, and I think that for a multicultural city like Melbourne, it's a bit of a shambles really. Here's hoping that next year the organisers decide that overseas writers can be found outside the UK and the US and that there'll be a few big names on the programme.
I'm not holding my breath, though...
Friday the 22nd of August was a beautiful late-winter day in Melbourne, and it also happened to be the day for my annual visit to the Melbourne Writers Festival. I only go in for one day, but I do my best to make the most of it, and this year I managed to fit four events into about five-and-a-half hours. And what, exactly, did I see? Well, stick around, and you'll find out...
*****
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 ;)
