I was invited to attend the Toronto International Writers Festival
and what a treat! It is fascinating to see how other people in different countries do things. Some you can hope to learn from and possibly replicate, others you know you won’t be able to, such as having your office and green room in the penthouse suite of a luxury hotel…
The opening night was a heart warming event with Diana Athill and Alice Munro in support of Pen. The audience had paid $100 for the cocktail and talk and it was a full house. The two grand ladies of letters were funny, honest and obviously enjoyed meeting each other. The words “short stories” were not mentioned once and I wondered when, in the UK, people would realise that a short story writer is not simply someone who still has to grow up to writing long stories. Munro won the Man Booker International but is not eligible for the Booker! at least for the moment. You can listen to their podcast on the Globe and Mail website.
The next day, with Orhan Pamuk, the mood was quite different . He started with a 20 minutes reading of his new novel, The Museum of Innocence, followed by an interview. He was charming, tongue in cheek, thoughtful but became icy cold when asked about politics. Why is it that writers who come from “difficult” countries can’t simply talk about their novels. It’s journalists who ask political questions about topics that are simply not in the books. And no he does not regret expressing the views he did but was not going to be drawn onto that terrain. As to talking about his assassinated friend, the Turkish Armenian journalist Hrant Dink whose photo was on the stage, he was simply not the subject of a talk show. I felt sorry for his lovely interviewer who was looking more and more uneasy. I also felt sorry for his translator whose name he simply did not mention but explained that it did not reflect the amount of work put in by him and other people to make the English text his own. He talked beautifully about writing about a town, either as an outsider regretting what’s missing or an insider tracing a personal map of all the places relevant to the author’s own story. He dismissed writers who say they are led by their characters whereas his novels are carefully plotted. He was there, as in his books, perfectly in control and most brilliant to watch and listen to. I had once dreamt of having Pamuk in conversation with either Amos Oz or David Grossman but I doubt this will ever happen. Pity!
I attended an interesting event trying to bring in new technology to the book festival. The room was set up cabaret style and the young woman I sat next to didn’t seem overjoyed by my company. She had probably hoped for a handsome stranger not a middle aged lady. People were invited to tweet about the session as it went along, a bit like thinking aloud in writing, their tweets for all to read on a screen. There also was a journalist from the Toronto Globe blogging live on the event. The discussion was all about Peep culture as opposed to Pop culture, writers blogging in character, etc… The most interactive moment of the session was still when people were invited to get up and learn how to open a coconut. That’s also when I finally chatted with my neighbour. Then a band riffed to screened You Tube videos, a woman being spanked, a kid bewildered by anasthesia, Susan Boyle… That’s when I left. Probably not one to bring home, apart maybe for the coconuts.
The festival went on with a mix of readings and round tables. Readings are a serious affair, with 4 or 5 authors (novelists, poets or even non fiction writers) reading for 20 minutes or so each and an interval in the middle, no questions or discussions. Some writers love it and are very good at it, others tell me they don’t see the point of it. I think the odd mixing enables to introduce new voices or genres. It can also be a sort of best of the festival. Maybe one to try at JBW… I would love to hear what people think. I was only at the festival for a few days but heard an impressive of international authors such as Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt, Boualem Sansal, Colm Toibin, Sherman Alexie, Iain Pears, Adam Thorpe, Sarah Waters, Tash Aw, John Irving, Michael Ignatieff and, of course, Anne Michaels and Margaret Atwood.
I was impressed by the relatively young average age of the audience and so were my colleagues from New Zealand and Australia. There were even some amazingly stunning Punks complete with Mohicans and studded jackets come to meet David Byrne who was talking about his Bicycle Diaries. Students go in free although apparently most of them don’t take advantage of the offer and will buy their tickets. I also learnt a new term: “toilet review” as practiced by my of my colleagues who will shut herself up in a cubicle after an event to hear what people say about it. In that case, it was after AL Kennedy’s superb show “Words” and the review was enthusiastic as it should be. 
Back in the UK, I was greeted by Amanda Craig’s blog giving some advice to festival organisers. Her list of dos and don’ts makes sense and I hope we don’t suffer from too much of the faults she attacks. The question of how much a writer should be paid is a difficult one. We tend to think we help an author promoting a new book but it must be said that even established writers today receive advances which become pityful if divided by the time it’s taken them to produce their new work. I always try to put myself in the author’s shoes and make sure what we offer is worth coming to JBW. It may definitely not be the payment but hopefully the pairing with another writer, an attentive audience, a good and well-prepared chair and, of course, good book sales. Definitely for me the most exciting part of devising the programme is the matchmaking between authors. I was delighted to know that AL Kennedy and Shalom Auslander or Sarah Dunant and Amy Bloom are still in touch. And at our next festival, I look forward to conversations between Susan Neiman and the Chief Rabbi, Philippe Sington and Frank Tallis, Etgar Keret and Jonathan Safran Foer and last but not least, Michael Arditti and … Amanda Craig. If you have not yet read her wonderful Hearts and Minds, rush and get a copy.
Last week end I attended one of the loveliest book festivals in the UK:
close to Lewes. So many things make it special: it’s location close to the Sussex coast and in the undecorated barn of the Bloomsbury set’s country home, the beautiful garden where one can wander, read, chat or nap during the leisurely one hour intervals between sessions and it’s very essence: it is THE only short story festival in the UK.
hat the length of the texts makes them suitable for reading out loud, something extremely pleasurable, especially by someone as gifted as Will, it takes us back to our childhood. It reminded me of
, whose collection of short stories,
to human rights lawyer
Going back to Small Wonder,
first one will be our opening night, a Purim Spiel with a twist on the 27 Febuary and the following Saturday, an exercise on the flimsy line which separates fiction from non fiction. Watch this space to learn more about future developments and the names of participating writers.
First of all, I have to confess that I am a huge fan of Margaret Atwood. I still vividly remember reading
writer. Today it is not enough to produce wonderful books and hope the public will love them. You have to be a performer, to sell yourself and we, festival directors and events organisers, are part of the problem. For someone like her, with myriads of adoring fans round the world, this meant the invention of the
Should we do Dickens-style straightforward readings? It can work when the author is enough of an actor to give an amazing performance and I have witnessed some of these but only too rarely. Most of the time, we seem content to have writers discuss their books. They usually end up explaining what is not fiction in a work of fiction, an exercise in paradox if there was one. They walk a fine line between revealing too much of the story and whetting their potential readers’ appetite. I have seen interviewers who had not read the book, maybe as a way of protecting the audience -who would not have read the book either- from too knowledgeable questions… I have also seen usually academic interviewers lecture the audience on the writer’s work while the poor author sat slightly dumbfounded and wondering what he was doing there. No one describes this better than Amos Oz in his latest novel, 
Sadly my father died without taking us to Drouillas but this summer, a wedding in Dijon and one in Arcachon meant that we would be driving through that part of France I had heard so much about. My uncle gave me the directions and amazingly we managed to find the hamlet which is not even marked on the map. Then came the search for the farm itself.
will feel less like a bad feminist but Adele responds immediately to say that Sheila Jeffreys taught her at university and she’s actually read the book (which is about the global sex trade.) That stops me laughing and now I really feel like a bad feminist.
questions? How Jewish do you want your JBW to be?
and that certain things are better not left to chance…
She mentioned some of her heroes, among them the little known
I went for instance to see Barbara Schwepke, the founder of 
by Ben Moser. The Brazilian writer was famously described as looking like Marlene Dietrich and writing like Virginia Woolf. They will also be publishing one of her novels. Now we have to contact the author and decide what is the best format for the event: a talk on Lispector, a conversation between Ben and other writers who admired Lispector such as Cixous, readings of her work? This will all be decided in the coming months.
I find out that Marina Lewycka’s new novel
How Wall Street’s Gamblers Broke Capitalism will be published in paperback. A former investigative journalist and investment banker, he won the FT Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award for The Last Tycoons. We know we definitely want to address the recession at the next JBW but at a time when we expect sponsors to be much less generous, we are not sure we can bring him over from the US; maybe we’ll be lucky and he’ll have planned to be in the UK at that time. Another possibility is 
AS Byatt’s latest novel,
who has just written
hard you try, you will always be caught out having missed out on a masterpiece. A lifetime of sitting at home and not doing anything else than reading would still not be enough so I have stopped feeling guilty. And I won’t pretend that having seen the
BUT I had read the
Jewishness. This is I suppose to be expected when you take part in a Jewish Book Week event. Yet I almost felt like intervening and saying it did not matter. JBW is not about whether an author is Jewish or not but his/her relationship to Judaism.
The week ended gloriously with a wonderful tribute to Harold Pinter at the National Theatre. The cast was more than impressive, with such great actors as Henry Woold, Jude Law, Henry Goodman, Colin Firth, Jeremy Irons, Sheila Hancock, Michael Sheen, Eileen Atkins and many more who read from Pinter’s poems, plays and Nobel Prize speech. The theatre itself was packed with actors, writers and members of the public come to give the great playwright a final applause.
The last two weeks have been very busy. First there was the
The following week I was invited to the
. At the time I worked at the French Embassy and had had the pleasure of welcoming her at the Institut for a conversation with Anne Fine whom she translated into French (she also translated Virginia Woolf). It was also the occasion of my first visit to Jewish Book Week where she had launched her book.
The French title of the book was “Mangez-moi”, judged too sexy for an English audience. “Eat Me” was a reference to Lewis Carrol. Like Alice, Myriam feels she is always the wrong size in the wrong place. She is a misfit trying to fit in and the success of her restaurant is that it becomes a haven for others. “Eat Me” is also the act of the mother feeding her baby. There is nothing more generous, more maternal and giving than feeding others. Myriam’s menus are full of brilliant and original ideas, they make people think and feel in new ways.
- Myriam’s restaurant, Chez Moi, is a healing place for her and for others. How did you come to write this wonderful tale?