Frankfurt Book Fair, continued
Oct. 8th, 2004 08:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakDay 3 of the Frankfurt Book Fair, and I’m starting to get that strange zombie feeling. In a good way – I like being here – but I still feel drained. Part of it comes from being a day and not a night person, and during the Frankfurt Book Fair you’re not just up and walking all day but also going to receptions & the like all night. And rise early, natch.
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artaxastra asked about book tips, so here are some more books that left a “must purchase these and read more thoroughly” impression on me while I browsed through them.
Julia Blackburn: Der alte Goya. (Literally „The Old Goya“, but it might have been called something different in English.) Not really a biography, not a novel, something in between. The “biographer meditating on his subject” subgenre, in which the narrator is actually a part and character of the biography, is a tricky one – I think Janet Malcolm succeeds brilliantly in The Quiet Woman, for example, but I can’t stand David Thomson doing it in his Orson Welles and Laurence Olivier biographies. (Just the endless passages on why Thomson doesn’t find Vivien Leigh sexually attractive and therefore Olivier can’t really have, either, is enough to make one hurl the book way, if you ask me.)
Mary Taylor Simeti. Anyway, Blackburn and Goya are a well-matched couple.
Mary Taylor Simeti: Travels with a medieval queen. Another example of this approach working. In this case, the author is travelling in the footsteps of not just a queen but an Empress, Constance de’Hauteville. Constance (heiress of Sicily, daughter of the Norman king Roger II of same) was one tough lady, which she needed to be, considering that her husband was one of the more brutal German Emperors. She was in her thirties, he was 21, and they seem to have hated each other on sight, much like the Empress Maud and Geoffrey Plantagenet did. Like that earlier couple, though, they had one remarkable child, the most colourful and amazing of the medieval rulers, Frederick II, stupor mundi, (and not to be confused with the Prussian king of that name reigning many centuries later) a Renaissance character if ever there was one long before there was a Renaissance. Since she died when he was four (and his father died even earlier), Constance usually gets only a little part in his biographies, so a whole book devoted to her was a welcome change for me.
Edward W. Said and Daniel Barenboim: Parallelen und Paradoxe. (Literally “Parallels and Paradoxes.) A collection of the interviews and Q&A’s these two did together. The late Edward Said being the most prominent Arab intellectual of his lifetime, and probably one of the most well-known Palestinians; Daniel Barenboim is of course one of the most famous conductors of the world, and Jewish, which is important to the purpose of this book. Together, they founded and organized an orchestra in which Israeli and Palestinian musicians would play together. They weren’t naïve and thinking this would solve the conflict, but they also weren’t cynical and believed one had to start somewhere. The conversations, interviews and Q&As collected here are fascinating. Of course they were all done for the benefit of the public but you get the impression there is a real dialogue going on, and in the protocols where both answer questions from the public, one has to admire their patience as Barenboim deals for the nth time with the question on why a Jewish conductor would want to conduct Wagner, or Said for the nth time is asked what he thinks of Arafat (not much). Comparing impressions of their youth, Said describes the one time he heard Wilhelm Furtwängler conducting (in Cairo, when S. was a boy), and Barenboim tells of meeting Furtwängler in the late 50s and how much it meant for him (Wunderkind that he was) to get Furtwängler’s praise and support.
Suad Amery: Sharon und meine Schwiegermutter. („Sharon and my mother-in-law.“) A female Palestinian writer and her description of 45 days in Ramallah. (When a lot of it was being levelled by the Israeli army.) What struck me when browsing through this is the black humour of the tone, which manages not to trivialize the horror of the current vicious circle Israelis and Palestinians are in, and is a quality you wouldn’t automatically associate with Palestinians. (Then again, what do I know? I have read a grand total of two Palestinian writers.)
Francoise Chandernagor: La Chambre. German title : Das Kind im Turm. (« The Child in the Tower ».) An intense novel about the last two years of the child Louis Charles, Marie-Antoinette’s son. The very fact that this novel doesn’t try to glorify the Ancien Regime makes the judgment on the mixture of abuse and total neglect the Republic used in dealing with this inconvenient boy all the more powerful. There is no last minute rescue by dashing strangers (a favourite topic of many a melodrama), either, nor dastardly villains. These days, politicians would call what happened to the boy “collateral damage”, no doubt. “If faith can move mountains, it buries children” is one of the first sentences, and that’s more topical than ever.
***
So much for book tips. Now some gossip: everyone was surprised by the announcement of Elfriede Jelinek as the nobel prize winner, including her publisher, who is also Margaret Atwood’s publisher in German and had bet on Mrs. A. to win the laurels. Cue very German debate on whether Jelinek not being widely read outside the German speaking world shouldn’t have prevented her from winning.
Last night was the Random House/Bertelsmann reception, and was it ever overstuffed. You felt like a sardine, there, hardly able to move. I did meet an acquaintance of mine, however, fellow Bambergian Rüdiger Löwe, who was in bad shape after an operation and mentioned his old pal was in worse. His old pal being Bill Clinton (they went to college together); according to Mr. L, the bypass thing was far more serious than officially declared, and he was told they’d be lucky if Clinton can make public appearances again in five months’ time. Health problems weren’t the only thing Mr. L. was being depressed about; he also predicted Dubya would win the elections, and we’d be in for four more years of world wide damage.
On a more bizarre note, while chatting with Florian Langenscheidt (current head of the Langenscheidt publishing house – that’s the dictionary if you’re German) I got introduced, briefly, to a very very small woman. “Dr. Ruth Wertheimer,” said Mr. Langenscheidt, introduced me, and said this lady was the oracle on anything sexual in the US. I immediatelly flashed back to Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns and half expected her to drop dead, assassinated by the Joker. She did behave like her comic book alter ego otherwise, though, asking me whether there was sexual intercourse in my writing. I could hardly tell her about tentacles on the one hand and incorporeal beings on the other, though.
My third encounter with the glitterati took place today, when I got to brush elbows with our current secretary of state, Joschka Fischer, who had decided to drop by for a casual visit of the Book Fair. (Not announced previously due to security reasons.) Up close, it’s visible that he has gained all the weight he had lost before. (If you want to be spiteful you can say he can do the diet thing again and lose it because the current government is bound to lose the next elections.) He was nice enough, though, chatting a bit about the Fair and some publishing industry stuff, with security left and right and a very pretty dark-haired lady silently at his side who smiled at me as if I was supposed to know her. Somewhat helplessly, I smiled back.
***
Tomorrow, it’s meetinghmpf, a cousin of mine, and a lot of other people not nearly as nice. (Well, probably.) Also, Saturday is traditionally the day the general public storms the halls the most. Cross your fingers nobody gets crushed.
artaxastra asked about book tips, so here are some more books that left a “must purchase these and read more thoroughly” impression on me while I browsed through them. Julia Blackburn: Der alte Goya. (Literally „The Old Goya“, but it might have been called something different in English.) Not really a biography, not a novel, something in between. The “biographer meditating on his subject” subgenre, in which the narrator is actually a part and character of the biography, is a tricky one – I think Janet Malcolm succeeds brilliantly in The Quiet Woman, for example, but I can’t stand David Thomson doing it in his Orson Welles and Laurence Olivier biographies. (Just the endless passages on why Thomson doesn’t find Vivien Leigh sexually attractive and therefore Olivier can’t really have, either, is enough to make one hurl the book way, if you ask me.)
Mary Taylor Simeti. Anyway, Blackburn and Goya are a well-matched couple.
Mary Taylor Simeti: Travels with a medieval queen. Another example of this approach working. In this case, the author is travelling in the footsteps of not just a queen but an Empress, Constance de’Hauteville. Constance (heiress of Sicily, daughter of the Norman king Roger II of same) was one tough lady, which she needed to be, considering that her husband was one of the more brutal German Emperors. She was in her thirties, he was 21, and they seem to have hated each other on sight, much like the Empress Maud and Geoffrey Plantagenet did. Like that earlier couple, though, they had one remarkable child, the most colourful and amazing of the medieval rulers, Frederick II, stupor mundi, (and not to be confused with the Prussian king of that name reigning many centuries later) a Renaissance character if ever there was one long before there was a Renaissance. Since she died when he was four (and his father died even earlier), Constance usually gets only a little part in his biographies, so a whole book devoted to her was a welcome change for me.
Edward W. Said and Daniel Barenboim: Parallelen und Paradoxe. (Literally “Parallels and Paradoxes.) A collection of the interviews and Q&A’s these two did together. The late Edward Said being the most prominent Arab intellectual of his lifetime, and probably one of the most well-known Palestinians; Daniel Barenboim is of course one of the most famous conductors of the world, and Jewish, which is important to the purpose of this book. Together, they founded and organized an orchestra in which Israeli and Palestinian musicians would play together. They weren’t naïve and thinking this would solve the conflict, but they also weren’t cynical and believed one had to start somewhere. The conversations, interviews and Q&As collected here are fascinating. Of course they were all done for the benefit of the public but you get the impression there is a real dialogue going on, and in the protocols where both answer questions from the public, one has to admire their patience as Barenboim deals for the nth time with the question on why a Jewish conductor would want to conduct Wagner, or Said for the nth time is asked what he thinks of Arafat (not much). Comparing impressions of their youth, Said describes the one time he heard Wilhelm Furtwängler conducting (in Cairo, when S. was a boy), and Barenboim tells of meeting Furtwängler in the late 50s and how much it meant for him (Wunderkind that he was) to get Furtwängler’s praise and support.
Suad Amery: Sharon und meine Schwiegermutter. („Sharon and my mother-in-law.“) A female Palestinian writer and her description of 45 days in Ramallah. (When a lot of it was being levelled by the Israeli army.) What struck me when browsing through this is the black humour of the tone, which manages not to trivialize the horror of the current vicious circle Israelis and Palestinians are in, and is a quality you wouldn’t automatically associate with Palestinians. (Then again, what do I know? I have read a grand total of two Palestinian writers.)
Francoise Chandernagor: La Chambre. German title : Das Kind im Turm. (« The Child in the Tower ».) An intense novel about the last two years of the child Louis Charles, Marie-Antoinette’s son. The very fact that this novel doesn’t try to glorify the Ancien Regime makes the judgment on the mixture of abuse and total neglect the Republic used in dealing with this inconvenient boy all the more powerful. There is no last minute rescue by dashing strangers (a favourite topic of many a melodrama), either, nor dastardly villains. These days, politicians would call what happened to the boy “collateral damage”, no doubt. “If faith can move mountains, it buries children” is one of the first sentences, and that’s more topical than ever.
***
So much for book tips. Now some gossip: everyone was surprised by the announcement of Elfriede Jelinek as the nobel prize winner, including her publisher, who is also Margaret Atwood’s publisher in German and had bet on Mrs. A. to win the laurels. Cue very German debate on whether Jelinek not being widely read outside the German speaking world shouldn’t have prevented her from winning.
Last night was the Random House/Bertelsmann reception, and was it ever overstuffed. You felt like a sardine, there, hardly able to move. I did meet an acquaintance of mine, however, fellow Bambergian Rüdiger Löwe, who was in bad shape after an operation and mentioned his old pal was in worse. His old pal being Bill Clinton (they went to college together); according to Mr. L, the bypass thing was far more serious than officially declared, and he was told they’d be lucky if Clinton can make public appearances again in five months’ time. Health problems weren’t the only thing Mr. L. was being depressed about; he also predicted Dubya would win the elections, and we’d be in for four more years of world wide damage.
On a more bizarre note, while chatting with Florian Langenscheidt (current head of the Langenscheidt publishing house – that’s the dictionary if you’re German) I got introduced, briefly, to a very very small woman. “Dr. Ruth Wertheimer,” said Mr. Langenscheidt, introduced me, and said this lady was the oracle on anything sexual in the US. I immediatelly flashed back to Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns and half expected her to drop dead, assassinated by the Joker. She did behave like her comic book alter ego otherwise, though, asking me whether there was sexual intercourse in my writing. I could hardly tell her about tentacles on the one hand and incorporeal beings on the other, though.
My third encounter with the glitterati took place today, when I got to brush elbows with our current secretary of state, Joschka Fischer, who had decided to drop by for a casual visit of the Book Fair. (Not announced previously due to security reasons.) Up close, it’s visible that he has gained all the weight he had lost before. (If you want to be spiteful you can say he can do the diet thing again and lose it because the current government is bound to lose the next elections.) He was nice enough, though, chatting a bit about the Fair and some publishing industry stuff, with security left and right and a very pretty dark-haired lady silently at his side who smiled at me as if I was supposed to know her. Somewhat helplessly, I smiled back.
***
Tomorrow, it’s meeting
hmpf, a cousin of mine, and a lot of other people not nearly as nice. (Well, probably.) Also, Saturday is traditionally the day the general public storms the halls the most. Cross your fingers nobody gets crushed.
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no subject
Date: 2004-10-08 11:32 am (UTC)Enjoying all your despatches from Frankfurt. You really make it come alive!
no subject
Date: 2004-10-08 11:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-10-08 11:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-10-08 11:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-10-08 12:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-10-08 01:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-10-08 01:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-10-08 02:16 pm (UTC)And yeah, weird about the Jelinek (in Austria she's just "die Jelinek", hence). Such a depressing writer, I thought Nobel Prize winners where supposed to be a little more... uplifting. Brrr.
no subject
Date: 2004-10-08 02:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-10-08 02:49 pm (UTC)I have a copy of this, though I haven't actually read it yet. It must have come out in paperback this year here and looked very promising. My absolute favourite in the genre of "biographer meditating on his subject" is Richard Holmes's Footsteps which has essays on Robert Louis Stevenson, Mary Wolstonecraft, Mary Shelley and Gerard de Nerval. When the unfortunate biographer gets to Gerard de Nerval he has a nervous breakdown as he simply can't get a handle on his subject!
Even on this side of the Atlantic I'm pretty sure I've heard enough about Dr Ruth to be sure she could deal with both tentacles and incorporeal beings. Probably a good job you didn't tell her though, someone might have overheard you *g*.
no subject
Date: 2004-10-09 12:07 am (UTC)Oh, and while Dr. Ruth might have been up for anything, I'm not sure Mr. Langenscheidt would have been...
no subject
Date: 2004-10-09 12:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-10-09 12:15 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-10-09 12:23 am (UTC)His past: well, he rather famously demonstrated and got into riots with the police as a young man. Though his progress from radical to middle of the road is nowhere nearly as stunning as the complete U-Turn by Otto Schily, who as a lawyer defended Gudrun Enslin, Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof in the 70s and these days is about the stricted minister of the interior we ever had in Germany. Also, Fischer switched to being a moderate before becoming secretary of state.
Imo, Fischer as a politician these days had one of his best moments when facing down Donald Rumsfeld in Munich before the Iraq War in the security conference there and in the middle of his speech switched from German to English and said, re: weapons of mass destruction, passionately instead of blandly, sorry, but I'm not convinced.
no subject
Date: 2004-10-09 12:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-10-10 02:56 am (UTC)It sounds like incredible fun!
no subject
Date: 2004-10-10 12:09 pm (UTC)