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So, the 70th Frankfurt Book Fair. (Post-WWII that is; the actual Frankfurt Book Fair dates back to the 1500s, and there' s a hilarious in hindsight account of some printers going to celebrate in the evening to Sachsenhausen (part of Frankfurt) WHICH IS STILL HAPPENING).

(One of these days I'll write a sketch or a story about those early book fairs. Dürer's wife Agnes is the secret star, outselling everyone with her prints but having to battle with illegal Italian copyright infringement, mapmaker Gerhard Mercator has to explain why his maps come in Catholic and Protestant editions (the Catholic ones depict Scotland and Ireland far more prominently than that English bit in between), Luther has finally been wood into doing a reading and signing, err, preaching appearance but then is pissed off when learning that so will Erasmus of Rotterdam, and the British deligation leaves in a huff when finding out Henry VIII. isn't even considered for any awards because everyone takes it for granted Thomas More was his ghost writer.)

Meanwhile, what happened in 2018 in Frankfurt was this: )
selenak: (Claudius by Pixelbee)
Buchmesse 2017 photo 2017_1015Buchmesse0070_zpsvqqgdgqu.jpg



Two thoroughly exhausting (but mostly in a good way) weeks are behind me; first the Frankfurt Book Fair, then a workshop (in a splendid environment, but still, it was work from morning till night). Hence no posts; I could only get online very briefly.

Macron, Merkel, Rushdie, Atwood et all under the cut )
selenak: (Kate Hepburn by Misbegotten)
The Frankfurt Book Fair always ends with the Peace Award of the German Book Trade, which is handed over in the Paulskirche, St. Paul's, a secularized church which is one of the few places reliably prone to make me go sentimental in a way related to my country of origin. It's our big might have been: the place where the first German freely elected parliament took place in 1848, working on a constitution that never was, because the 1848/49 revolution was aborted and instead we got the Empire and lots of Untertanengeist (subject mentality).

Anyway, the other reason why I'm prone to feel sentimental about the Paulskirche is that listening to the winners of this award usually is thoughtprovoking and moving. This year was no exception. It went to Carolin Emcke, who as opposed to some earlier winners (Susan Sontag, David Grossman, Svetlana Alexejivich two years before she got the Nobel, etc.) probably isn't known outside of Germany, but deserves to be, because she's fabulous. Journalist (first war correspondant, then columnist for several of our major media outlets), writer, activist; at least one of her books is also published in English (Echoes of Violence. Letters from a War Reporter. Princeton University Press, Princeton / Oxford 200), so you can check it out. She's also openly gay, and while she's not the first Peace award winner to be so, she's the first who made this a part of her acceptence speech; more about this in a moment.

One main reason why she got the award is that in this time of the public discourse going down the drains and hate speech becoming more and more acceptable for main stream politicians to use, she keeps writing on against this without letting herself be goaded into bashing rethoric as well. An early example of this was the first thing I've read from her, a meditation on the RAF and how to approach terrorists, by which if you're German you don't mean the Royal Air Force but the Rote Armee Fraktion, or the Baader Mainhof Group in English; this to MS. Emcke was no abstract subject, because her godfather, Alfred Herrhausen, was killed by them, and her description of the day it happened and the day after in the essay capture the numbness of shock, the devastation, so incredibly well that you feel it all over again.

Heinrich Riethmüller, the President of the German Book Seller's Association, who'd given such a moving openining speech on Tuesday evening, quoted both the poet Rose Ausländer and the philosopher Hannah Arendt in his concluding speech, both of whom of course in their time refugees and intimately familiar of what hate and nationalism can do. (I was briefly taken out of the mood by him referring to Odysseus as "literature's first refugee" whom we wouldn't know about if Homer hadn't written , though, because it makes my inner myth lover protest. Odysseus doesn't really fit the bill, Mr. Riethmüller, because his ten years gallivanting around the Mediterranean post war in Troy happened with the knowledge that he's got a kingdom awaiting, and they mostly were due to having pissed off one of the gods, Poseidon. If you really want to make a refugee comparison to survivors of the Trojan war, I'd go for the Trojans. Yes, I like the Odyseee better than than Aenead, too, but Aeneas and his followers to fit the bill: survivors of a city destroyed by war which they can't return to, seeking a new home.) The central idea of Riehtmüller's speech, which the laudator of the event, Seyla Benhabib, then evolved was how language - and the context between violence and language, violence and lack of language, which Carolin Emcke has written about - is instrumental to any hope we might have for change.

Seyla Benhabib - who as opposed to Ms. Emcke has an English language wiki entry I can link you to - took as her opening image Paul Klee's Angelus Novus and Walter Benjamin's famous interpretation of same, and related this directly to Carolin Emcke's writing in what was to me one of the most memorable descriptions of the day: "Even if, as Benjamin says, you can't put together again what was destroyed, you can redeem/release/deliver" - she used the word "erlösen", which means all of these in German - "it by telling its story. Carolin Emcke has the gift of naming issues and narrating them in such a way that the silence in which violence, cruelty and torture cloak themselves is broken apart."

Then it was Carolin Emcke's turn. And she started with a joke which at the end of her speech she returned into, turning it into a great reallying call in anything but a joking manner: "Wow," she said, "so this is what it looks like from up here, from this perspective", going on to mention how she used to watch the ceremony in the Paulskirche and the speeches each year from childhood onwards, first from the tv and then from the audience. Then she got serious, talking about the various way identity is constructed - religious, national, even musical - at which point you could feel the audience be just a little complacent and nodding along, when the first zinger happened; the referred to an (in)famous occasion in the 1990s when Martin Walser was the award's recipient (you can read about the controversy here) and, quoth Carolin Emcke, the Jewish members of the audience like Ignaz Bubis had to sit there and listen to a speech "in which the terrible suffering of their own family was reduced from a crime against humanity to a 'moral club'". Talk about defining identity.

Next, she spoke about being queer, and this was when you felt a part of the audience sit up and another, who'd been ready to nod along to the general "nationalism and hate speech evil" message, be uneasily reminded of their own prejudices. Because yes, we've had a vice chancellor who was openly gay, but good lord, we're far from being no discrimination paradise. Carolin Emcke talked about how she was quickly disabused of the notion that falling in love with another woman was in society regarded as a private matter that only concerned her and her partner: "It is a truly weird experience that something so deeply personal should be so important to others that they claim for themselves the privilege of entering our lives and take rights and dignity from us. As if the way we love matters more to others than too ourselves, as if our love and our bodies don't belong to us but to those who oppose to pathologize them. There's a an inherent irony here: it's as if our sexuality serves less to define ourselves but them. Sometimes the obsession Islamophobes have with the headscarf appears quite similar to me. It's as if the headscarf means more to them, who never wear it, than to those who chose to."

Her detailing how sexual identity is treated culminated in this passionate appeal: "So we're allowed to write books which are taught in schools, but the way we love is supposed to described in school books according to the wishes of some parents only as something 'to be tolerated' and most certainly not as something to be respected? We're arrowed to speak in the Paulskirche, but not to marry or adopt children? Sometimes I wonder whose dignity is damaged here: ours, as we're declared to not quite belong, or the dignity of those who want to reduce our rights? Human rights aren't a zero sum game. Nobody loses theirs if they're given to everyone."

(Go figure: our right-oriented meda like the FAZ predictably reacted to this in their commentary with 'we're with you about how hate speech is bad, but did you have to mention all this queer stuff?' Reminded me of the conservative reviews of The State versus Fritz Bauer last year , which: Bauer noble, Nazis boo, but why did the movie have to keep mentioning that Bauer was gay? Which is exactly why Ms. Emcke has such a point. See, that's why I read the left wing SZ instead.)

The last third of her speech was devoted to a dissection of "the climate of fanaticism and violence currenctly pervading Europe", the revived dogma of "the 'homogenous' people, the 'true' religion, the 'original' tradition, a 'natural' family, and an 'authentic' nation: "No, they probably don't stand in the streets themselves and spread terror, these populists and purity fantastics, they don't throw fire bombs into refugee shelters with their own hands, don't strip Muslim women of the hijab or Jewish men of the kippa, they don't hunt Polish or Romanian Europeans, they don't attack black Germans themselves - they don't hate and hurt on their own. Sie lassen hassen. (Hard to translate exactly, because "They let hate" doesn't mean the same thing, nor does "they make hate happen".) They deliver patterns made of resentments and prejudice to the public discourse, they manufacture racist product placements, all these little vicious phrases and imagery used to stigmatize and to take away dignity, used to humiliate and attack people.

"They manufacture racist product placements" sums it up exactly. If you've noticed the repeated mention of the word "dignity", btw, this is not least because the preamble to our constitution, written with the Nazi experience directly behind us, starts with "Die Würde des Menschen ist uinantastbar" - "human dignity shall be inviolable". Against a patriotism that excludes and defines itself by being against others, Carolin Emcke suggested "Verfassungspatriotismus", patriotism defining itself by love of the contitution. I thought that was a marvellous idea, and evidently so did our head of state, President Johannes Gauck, who was in the audience and who later at the post award lunch said in a short speech of his own that he was sick of all the hate speech in the name of patriotism (no wonder, given that he and Chancellor Merkel were shouted at as "traitors" in Dresden at this year's national holiday): "Ich bin ein Verfassungspatriot." ("I am a patriot of the constitution.")

The question of what to do in these times: "Keep starting again", said Carolin Emcke. "We can always start again, both as individuals and as a society. (...) Nobody can do this alone. It needs all in a civilian population. Democratic history is created by everyone. A democratic story -" the German word for story and for history is the same, "Geschichte" - "is stold by everyone. Not solely the professional narrators. (...) Freedom isn't something you own, it's something you do. Secularization isn't something finished, it's an eternally unfinished project. Democracy is no static certainty, but a dynamic exercise of how to deal with uncertainties and cricitism. Being a free, secular, democratic society is something we need to learn. Again and again. By listening to each other. By thinking about each other. By mutual respect for the diversity and individual uniqueness. And not least by allowing each other flaws and offering forgiveness. Is this hard? Oh yes. Will there be conflict between various practices and convictions? Absolutely. Will it be difficult at times to balance different religious practices and the secular order? Definitely. But why should it be easy?
We can always start again.
What do we need for this? Not much. A bit of Haltung" -
that's another hard to translate word, as it can mean morale, poise, bearing, conduct - "a bit of laughing courage, and not least the readiness to change the direction of your gaze now and then, so that it happenes more often we all can say: 'Wow. So this is what it looks like from this perspective.'"

And with that elegant return to the beginning of her speech, Carolin Emcke ended it to everyone jumping up and applauding her for eons.
selenak: (Default)
This year's Frankfurt Book Fair changed several things in the layout, and in the security measures. Where in the past, only Hall 8, where the English-speaking publishers plus the Israelis used to be, had handbag-searching at their entrance, this year all bags get searched at the general entrance. Also the English speaking publishers plus the Israelis switched to Hall 6, which is much closer to the rest of the action, but meant that the Latin-origin languages moved to Hall 5. Which was when the Italians, who were supposed to get their stand in 5.0, protested that there was no way they were going to be placed BELOW the French who are in 5.01. I don't know whether these are long term Napoleonic scars, or what, but I have it from a publisher who was told by the President of the Frankfurt Book Fair. In the end, ruffled feathers were calmed, and the Italians were content with 5.0.

These territorial squabbings notwithstanding, the opening speeches at the opening ceremony started with strong appeals to European unity and fighting against the evils of nationalism in all our countries. Then they got self critical. The second speaker was Heinrich Riethmüller, President of the German Publishers and Booksellers Association, and he offered a mighty "J'Accuse" in direction of not solely Turkey but also our own government (and the rest of the Europeans) for not doing anything due to Erdogan's refugee leverage. He quoted a letter the imprisoned writer Azli Erdogan (no relation) has written, representative of over 120 currently imprisoned writers and journalists in Turkey, which was a heartwrenching appeal, and lamented "the silence of politics". The next speaker was Martin Schulz, President of the European Parliament, who departed from his prepared speech by immediately addressing what Riethmüller has said. "'Politics' may be silent, but I won't be. I agree with you, Herr Riethmüller. The voice of Frau Erdogan says all about Herr Erdogan. Someone who seeks to silence his opponents by persecuting them and locking them up can no longer be a democrat. I join you in calling for their immediate release." Since he said this on a public occasion to an audience of hundreds and in the presence of two heads of state - the Kings of Belgium and Holland respectively, because this year's guest(s) of honor were Flanders and the Netherlands - it was hopefully a gesture not unnoticed. The rest of his speech was pretty good, too. He linked Trump, Le Pen and our homegrown evils, the AFD, and called for "an uprising of the decent", to speak against hate speech, because this is our test, the one we didn't think would come for our generation, where we truly find out whether we've learned better than our grandparents. He also used his bookseller background to connect reading to empathy, which I'm less sure about, given that there are plenty of books around which incite hate, but anyway. There is currently some talk about whether or not Schulz will replace Gabriel as the SPD's candidate for chancellor in the next elections, but so far it's not likely he'll give up being President of the European Parliament for such a candidacy.

As mentioned, the guest of honor isn't one country this time, but two, or rather, one and the linguistically related region of another. Two of their authors, Charlotte von den Broeck for Flanders and Arnon Grünberg for the Netherlands, gave us a new format for the traditional last speech, always by a writer from the guest of honor country. Instead of a speech about their country, they gave us a poetic dialogue about shame, writing, empathy, distance. By far the most "literary" conclusion the opening evening has had for a while.

There has been no shortage of famous writers, German and international alike, at the Book Fair this year, but by far the most famous author came from another industry. No, Bob Dylan didn't make it to Frankfurt. (Though every publisher who had Dylan lyrics or biographies about him in their backlist included those at their stand.). But Bruce Springsteen did. Alas for most of us, he didn't do so in public or announced. Instead, he presented his memoirs to a select audience of ca. 60 journalists, and the rest of us only learned about it the next morning. However, it WAS a traditional reading/presentation - just two minutes for photographs, then he read an excerpt from his autobiography and answered questions. The invited journalists loved it (and were v.v.v smug the next day, let me assure you; one said that "Bruce looks more Irish the older he gets", while I tried very hard to pretend I was only jealous on [personal profile] likeadeuce's behalf.

Some famous authors I did meet and listen to: Donna Leon, whom I'd met earlier this year in February, and who, as an American living in Europe, was inevitably asked the T question, which led to this bit of dialogue:

DL: You know, I think the rest of the world should get a say in US elections as well, seeing how our decisions affect all of you. But unfortunately, nobody listens to me.
Moderator: Will you vote?
DL: I've voted already.
Moderator: We all agree that Trump is unspeakable, but is Hillary Clinton really a better choice? I've got a Republican cousin in New York who says she's just as bad, and...
DL (interrupting him, first with mock horror, then with real verve): Argh - Republican relations! No, she's not "just as bad". And by the way, I didn't vote for her because she's a woman, either. I voted for her because she's incredibly smart, she's disciplined, and she gets things done.

That told him. Then there was Ian Kershaw, of British historian fame, presenting his book about what he called "the 30 years war of the 20th century", i.e. The time between 1914 and 1949. The original English title is "To hell and back", I hear, but the German one is simply "Höllensturz" (no "back" optimism), and of course Kershaw's moderator gloomily asked whether we're falling into hell again right now. Kershaw didn't want to commit to this exactly, pointing out that in the 30s, two thirds of Europe was ruled by various dictators, whereas now, most countries have had decades of experience of democracy behind him, imperfect as they are/were, but he wasn't exactly vibrating with optimism about the future, either. Interestingly, he thinks the European project peaked in the late 70s, not the 80s or early 90s, which would have been my choice, but didn't elaborate, as most of the conversation was obviously about the decades his book covers, in which "everyone always made the worst of all possible choices". When the moderator congratulated Kershaw for his fluent writing style, Kershaw said: "Well, I've always had a very low boredom threshhold as a reader, and so as a writer I try not to challenge my readers to feel they need to explore theirs."

Turkey didn't stop being an urgent subject, never more than when Can Dündar, the editor of the now defunct Cumhürryet, spoke; he urged us all not to treat Erdogan as the sole voice of Turkey, to remember and support all the other voices Erdogan is trying to erase. He also pointed out the not-newness of Erdogan's behavior, quoting something Erdogan had said when Mayor of Istanbul in the 1990s - "Democracy is the train which will carry us to our destination; then we won't need it anymore". Deniz Hüzel, a correspondant who'd actually been in Istanbul during the night of the attempted coup, described his experience and chilling it was, too.

In terms of "books I'm putting on the 'to check out later, they sound intriguing' list": German translation of the correspondance between Paul Cezanne and Emile Zola, published apropos the movie "Cezanne et moi" (which I've watched and found frustrating because to me it was as if it kept being on the verge of something better, more interesting, and then didn't manage), German translation of Mary Beard's "SPQR", and a new biography covering the young Erich Honecker. Which I hadn't thought would interest me, but I caught the presentation of the book almost by accident, and Martin Sabrow, who wrote it, made "Erich Honecker. Das Leben davor." (The Life Before) sound fascinating. He talked about how it had been his goal neither to redeem or deconstruct Honecker, but to look at his youth not least because it had been rewritten quite differently once Honecker rose to the top, but also in terms of how it relates to the era; Sabrow was a good out loud narrator (which not all authors are) as he wryly told his anecdotes about young Erich Honecker, undercover Communist resistance member, managing to escape the Gestapo in an action movie worthy chase only to be arrested the very next day because he'd forgotten he had given the driver of the taxi he'd jumped out of when noticing the cops were on his trail his intended destination, which was near where he was hiding. He also drew a connection between Honecker's stubborn refusal to face realities in the late 1980s and that arrest in 1935 followed by ten years of prison (in Nazi Germany): "A deep distrust towards one's own people. Remember, he starts out wanting to free them, but then he's arrested and does he get applauded? No, of course not. He's reviled and spat at while everyone he sees cheers the Nazis. And that's when you start the mental division between "the true people", who need to be led by the (Communist) party, and the unreliable mob."

This resonated not least because of current day events, and the painful awareness that "deep distrust" isn't just something crusty old ideologues who have their people fenced in by walls and shooting orders feel. I've felt it myself.

Now for some visual impressions from the fair:

Below the cut )

Tomorrow the book fair ends with the presentation of the Peace Award of the German Book Trade. Stay tuned.
selenak: (Claudius by Pixelbee)
This year's Frankfurt Book Fair was exciting and eventful as ever, but unfortunately I cought the dreaded Book Fair Flu. It happens nearly every year to those of us who stay the entire week in the small city of halls with thousands of people breathing the same air, but usually the symptoms wait for Monday. Not this year, where I'm running a fever and sniffling like a Dickensian orphan, so the report will be shorter than usual.

 photo 2014_1012FrankfurtMersse0063_zpse110a9ae.jpg

Report under the cut )
selenak: (Bayeux)
It's that time of the year again - starting tonight, with the opening ceremony, the world's largest book fair takes place in Frankfurt. This year's guest of honor is Finnland. I won't be able to go to the opening ceremony for the first time in eons because of other rl obligations, but from Wednesday morning till Sunday afternoon, I'll be inhaling books at the fair, and hence rarely online.

Also, I wasn't able to catch the latest Good Wife before hitting the road, so I won't be able to watch it until next Monday, together with the next one. Something I did manage to watch before losing the benefit of broadbent access, courtesy of [personal profile] trobadora, is the lovely Snow and Regina scene they cut from the most recent Once upon a Time. Which really should have been in the episode!
selenak: (Default)
This year there was a satirical article about how you, too, can experience the Frankfurt Book Fair feeling at home, if you: a) surround yourself with lots of stapled books, b) get smartly dressed for an autumnal climate, c) then put on the radiator and all the lights in the room so that it's really hot, and d) start drinking the white wine around 10 am-ish. It's over the top, but it made a lot of us book fair afficiniados chuckle in agreement.

I do love the Frankfurt Book Fair. There isn't another like it anywhere in the whole wide world: ten gigantic halls full of books from all over the globe. Two of those halls consist of German books; the rest are in other languages. (Hall 8 is the one for English-publishing countries.) Now smaller book fairs elsewhere have their charm - I once visited the Greek one in Athens, which takes place outside (or at least it did a decade ago when I was there), which was nifty, and our own Leipzig Book Fair (having two book fairs, one in spring and one in autumn, is a legacy of having had two Germanies; personally, I'm all for it) is famously better organized when it comes to the authors-reading-from-their-works part of the event. (Otoh, other languages are hardly represented.) But Frankfurt is unique. I always spent the entire week there because obligations aside, I want the time to stroll through those halls and browse through all those new books. And because I'm a fast reader if I need to be, read through a lot of them if they capture me beyond "...could be interesting". Also it's great for catching up with friends from the publishing industries of other countries you otherwise don't see due to your respective places of living. And occasionally, you come across world famous authors. Or just plain interesting people. Some memorable experiences over the years:

- meeting Amy Tan at one of the receptions, where she showed me her Pekingnese dogs in her handbag; she claimed to have smuggled them on to and from the air plan as hand luggage; this was many years pre 9/11, but hand luggage was still getting x-rayed, so how she accomplished that, I don't know

- getting introduced to Dr. Ruth of decades of sex education fame

- listening to Ingrid Betancourt talking about her hostage experience and expertly dealing with the questions about the hostile depictions of her in her fellow hostages accounts

- hearing a nearly hundred years old Austrian who as a Jehova's Witness refused to serve in the army in WWII and because of this ended up in three concentration camps talk about his life

- cringing when the Book Trade organization folded to Chinese pressure and disinvited Chinese dissident authors, perking up when the German PEN club reinvited them instead so that they were presented at the Fair

- being stunned by the gorgeous display in the New Zealand hall when New Zealand was the guest of honour.


So I love all of that. Downsides of the Frankfurt Book Fair which I would change if I could:

- Better advertising of the readings-of-authors program, which does exist, but you often miss events for not figuring out what takes place where in time

- the Frankfurt Public Transport system, while having improved in the more than twenty years I've been attending the Book Fair, is still headache inducing in the way the final destinations and general directions of underground lines are never spelled out

- in the last five or so years, it's become common for US and Canadian publishers to start packing as early as Saturday afternoon. I miss the days they would stay until Sunday afternoon look everyone else, and it's not even good business, because on Sunday, books can be sold (so you don't have to transport them back), plus Saturday and Sunday are the two days of the Book Fair where it's open for the general public, not solely the publishing trade. The first time I ever visited the Frankfurt Book Fair, I was still in school in a small town with bookstores that didn't sell books in English, and being able to browse through all those English language books (and buy some of them) was great.

- the Book Fair Flu. This isn't anyone's fault but the almost unavoidable result of thousands and thousands of people in ten halls with air conditioning for a week. Still, having a cold at the mildest and being bed ridden if you're unlucky after the Frankfurt Book Fair is annoying.

- the dark side of that famous authors thing I mentioned. Because totally embarassing celebrities who have their memoirs ghost written count as authors, too, and if I never have to live through Dieter Bohlen promoting his autobiography again, and his publisher promoting it by wearing Bohlen related t-shirts, it'll be too soon.

There are some other minor annoyances, but nothing that ever spoils the experience for me. And you know what? Last year I read a biography of Renaissance cartographer G. Mercator. At one point, there was a contemporary description of visiting the Frankfurt Book Fair. Complete with partying in the evening in Sachsenhausen. In the Renaissance. Talk about immortal traditions!
selenak: (City - KathyH)
Back in Munich as of last night, and somewhat damaged, as I caught what's referred to as "The Book Fair cold", i.e. the inevitable result of spending a week in circulated air with millions of people. But never mind that - it was a thoroughly busy and splendid fair for me, with the Book Trade Peace Award yesterday given to Svetlana Alexejivich meaning it went out on a high note. I must confess I hadn't read anything of hers before, but I most certainly will now.

Svetlana Alexijevich, who is from Belarus, had a few scholarships abroad but always went back home and still lives there, despite the fact that she's no longer allowed to be published there, having run foul of the Belarus dictator. Her three most famous works, all non-fiction novels a la In Cold Blood, are (and I'm using the German titles translated into English here, so maybe the English titles are different) : "War has no female face" which dealt with the then completely unexplored part Soviet women played during WWII (this brought her the accusation of maligning the Great Patriotic War, and it couldn't get published until the onset of Perestroika in 1985), "Boys in Tin" about the Russian/Afghan war and specifically the soldiers coming back to a Soviet Union which no longer existed, having fought in a deeply unpopular war, and being thoroughly damaged, often suicidal. When there were quotes from this book in the speeches I was struck by how you could change "Russian" for "American" and "socialism" for "democracy" and have the exact same passage written today: "Kabul 1988. An Afghan hospital. A young Afghan woman, her child in her arms. I approach her and give the child a teddy bear. It takes it with its teeth. "Why does he take the teddy with his teeth?" I ask. The Afghan woman drops the thin cover in which she had wrapped her child, and I look at a small torso without any arms or legs. "That's what you Russians did."
"She doesn't understand," the Sovjet captain standing next to me says, "we brought them socialism."
"Go home and practice socialism there. Why did you come here?" says an old Afghan man who is missing a leg. (...) Then I am in a canteen. Troubled faces of our boys, who don't understand for what they're dying here. They reply angrily to me: Shoot or be shot, such questions as yours have to wait until after the war. If you shoot, you kill first; if you don't shoot, you get killed. All want to get home to their mothers. Some were made drunk with vodka, put in a plane, and in the same night they arried in Kabul. They cried, screamed, attacked the officers. Two committed suicide. They hung themselves in the restroom. Others volunteered. Children of village teachers, of doctors - they were educated to trust in their country... they will return home within a year, and the country which sent them out to kill will no longer exist."


This book brought her a lot of lawsuits for "slander of the Sovjet army", and more were to come when she wrote the definite book on Chernobyl, "Chernobyl: Chronicle of the Future": "The firemen who fought the fire during the first night all died. A nuclear reactor, and they were called as if to a normal fire; they were not given any protective suits. They each got radiactive poisoning over hundred times the lethal limit. The doctors did not let their wives to them. (...) In a thirty kilometres radius around the plant, thousands of people left their homes - forever. Early on nobody would believe that. Buses full of people and a quietness as if in a cemetery. Around the buses there were a lot of pets - dogs, cats. The pets were left. The humans didn't dare to look at them. 'The birds in the skies, the animals in the woods - we all betrayed them. Our beloved dog Sharik we left a note; 'Forgive us, Sharik.'"

These are all quotes from Svetlana Alexejevich's acceptance speech, and which, like the laudatory speech by Karl Schlögel, was full of such vivid detail going right under the skin. One of the most remarkable things about her: that all these interviews did not make her into a cynic or nihilist, on the contrary. That she still believes in reaching humans when she transcribes their voices.

Something else: usually the Book Trade Peace Award is given in the presence of the President. Only twice it wasn't, and today was the third time, which was why a few demonstrators were outside holding up pictures of Joachim Gauck saying "where are you?". Speculation from the guests was that yes, this was for political reasons. Instead of him, our equivalent of the Mr. Speaker in Parliament come, Norbert Lammert (ranking of German offices: President - who hasn't got political powers but represents the republic -, Chancellor, Mr. or Ms Speaker), and at the celebratory lunch afterwards, he thanked Svetlana Alexejevich for "exposing the so called lupenreine Demokraten as the autocrats and dictators they are". This was a pointed allusion to a phrase former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder had used when palling around with Vladimir Putin, whom he described as a "lupenreiner Demokrat" ("a democrat even if you use a microscope to look at him"), which is remembered as particularly shameful not just because, well, Putin, but because Schröder immediately after his tenure as Chancellor ended went to work for Gazprom, the Russian oil-and-gas giant.

Earlier during the Book Fair, I had chatted with Gert and Gisela Heidenreich, both writers, and she told me that back when Schröder said this she left the party (i.e. the SPD) even though she still considers herself a social democrat in her politics. Almost as depressing, they both said, is what's going on with the US right now; one of the oldest ongoing democracies self destructing, inwardly because of the crazy Tea Party nutters and outwardly because of the paranoia and disregard of anyone else's rights. After what happened to Ilja Trojanov, Gert Heidenreich was wondering whether he'll be refused entry the next time he has to attend a conference in the US as well, given he wrote as critical things as Trojanov did. And Guantanomo continues while nobody cares. He had another thing on his mind: during the last two years, he'd worked with director Edgar Reitz on the later's project Die andere Heimat, "The other Heimat" (we had a lengthy discussion of how Heimat is an untranslatable German term because it really is not at all the same as Fatherland/Vaterland), which had its premiere during the last weeks to raving reviews. Now Gert Heidenreich developed the story with Edgar Reitz, wrote a novella on which they then based the script, and is duly noted as co scriptwriter in the credits. During the first two showings of the movie, they were both attending. And then the glowing reviews started to drop in, and suddenly Edgar Reitz, who was also coming to the Book Fair, decided that all future appearances were to be of him alone, and wrote an email to Heidenreich's publisher accusing the later of "trying to cash in to my success" by promoting the novella which was published simultanously with the film release. This was bewildering the nth degree to Mr. Heidenreich because he'd thought they were friends (plus, of course, it had been their shared project from the start); at a guess, it might be because Edgar Reitz wants critics to see Die andere Heimat as the crowning of his autobiographical oeuvre (his tv series "Heimat" years ago became a modern classic), and sharing credit is inconvenient to the lonely auteur theory. Still, it's a shame and conduct unbecoming.

Books I browsed through which I want to read at a later point: Jung Changs new biography of the Empress Dowager Cixi, in which she reclaims her from evil caricatureness; Pat Conroy's "The Death of Santini", in which he dispenses with the fictional guises and writes straight autobiography about his dysfunctional family & himself. I had met Pat Conroy many years ago, and he'd been funny, moving and very kind to a shy young woman, i.e. yours truly, which I never forgot. Of his novels, I have some I love ("The Prince of Tides") and some I like ("Lords of Discipline"), and only one which I thought was a mess ("Beach Music"). He does get repetitive if you read all the books, true, but the majority of them still left a profound impression on me, and a first look at this new book, which is far slimmer than the weighty and messy "Beach music", left me with the impression he was back to form. Mind you, it also left me thinking once again that most fannish hurt/comfort dark fics have nothing on the Conroy home life, but, like Svetlana Alexjevich, he tries to give written form to the traumatic horrors that happened and by that reaches people. Which is what so many of us try and not that many manage.

Mind you, it'll be a while until I can get to those books, probably not until Christmas. Meanwhile, there is tv to catch up, and the book fair cold to cure. Till later!
selenak: (Brian 1963 by Naraht)
Day Two at the Frankfurt Book Fair was the day of the memoirs; among others, those of Malala which were published simultanously in a couple of languages. Now since she's nominated for the Nobel Peace Award, her German publisher, while not considering it likely she wins, still is fretting because she's currently doing book signings in the US, and IF she gets the Nobel, the news will reach her... in Washington, DC. Which, quoth the publisher, considering that the girl is already the target of conspiracy theories (she never was shot! she's a CIA stooge! etc.) will make it even worse. When on Friday later morning it turned out Malala HADN'T won, he was half glum, half relieved about it.

Meanwhile, Fischer who publishes Alice Munro in German is mightily pleased. So are her own publishers of course; I had a quick glimpse at hall 8, which is where the English-speaking publishers are camping out, though what I have to admit I browsed through most was the comic book/graphic novel "The Fifth Beatle", about Brian Epstein. In which the author goes for a poetic approach, and so does his artist; when Brian meets Elvis' manager, Colonel Parker, on that one and only occasion the Beatles met Elvis, Parker is drawn with demonic red eyes, no less. You know, the cliché of the Bad Manager, controlling and exploiting his artist and the counterpart to Brian's Good Manager (giving all for his artists and loving them). Which I would ridicule, except, um, according to all we can now, it was true? Still think the red eyes are a bit over the top.

Also red: the hair of the girl who is Brian's Head!Six, named "Moxie", symbolizing his ambition and giving him someone to share his thoughts and doubts with, conveniently allowing the reader to do the same. Why Brian has a Head!Moxie is unclear to me but then I only browsed through the pages and maybe a thorough reading will reveal all. (I hasten to add Head!Moxie doesn't mean Brian's homosexuality is ignored or changed, absolutely not. I dare say, though, you could have had Brian monologuing or dialoguieng with, say, several of his pals like Nate Weiss or employes/friends/occasional lovers like Peter Brown and get the exposition across that way.) The comics' stand on the "did they or didn't they?" Barcelona question: there was UST but no they didn't, because John chickened out after first getting Brian to admit he was interested.

The Beatles in general, when they show up (which they don't do too often; as it should be, the focus is on Brian's story) talk in A-Hard-Day's-Night-ese, which, fair enough. (Except for John's solo scenes with Brian; he then talks in quotes from the 1980 Playboy Interview.) Since the comic goes for magical realism, we get a dreaming-into-his-death Brian having goodbye type vonversations which culminate in him having one with ghostly Paul on the note of "it's on your shoulders now, we both know John can't be arsed to work if one doesn't drive him, pray keep the group together, you have the savvy, the work ethics and the drive, but I know I'm also dooming your friendships with that, sorry", which I found somewhere between touching and wistfully amusing, considering one of John's often voiced complaints in ye days of musical feuding was that "Paul behaved as if Brian had died with the worlds "let's make a new album, boys" on his lips". So the author actually letting Brian die with, etc, is among other things black humour and reconcilatory gesture.

Art: Brian, alas, is rarely recognisable on first browsing, and none of the women are (Cynthia Lennon looks like Generic Comic Book Blonde, for example), but on the other hand if you don't look for actual similarities the art goes well with the storymood. (For example, for the whole Manila episode, when things went truly insane, one of the most nightmarish experiences for Brian Epstein and a pretty bad one for the Beatles, it gets more and more abstract and cartoonish to go with Brian's state of mind.) And there are some neat nods to things that don't play a role in this particular story but were long term wise important; at the Sgt. Pepper launching party in Brian's house, there is only one female photographer, blonde. (As indeed there was. This was Linda Eastman, the future Mrs. McCartney.) She isn't adressed by name but I thought it showed both writer and artist did their research.

Non comic books which caught my eye and which I want to read at my leisure outside of the hectic book fair atmosphere: "The Golem and the Djinn" by Helene Weckman and "Abschied von Sansibar", "Farewell to Sansibar" by Lukas Hartmann. I had "met" one of the later's historical main characters as a minor character in a novel by M.M. Kaye many years before, "Trade Winds", so I was aware she had really lived: Salmé bint Said aka Emily Ruete, daughter of the Sultan of Sansibar who'd run away with a Hamburg merchant and married him. That much I knew, but not what had become of Salmé/Emily afterwards and her and her children's story is what this novel tells. She had three children (four actually, the first one died as a baby), and then lost her husband, which meant she was stuck in strange Germany with three children to bring up and an absolutely unforgiving brother on the throne back home in Sansibar who did not want to reconcile, let alone support her. Bismarck used the threat of making her son Sultan as part of his strategy to get a treaty out of her brother that would allow Germany to annex Sansibar after said brother's death, then once that was accomplished dropped her like a hot potato. She ended up living in Beirut for a while (which, as the author said at the book fair presentation, is in the exact geographich middle between Hamburg and Sansibar), but was not allowed to see her home again. Her half Arab, half German children, two daughters and a son, had remarkable fates as well. One married a hardcore Nazi, one, the son, a Jewish merchant's daughter which was why he emigrated. He'd gone from officer to pacifist in WWI already, and then took up the already Don Quichotte like cause of mediating between Zionists and Arabs in Palestine. The novel isn't chronological - we start with the son near his death and only near the end get the story of how young Salmé fell in love with her German in the first place - and going by my hasty browsing well written. There are excerpts interspersed from a letter the real Salmé/Emily wrote to her brother Bargash, the Sultan of Sansibar, in vain pleading with him. According to Mr. Hartman, Salmé in addition to writing her memoirs (which were a bestseller and how she supported herself & the kids for a while", "Memoirs of an Arabian Princess") also wrote letters to herself which were not meant for publication, and in which she voiced the depression and despair she kept out of her memoirs, but also the full story of why and how she left Sansibar, which only gets five or so lines in the memoirs (the later focus on her older siblings and family history instead). It all read and sounded truly intriguing, and I will check it out.

Not all authors are gifted speakers, mind. Rüdiger Safranski, who already gave us a book about Goethe and Schiller and a Schiller biography, has now delivered a highly readable Goethe biography, about which he talked with Goethe expert Gustav Seibt, but alas his voice is still... not the most fortunate to have for such an occasion. However, he still has a nice sense of huimour: when asked about Goethe's changeability, he quoted the man himself who said when accused "but Herr Geheimrat, last year you expressed a completely different point of view", in a nonchalant reply: "One doesn't get 80 by constantly thinking the same things". Mr. Seibt, who always writes the Goethe articles for the Süddeutsche Zeitung, brought up the fact that for all the long life and no drama attitude, Goethe drank a lot - by today's standards, enough to call him an alcoholic (two litres per day), and yet there aren't any accounts of him trodding about drunk. Whereupon Rüdiger Safranski couldn't resist pointing out that Goethe drank the most during his years of friendship with Schiller, hence also the weight gain during said years (that made them look like like Stan and Ollie when walking around), and that good old G. lost that weight again (by dialing back the two litres per day?) after Schiller's death. Sadly, Mr. Seibt didn't ask him about the context of boozing it up and having a rival-turned-best-friend hanging around.

Speaking of boozing it up: the evening receptions at the Frankfurt Book Fair often last until the early morning hours. Now yours truly isn't a night owl, but this is the one time in the year where I really don't get rmuch sleep. Otoh one hears all the literary gossip at those parties, including the one about the lamentable soap opera which is the story of the once famous Suhrkamp Verlag (currently involved in declarations of insolvency, a bitter power struggle between the shareholders and 120 authors threatening to leave it). Sadly, said gossip was told confidentally, and thus I can't share. Right now, I'm off to another evening reception, and hope to return with more shareable news.
selenak: (City - KathyH)
First day of the Frankfurt Book Fair: over, and the succesfully passed. This years' guest of honour is Brazil, and at the opening ceremony last night, something happened which very rarely does. Actually two things. Usually, the speeches at the opening ceremonies are very sedate affairs, with the occasional exception, as in the year of China, when there had been some miserable bungling and spinelessness in advance but Angela Merkel found a good solution to the problem of having a dicatorial guest of honour (presented by the Chinese President) who had demanded censorship in advance. She talked rather pointedly about her childhood in the GDR and how authors had suffered by being repressed, censored, and what it had meant to read forbidden books. At no point did she make a comparison to China, but the point was clear nonetheless, and yet no one could have accused her of insulting the guests since she spoke about something that was in fact part of her personal biography.

The other non-sedate thing that occasionally happens is a gaffe, as when her secretary of state two years ago, when Iceland was the guest of honour, declared since he couldn't pronounce Icelandic names and thus wouldn't try. Since he's supposed to be our chief diplomat, there was a collective groan, so to speak. Anyway, this year, he did say every Brazilian name in his manuskript and promptly mispronounced a few, but other than that, his speech was one of the more relaxed ones, perhaps because, as he said, he was part of the outgoing government and won't be our secretary of state much longer. Consequently, he went a bit wild (for Guido Westerwelle) and declared that Germany supported Brazil in wanting a permanent seat at the UN Security Council, that it was outrageous the entirety of Latin American wasn't presented by a single country there, nor was the continent of Africa, and while he was talking about outrageous things, Germany fully supports the Brazilian President in her speech a few days ago at the UN about how just because you can spy on the rest of the world with technology and by virtue of being the biggest gorilla in the room doesn't mean you have the moral right to, so there. The rest of the German speakers were more concerned with the preservation of the Buchpreisbindung, which is more under threat than ever (and which is really what secures German authors their income, so yes, let's keep it, please), and bookstores hopefully making a comeback in the wake of Amazon image losing (wishful thinking, but I'd be all for it).

Anyway, what enlived the ceremony were the audience reactions to two of the Brazilian speakers. Of which there were three: author Luiz Ruffalo, the president of the Brazilian academy of Literature, and the Vice President of Brazil. The Brazilian delegation this year includes no fewer than 70 authors, which had been derided by the all time bestselling Brazilian author Paolo Coelho who declared he only knows 20 of them and the rest were probably only functionaries taken along as a government favouri, which was why he didn't show up. This made him look like a total diva, for two reasons: firstly because just because he doesn't know all 70 doesn't mean they're not authors or don't deserve to visit the Frankfurt Book Fair (how many authors of your own country could you name, btw?), and secondly because the Brazilian delegation last night proved that they were no government flunkies.

The first Brazilian speaker, Luiz Ruffalo, held a very passionate speech about the injustices of the present and past in Brazil. Some choice quotes: "We were born as a result of genocide. Of the four million Indians who lived in 1500, roughly 900.000 are left, and many of them live in miserable conditions at the side of the roads or in the Favelas of the big cities. Often people point as an example of Brazilian Tolerance to the so called "democracy of the races", the myth that there was no genocide of the native inhabitants of this country but assimilation. But this euphemism only serves to prettify an undeniable fact: if we're today a mixed race nation, this is the result of sex between European men and Indian and African women, to be precise: the assimalation happened via the continued rape of natives and Africans by white colonizers. (...) Even today, the majority of African Brazilians lives at the lower half of the pyramid of society. Very rarely you find them among the doctors, lawyers, engineers, c.e.o.s, journalists, artists, filmmakers and writers. They're invisible, badly paid, and robbed of the most basic rights as citizens - a place to live, mobility, vacations, education and health care - the majority of Brazilians is regarded as expendable as far as economy is concerned: 75% of the wealth of this country are in the hands of 10% of the white population, and only 46.000 people own half of the territory in our country."
"Intolerance thrives, carried along a terrible awareness of lack of punishment, because you only have to go to prison if you have no money to pay good lawyers."
"The rate of violent crimes in Brazil is at 20 murders per 100 people, 37.000 dead peopleper year, three times more than the world wide avarage. (...) As machos, we take the shaming seventh place among the countries with the highest rate of domestic violence, with 45.000 murdered women in the last ten years. In 2012 alone we had more than 120.000 reports of violent abuse of children and adolescents. And those are only the crimes that were reported; we know that the actual numbers are far, far higher."

This passionate J'Accuse was wildly applauded by the Brazilian audience, not just with cheers but stampedes and approving yells, as if Brazil had won the world cup. It was the total opposite of the speech the Vice President of Brazil, Michel Treme (if I recall correctly, haven't looked up the spelling yet), held, which not only declared how there were hardly any problems left but that he, too, is a writer, not just of books about constitutional rights but also of a volume of poetry about his childhood. At this, for the first time since I'm attending the opening ceremony of the Frankfurt Book Fair, a speaker was booed, as passionately as Ruffalo had been applauded, by the Brazilian delegation. The German audience sat there and visibly thought "um? how to respond to that one?"

By strolling through the Brazilian pavillon, as if it hadn't happened, was the obvious solution. As opposed to last year's New Zealand pavillion which offered some fantastic combinations of darkness, water and light, this year's guest of honour presentation was all in bright colours, one part with bicycles in front of tv screens (if you ride the bikes, you can see Brazilian history on the screen), and columms showing photos of writers which upon a closer look turned out to consist of paper which you can take; on the paper is the decription of a Brazilian classic novel, a different one for each writer. Very clever.

Today I mostly strolled around, caught up with various acquaintances and friends and browsed through books. Noted for later reading: "The Golem and the Djinn" by Helene Wecker. And then I heard some gossip about two authors with similar plots but will have to verify before reporting it.

The largest book fair of the world is still precisely that, though how much we're the ancien regime facing the ebook revolution and how much an amalgan of both remains to be seen. More in the days to come!
selenak: (Rocking the vote by Noodlebidsnest)
The last highlight of the Frankfurt Book Fair is the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade; this year it was awarded to Liao Yiwu. There was a lot of background goings on; not least the shameful behaviour preceding the 2009 Book Fair, when China had been the guest of honour, and the Chinese had insisted dissident writers, including Liao Yiwu, were to be disinvited. (Footnote: after the Book Fair organization caved, the German PEN instantly reinvited them as its guests, but Liao Yiwu still couldn't come. He finally made it out of China in 2011 and has been staying in Germany ever since.) Also the heated discussions about the Nobel Prize for Mo Yan, who'd been among the Chinese delegation in 2009 who'd walked out of a room whe the dissidents entered it. Mo Yan, btw, wasn't mentioned in any of the speeches, but at the lunch later a lady sitting on the same table with me expressed her disdain. "Look," said I, "you and I were born here and have nothing to fear for either ourselves or our families. It's easy for us to say 'I wouldn't have done that', and Mo Yan did call for Liao Xiabo's release in the first interview he gave after winning the Nobel." She admitted I had a point.

I have no idea whether I would have the courage to speak out in a dictatorship, but I definitely know I wouldn't have the strengh to live the life Liao Yiwu did. He'd been a relatively apolitical poet until Tianmen Square, when he'd written the poem "Massacre" which got him four years of prison. Afterwards, he lived as a street musician playing the flute dor a while and then started chronicling the lives of the poorest of the poor in China; the interviews form the basis of the books he got the award for. His acceptance speech was the most passionate J'Accuse I ever heard in the Paulskirche. Composed around the refrain "This Empire must break apart" - I deliberately don't translate it as "fall" because he said this sentence in German (the rest of the speech was in Chinese and we could read the translation simultanously), and "zerbrechen" is very different from "stürzen, fallen", plus breaking apart was a theme in the speech - it did something official propaganda also likes to do, using historical parallels, only it did it in reverse to the official interpretations. One reason why I always found the film "Hero" in its aesthetic beauty so incredibly chilling is the basic idea of the individual being nothing and the death of multitudes being acceptable a prize for a greater political goal, unity and an Empire, with the first Emperor being a misunderstood great man. Cue Mao and successors mirroring themselves there.

Liao Yiwu also used the example of the first Emperor of Qin and drew a direct line from him to Mao and current day party bosses, but the point he made was the opposite (I'm translating a translation, so sorry for a lack of style): "His name will always bear the stench of two of his deeds: the building of the Great Wall and the burning of books, which came with the murder of the scholars. Building the Great Wall was supposed to separate the people from the rest of the world and to make China a giantic prison. In order to achieve this, the entire country was forced to work as slaves. The burning of books and the murder of scholars was supposed to separate the people from their own tradition. (...) Two thousand years later he got applause from a new despot named Mao Zedong. Who boasted: Quin Shihuang only killed 400 philosophers; we got rid of tens of thousands of counter revolutionaries."

He conjured up the forty millions who died in the great hunger between 1959 and 1962, the daily degradations and brainwashings later, and what he called Deng Xiaoping's greatest trick: opening the market for Capitalism. The idea that Capitalism in any way is connected with democracy or freedom of speech being by now thoroughly disproved by China's economic success coupled with complete oppression.

"The executioners triumph, because the entire country is their slave. The country is plundered, devastated, sucked dry. To foreign investors, they say: come here, cone here, build your manufacturing plants, do business, build skyscrapers and create networks. As long as you don't bother us about human rights, you can do whatever you want. You may have laws and a public opinion, but here you can wallow in the mud. Come and destroy our rivers, poison our air, ruin our food and our water: come and get our cheap work force and make them work day and night like machines. The more you ensure the Chinese will get physical and mental cancer by destroying their environment, the higher your profit will be. China is the biggest waste hill in the world, and that offers the best business."

And again and again: "This empire must break apart." (Dieses Imperium muß zerbrechen.) At the end of his impassioned, take no prisoners speech, he presented a poem, "The Mothers of Tian'anamen". This he didn't recite but sang, and accompagnied himself on an instrument I don't know, which looked like a bowl made of bronze but worked like a very harmonious gong. His voice was melodious and powerful, and towards the end of the song the most magical thing happened: it was twelve o'clock, so the church bells began to rang and intermingled with the instument-I-don't-know, resulting not in dissonance but the strange harmony of two alien sounds. The effect was so stunning our President Joachim Gauck commented on it later, during lunch when he made a small improvised speech and toast to Liao Yiwu.

Joachim Gauck having been an East German dissident himself, the speech was inevitably personal (and in its moving clarity made everyone sigh in relief his predecessor Christian Wulff was out of the job - though I doubt he'd have come to the award to begin with). He also realistically said that no matter how moved we the audience now were, the memory would fade as it always does, and the so immensely profitable trade with China continue; but that before every democracy there were democrats, words and ideas, and these would eventually make a difference, as we ourselves had reason to know when we atypically (for Germany) managed a successful revolution in 1989. That we're now, 60 years after our own dictatorship (and in a part of the country only twenty years after the other), can offer asylum and a new home to refuges from other dictatorship proves that change can happen. Though we should, he added, work more on and relearn the opening our arms part. Topical allusion is topical.

All in all these were very moving hours and one of the most political of awards. For the first time ever, even the flowers weren't just set decorations: instead of the usual bunch of flowers, there were two yellow chrysanthemes behind bars of iron.

ETA: [personal profile] pujaemuss told me the instrument is a Tibetan singing bowl.
selenak: (JohnPaul by Jennymacca)
The Frankfurt Book Fair is one of the highlights of year to me, but it is extremely exhausting. You could wipe the floor with me right now, and there's still one more day to go.

On to the narrative. Before getting to some of the books I browsed through, here's my literary celebrity anecdote of the week. One of the most famous specimens we have of those is Harry Rowohlt, who is most famous for, in no particular order, a) being a great translator (English-German, and there isn't a tricky pun he can't master), b) doing great readings for which the bookstore owners and publishers need to have enough beer ready (he supposedly gets through the occasional sixpack per evening), and c) being a male chauvinist of the first degree. For some reason or the other, I had never heard him read before, which is the equivalent of never having been to a Springsteen concert when you're into 80s rock'n roll, so to speak, and thus I was resolved to remedy this lack and go to a reading. Of which he did several: he has the translation of Mark Twain's memoirs and of an essay and short story collection by Kurt Vonnegut out. I'd have gone for the Twain, but it took place simultanously with another obligation, and thus I ended up at the Vonnegut.

Now Harry Rowohlt as a reader is as good as advertised - deep narrative voice like a Hamburg foghorn, terrific individual character voices, and with his white beard and hungover face, he looks like a legendary seaman looking for his albatros, too. Being as good as advertised is a must to put up with him, though, as the male chauvinism isn't exaggarated, either. A female publisher friend of mine told me that her company once wanted him to translate something by a female writer, and back came the commissioning letter (these were the days before the internet, young padawans) as a fax with his handwriting on it saying "I don't translate women".

Anyway. Since he knew the late Kurt Vonnegut, has been translating him since decades, he was asked about anecdotes and what they talked about. Says H.R.: "Rarely something serious. When we were on the reading tour together, he was mostly busy hitting on the woman from Hanser" - their German publisher - "who'd been seconded to take care of us. She came across as somewhat shy and embarrassed because he was so much older than she was, and he said: 'Don't worry, the oldest woman I ever had sex with is my wife.'"

Said my female publisher pal that a lot of literary giants from abroad behave like this. She once had to babysit an author who wanted her to pick him up at his hotel room, and when she did, his bed was unmade and he said to: "Serious work took place here", pointing to the bed. When a (male, gay) editor friend of us heard this, he smugly commented that luckily this is a problem he never would have to face when babysitting foreign authors. "Not necessarily," I replied. "What would you have done if it had been Gore Vidal?" "I'd have said, You're too old for me, Mr. Vidal," he returned.

On a brighter note, today there was a truly gigantic cosplay competition, for which Richard Taylor of Weta and Lord of The Rings making off specials fame was the judge, and winners got a ticket to New Zealand and five days in Wellington with set visits. There was some adorable and very elaborate stuff, but the uncontested funniest was a couple of villains (Uruk-hai, Mouth of Sauron, Witch King, Nazgul) in search of a new theme song. By the time an Uruk-hai danced to the tune of Michael Jackson's "Bad", we were all in stitches. Also very funny was a group of hobbits and one Legolas who enacted a scene where Legolas takes Sam's wish to be like an elf literally and starts to coach the hobbits to move like elves, which turns into a funny desaster. Incidentally, the majority of cosplayers were female. We were all left cheering, much entertained and realy anticapatory for the filmed Hobbit. (The moderator joked that Leonard Nimoy's unforgotten face palm hymn, "The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins", would clearly make Nimoy belatedly the next Enya.)

And now for notes on some of the books I browsed through:

A short but creepy and intense novella by an Argentine author, titled "Wakolda", in which the German middle aged doctor developing an interest in an Argentine family with newborn twins and a twelve years old older daughter turns out to be Mengele. Mengele has been fictionalized before, memorably as a Hitler cloning ghoul in Ira Levin's "The Boys from Brazil" and only thinly, somewhere between fiction and faction, in Peter Schneider's novella "Vati" which was based on Schneider's interviews with Rolf Mengele, the son. And he's become proverbial for evil scientists. Whenever one shows up in sci fi, you can bet reviews will call him "a space Mengele" sooner or later. "Wakolda" isn't a thriller like "The Boys from Brazil", but it is very suspenseful because the readers know what Lilith, the twelve years old, and her family are unaware of, and as mentioned incredibly creepy - the author actually dares and pulls off a Mengela pov at times (the other times we're in Lilith's), and the chilling sense of dissociation, of not clinical craziness but the insanity of racism coupled with pseudo science when he contemplates skull forms and the degree of "degeneracy", and the implication of scenes as when Lilith says about her old doll she once tore off a limb and sewed it on again to know what it would be like and what the doll was made of, and "José" benignly thinks he entirely understands, is throat-constricting. Just the right length, too, because it's a novella, not a novel: spending any longer time in that mind would have felt unbearable to me.

Hunter Davies (editor): The John Lennon Letters. The good news is that the book offers both scans of the original documents and transcriptions, which since John's scribblings often came with little cartoons is a great advantage. The bad news is that very little of the collection is new. Of course, this only applies to nutters like me. If you only ever read one Beatles biography and/or one Lennon biography in your life, or none at all, then this will be all new to you, and it does illustrate various aspects of John's character very well: the love of puns, the wit, the ability to be very moving, or compassionate, but also the capacity for vicious over the top outbursts if he was in demolishing mode, and incredible paranoia. But as I said: if, like yours truly, you have already plugged your way through various people's memoirs and biographies, then the letters, post cards and even shopping lists (I'll get to that) will be familiar, and the only advantage is to have them all in one volume.

One reason for the relative lack of new material is that Hunter Davies seems to have gotten much of it not from the recipients but because a lot of it had been auctioned off and thus been scanned, photographed and otherwise put in the public domain. Or published in very limited editions, like John's postcards to Derek Taylor from the mid 70s which were previously available only in Taylor's hidiously expensive privately printed memoirs. (Since one of said postcards is the one - previously quoted but not shown in books like Peter Doggett's - that offers first hand proof John was indeed towards the end of his "Lost Weekend" toying with the idea of a Lennon/McCartney reunion in New Orleans, this was a kick for me.)

The copyright holder for all of this material is still Yoko, which brings me to another ambiguous point: the editing policy. Davies provides some linking texts but those are by and large disappointingly superficial. This becomes particularly grating where the choice of material to be included is only understandable if you're firm on your Lennon related literature, as is the case with the earlier mentioned shopping lists. Who aren't of any earthly interest - they're shopping list's, for God's sake! - and a casual reader must wonder why the hell they're included, except to provide some material for the later part of the 70s, and wonder whether there isn't anything else available. Well, the only bit in those lists that isn't about listing various items to be purchased by John's personal assistant, Fred Seaman, is a scribbled question whether Fred has stolen and sold John's boots as memorabilia. Why is this relevant? Because Fred Seaman was among the disgruntled Lennon-Ono employees to write a book, "The Last Days of John Lennon"; not available in print because writing it went against the original contract with the Lennon-Onos he had signed; Yoko also successfully sued him for theft of various items. Additionally to presenting himself as John's only confidant in said book, Seaman was one of Albert Goldman's main sources for the description of later 70s John as a half crazed junkie hermit and the John/Yoko marriage on the brink of divorce when he died. The only thing about all of this which Hunter Davies mentions is that a footnote that Fred did turn out to be a thief. Which works just on the opposite way it was presumably intended. I mean, I'm all for demonstrating that as opposed to being John's bff, Fred Seaman was an already distrusted employe, but this could be accomplished via quoting just the "did you sell my boots?" remark in an explainatory text instead of asking me to see John's shopping lists as valuable contributions in a letter collection, and then not even bothering to explain the point here is a counter narrative to Seaman's descriptions of John and Yoko.

To present actually interesting texts from the later 70s to match the earlier ones would be even better. But alas. The interesting texts end around 76ish. During the 18 Lost Weekend months and in the one, two years afterwards John had intensified and in some cases resumed contact with various family members in England - his older son, sisters, cousins, aunts etc., before it started to slacken again. And here, again, I can see why some of the letters are included because of the background knowledge, but Davies doesn't provide it in his editing notes, which simply inform us that after his reunion with Yoko and the birth of Sean in 1975, John lived a happily ever after for the final five years of his life.

Now, both Cynthia Lennon in her second book of memoirs, Julian Lennon in various interviews, John's sister Julia Baird (in her second book) and his cousin Stanly in interviews with various Lennon biographers all have painted a negative picture of Yoko Ono and quite often accused her of intercepting phone calls between various family members, including Julian, and John. The John Lennon Letters includes (as one of the few genuinenly new items) two or three letters by John to his cousin Liela who apparantly took him to task for his neglect of his older son; in reply, he accuses Cynthia, his ex wife, of preventing Julian to call him as often as Julian used to do during the Lost Weekend, of influencing Julian against him and of doing all of his to punish him for going back to Yoko because she wants him back herself. There are also some remarks about both Julian and other family members only contacting him when they want money from him.

Again: if you're aware of the larger context (i.e. the years of feuding between Yoko and various family members, John's claim to Feminisism being made questionable by being the worst divorce seeking and then ex husband this side of Charles Dickens and his hugely and acknowledged by him as such relationship with his older son), this comes across as a defensive move, to show other versions of the tale than the ones given by the Stanley clan and Cynthia. But Davies provides no such context.

(Footnote: mind you, even knowing the context John logic strikes me as, err, special. I have no doubt that teenage Julian sometimes wanted money from his multimillionaire father from across the Atlantic. Or that the cousins and sisters weren't quite the purely motivated by love innocents who were kept separate from John by his evil second wife as they present themselves; again, he WAS a millionaire, they were not, and the sad truth is that from Ringo and Paul, both of whom got and get on well with their family, you have stories about how even family relationships irrevocably change once you're the embodied trust fund fpr everyone. But when it comes to the who neglected/did not contact whom side of things about his son and ex wife re phone conversations with Julian, Cynthia has John's mistress May Pang to back her up about the fact it was John who had to be pushed and reminded into them, Cynthia who was eager to encourage contact between Julian and his father, and documented years of bending over backwards to oblige John as a defense against the idea she was using their son to punish him. (Another book I browsed through at the fair, Philip Norman's new Mick Jagger biography, includes a chilling little reminder of this courtesy of a story Chrissie Shrimpton tells, who was dating Mick for a while and thus once visited the Lennons with him. They were playing a board game called "Risk" when: "Cynthia was winning, and John started getting so nasty that she just gave up the game and went to bed. I remember thinking, 'She is so much under his thumb that she doesn't even dare to win a silly game.'")

Ironically enough, earlier Cynthia and Julian related letters and postcards show John from a far more sympathetic side. The collection includes not just the early love letters he wrote her (again, this isn't new material if you're familiar with Cynthia's books) and a letter about Julian from 1965 when the Beatles were touring America) that shows him tender, concerned and painfully aware he's not good at fatherhood, but a mid-70s/Lost Weekend era letter to Cynthia where he's downright relaxed and even joking with her as one does with someone you've known since literally your school days instead of paranoidly convinced she's on the warpath to reclaim him. There are postcards to Julian through the early 70s showing that if he had, pre Lost Weekend stopped calling, he at least was still writing, and trying to show Julian he wasn't forgotten. The most surprising element there, and this Hunter Davies duly notes, is that one of the post cards includes two lines from the much later song "Beautiful Boy", hitherto always assumed to be exclusively a Sean inspired song.

Also surprising, in a good way: John patiently answering fan mail in the early Beatles days (and it is his handwriting, which is where the reprints come in well), even giving the fan in question who evidently had asked whether the Beatles had siblings, the correct information about his two younger sisters, Paul's brother, George's siblings and Ringo's only child status. It's the kind of letter you'd think John would have shoved on some of Brian's people's shoulders, but apparantly not or not in the early days.

Not surprising, because I had read it before, but still good to read as a counterpoint to some of the other stuff: John exercising a rare bit of self censorship in the late 60s when asking Hunter Davies, who back then was writing the official Beatles biography, to take out again some negative stuff he'd said about his late mother's partner John "Bobby" Dykins, the father his half sisters, so little Julia and Jackie, back then teenagers, wouldn't have to read it and/or get teased about it at school. To my mind, that's far more sympathetic than his famed general let-it-rip attitude. Ditto also concerned remarks and questions about Astrid Kirchherr for quite a while after Stuart died, showing John not making that death into something only he was hurt by but seeing it as primarily Astrid's tragedy.

Most glaringly missing, unless my time pressed browsing at the fair made me overlook the pages in question: letters to Yoko (true, the eighteen months of the Lost Weekend aside they were always living together, but you'd think at least some of the correspendance from India in early 1968 when he was falling for her would have made the cut) and letters to Paul (or George; there are two or so post cards to Ringo) other than the public ones ostensibly adressed to Paul and Linda but sent not to them but the magazine Melody Maker as part of the musical and media blood bath of 1971. ("Who was right, who was wrong?" our editor asks rethorically and diplomatically tells us nobody can say.) Davies said in an interview that Paul declared the John letters he has to be private, which is understandable but means said public feuding letters are the only ones with a focus on the Lennon/McCartney relationship on the entire volume, which is a pity.

In general: could have been better selected and edited, but is still worth purchasing if you're a fan and want the publically known letters all in one volume instead of dispersed in various other books. I'm not sure that if you're not interested at all in either John Lennon and/or the Beatles already, reading will give you much, though, which is a great contrast to some other collected letters editions I've read. For example those of the poet Ted Hughes; many of these work even for newbies to Hughes's oeuvre, or for that matter the Plath/Hughes saga. Not least because they're far more thematically diverse and longer; someone brings up Wilfred Owen, Hughes comes back with a mini essay about the impact of WWI on the English psyche in general and on his family (his father was a veteran) in particular. Things like that.

This book fair also offered a good contrast, and with a focus on the 60s, no less, though the writer is nearly a generation older than the Beatles: the Richard Burton diaries, previously extensively quoted in both Melvyn Bragg's Burton biography and in "Furious Love" (book about the Burton/Taylor marriage), but this is the first publication of the diaries themselves. As opposed to the Lennon letters, these are properly indexed and footnoted, with a good introduction not only providing biographical background but also pointing out to the reader that it's worth wondering for whom Burton wrote his journals. Not only because he was far too famous not to be aware of the likelihood of postumous publication but because he was type of actor who always not so secretely wishes he was a writer instead, and because the diaries themselves prove that he showed them to Elizabeth Taylor on occasion, so they are part of their marital dialogue as well.

Those thwarted literary ambitions make Burton's journals from what I could see enjoyable to read. He has a talent for the mot juste (about co-star Genevieve Bujold: "She has the acting power of a gnat. Of a dying gnat."), is a good storyteller with a feeling for set pieces (the ghastly tale of one evening where Rex Harrison's wife Rachel Roberts becomes so drunk and appalling that the Burtons, no mean drinkers themselves, are genuinenly shocked, is very Edward Albee esque, interested in the people he observes, doesn't spare himself with criticism and manages what many a fiction writer does not: make an established relationship (the main diaries start when he's already together with Elizabeth Taylor) feel no less sensual and intense than a falling-in-love one. He's in various mixtures funny, tender, horny and never boring when talking about and occasionally to her, and there is no impression of passion lessening as the years goes on; their problems were others. He's also writing about their children, hers and his, on a regular basis, showing that superstardom kept neither of them from being involved parents. In conclusion: must aquire once I get home.

Speaking of getting home: I know I owe dozens of answers, but I won't have the chance until the train journey back tomorrow in the late afternoon, and/or Monday. But I will catch up with lj and correspondance then!
selenak: (Baltar by Nyuszi)
New Zealand pavillon: still awesome.
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Book Fair 2012, first day: like all Wednesdays, this is traditionally the most quiet day of the fair, compared with all that's to come. (Thursday is when all the bookstore interns and apprentices show up, for example, and the weekend is open to the general public.) This makes it ideal for browsing. And meeting friends and acquaintances, sharing gossip, etc. Yours truly did all of this and avoided this book fair's winner for "most publicized trashy celebrity autobiography", who is, of course, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Today he did book signings and interviews, while his bodyguards according to my source expressed irritation nobody calls him "Governor Schwarzenegger" here, and that everyone says "Arnie" instead. When those are POLITICAL memoirs. Well, sorry, and I freely admit that in the age of Silvio Berlusconi, Sarcozy and our own former president C. Wulff the lines between trashy celeb and politicians are more fluent than ever and interchangable often, but if you are a Carthinian writing that you introduced yourself to the mother of your intended by telling her her daughter has a great ass, you're an Arnie and not a Herr Ministerpräsident Schwarzenegger.

In other German pulp/American pulp news, seems the scriptwriter of Dances with Wolves who was charged with turning our Karl May's Wilhelminian Western into a film despite not speaking a word of German and not having read the novels delivered something so ghastly the Constantin (the late Bernd Eichinger's production firm) turned it down at once and the whole project is in limbo once more. My pal the Karl May publisher has extremely mixed feelings about this, because on the one hand, ghastly script, but on the other, films mean money, even if they're not successful, and if your one and only star author is someone from the 19th century, you need it.

By contrast, Klett Cotta, which has the German rights to all things Tolkien, looks exceedingly smug (and has placed gigantic Hobbit standups everywhere, along with feeling sort of proprietary about guest of honour New Zealand). So does Carlssen, which once upon a time was a tiny tiny children's publisher mostly doing comics but the only one in Germany willing to buy all seven Harry Potter novels at a time when only two were already published in Britain (and JKR only sold as a package, smart woman). These days, Carlssen is of course a giant because of this, even if on this book fair they are in the weird situation of still being a children's book publisher and having their big stand in the children's book section yet featuring a book decidedly not for children, i.e. The Casual Vacancy (since they in turn had been smart enough to secure themselves exclusive rights to any German Rowling publication back in the day.

Most interesting book originally written in German I've browsed through so far: "Odysseus, Verbrecher" (Odysseus, Criminal), a play by Christoph Ransmayer. Modern writers being troubled by the conclusion to the Odyssey (specifically the hanging of the handmaids) are nothing new, see Margaret Atwood's Penelopiad, but Ransmayer comes up with an intriguing twist which uses the prophecy/advice Odysseus had before his return to Ithaca received in the underworld - about reconciling Poseidon by leaving Ithaca once more, carrying an oar far away to a country where people think it's shovel - in a way that I hadn't seen before. The play takes place entirely in Ithaca; Odysseus is the returning war veteran who because he's damaged can't do anything but repeat old patterns. The killing of the suitors and the handmaidens - the youth of Ithaca, after all, who don't respect him - is equated by Penelope with bringing the destruction of Troy here and repeating it. Telemachos who was at his father's side is sickened by the reality of the slaughter, the reality of death he hadn't experienced before, and throws up before rejecting the heroic ideal. Penelope tells Odysseus to leave until he can truly return to Ithaca as opposed to bringing the fall of Troy with him wherever he goes; the oar he carries is symbolic of that.

And in conclusion:

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selenak: (Goethe/Schiller - Shezan)
This year's guest of honour at the Frankfurt Book Fair, the opening ceremony of which took place just a few hours ago, is New Zealand, and I must say, New Zealanders, your guys did you proud. The New Zealand pavillon instead of being a stately affair did something breathtaking.

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selenak: (Default)
This year's Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, the high point and end of the Book Fair, went to Algerian author Boualem Sansal, and the speeches I heard yesterday fulfilled one of their key functions: they impressed and made me eager to read his books. The mayor of Frankfurt, Petra Roth, who always gives one of the introduction speeches and usually does so with much grace had a mixture of a good and a bad day; on the one hand, she pointed out (improvised, because if you attend the ceremony you get the speeches in written form there, and the remark isn't in hers) that for an example of how a struggle for independence and liberties can not guarantee those liberties will be kept but that the country in question can still persecute its authors and journalists and get rid of those liberties one by one we don't have to look to Algiers or the Middle East but to Europe as well, specifically Hungary where the movement for freedom in the Eastern Block started 20 years ago and which is right now in a horrible situation. This was a very apropos thing to say, especially since the general policy in Europe is to look away from what happens in Ungary (which is an EU member!). On the other hand, Petra Roth also mispronounced the name of the prize winner as "Salaam" instead of "Sansal" not once, but twice, which made everyone cringe, including herself, but it was as if a hex was on her, she kept doing it. (And the whole ceremony was televised, too.)

Everyone else's speeches went fine. Peter von Matt who did the laudatory speech for Boaulem Sansal was able to to give people like yours truly who hasn't read Sansal's work yet an impression of what it must be like, and what his life is like in Algiers, where he lives but is not allowed to be published, where he and his wife lost their jobs and can't go out at night for fear of their lives. (His French publisher, Rene Gallimard, was present at the ceremony which was later pointed out at the reception because usually only the publishers of the German translations bother to show up when their authors get this award.) The paradox of Algiers - a country rich in natural resources (oil, gas) and with a multicultural history (Sansal himself is a Berber, not an Arab) with enormous poverty among the general population and murderous struggles between Islamic fundamentalism (rejecting that multicultural tradition) and the what Sansal refers to as the "peaked caps", the military. He talked about the many mother figures in Sansal's work and the way they also stand for Algiers; the women he writes.

Indeed, what struck me immediately about Sansal's own speech was that among the first things he said was to point to his compatriot Assia Djebar, who received the Peace Prize in 2000 and whom he credits with being instrumental in fighting for women's rights in Algiers, and that her fight had results: "real resistance today in Algiers, resistence full of persistance and dignity, is put up in today's Algiers mainly by women". After talking more about the feminist struggle in Algiers he thanked his wife Naziha, not just, as most people do at these kind of ceremonies with a line or two about her support, but by pointing out how much she, too, had and is enduring. I have to say, I have attended a great many Peaze Price of the German Book Trade ceremonies by now and often was moved and impressed, but this is the first time a male author had this kind of feminist focus in his acceptance speech.

My French is very rusty, but as I said you get the speeches in written form as well, and with that support I was able to follow the one by Boualem Sansal, which was unabashedly emotional and at the same time very elegant, whether he was thanking, lamenting, accusing or expressing hope. Or the occasional dig, as to the Algerian ambassador who wasn't there. (This usually happens only with dictatorships - and the United States, as the American ambassador didn't show up when Susan Sontag received the award in 2003, either, but that was at the height of the Bush regime.) He came up with striking imagery, as comparing the long bloody liberation war against France from 1954 to 1962 with a matrjochka doll containing encapsuled future wars, more and more, each sowing the seeds for the next). While the majority of his speech was a passionate lament for the Algiers of today, the last part inevitably touched on the Arab spring, and on the hottest of all hot political irons, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Now the papers had quoted Sansal ahead of time being sceptical about the former, but in the speech itself he wasn't and applauded that it happened, and then he continued: "The true miracle, however, would be not if the Israeli and Palestinians actually managed to make peace (...); the true miracle would be if those who play godfathers, tutors and advisors on both sides, and as prophets for their future would stop burdening them with their own ideological ballast. Holy wars, crusades, eternal voews, geo stratetic plans of salvation, this is all of the past; Israeli and Palestinians have to live in the here and now, not in a mythic past. The request for recognition of an independent and souvereign Palestinian state in the borders of 1967 which President Mahmud Abbas put to the UN was a blow into water, and we knew it would be ahead of time. And yet I think that this gesture will turn into a big gesture in future days, as decisive as the self immolation by the young Tunisian Bouazizi which set the Arab world on fire. For the first time in 60 years the Palestinians acted only from their own volition. They went to New York on their own accord, not because someone asked them to, and they did not seek permission or protection from either the Arab dictators, whom we are currently trying to get rid of one by one, or from the Arab league, which doesn't beat the war drum right now, or from some fundamentalist preacher. It was an extraordinary event. For the first time Palestinians acted like Palestinians in the service of Palestine, not as an instrument in the service of a non-existinc pan Arabic nation or of a very much existing djihadistic international. Only free people can make peace; Abbas came as a free man, and maybe he will pay for his life for this as Sadat did, for there are enough enemies of peace and liberty around. It is sad that a man like Obama, who in his person links two hemispheres on our planet, did not understand this and did not use the opportunity which he was waiting for since his famous Cairo speech."

Before anyone comments; yes, I know that if Obama had done anything but unconditionally support Israel on that occasion he could have kissed his chances for reelection goodbye. Presumably Sansal knows this as well, but this is what he said in his speech, which ended with a plea to Israel ("a free country which nobody doubts, a beautiful and a great democray, and more in need of peace than any other (...); the country has to break with its own extremists and all the lobbies who protected in their distant paradises encourage the country to a stiffness which locks it into unsolvable bloody equations").

After the ceremony, everyone wandered as ever to the Hotel Frankfurter Hof for the reception. En route, people talked about the speech. "Completely Utopian and unrealistic towards the end", said one. "Yes, but we say that, living in safety. Who but someone actually living in hell has the right to be Utopian instead of cynical?" returned another.
selenak: (Berowne by Cheesygirl)

One drawback of this year's book fair: Roland Emmerich saw it fit to premiere his Oxfordian schlock "Anonymous" here, and to rant about the still lasting evil "conspiracy of silence" that ensures the poor Earl of Oxford still isn't celebrated while the yokel from Stratford is. Now I didn't attend either premiere or rant, because I'm not masochistic enough, but I did run into a journalist who asked me among other things which city of the past I would like to visit. Always with the guarantee of a return ticket. Among others, I named Elizabethan London, provided, quoth I, that it wasn't a plague year.
"You're just like Roland Emmerich!" she exclaimed delightedly.
....

Anyway. When I visited hall 8 where the Americans, Brits and half of the former empire always put up camp, I spotted a rarity. You'd think every aspect of Tudor history has been written about at least three times, but when I saw that there was a new biography of Henry VII. out, called "The Winter King", I realised I had never read one of the first Tudor king before. Henry shows up as a young man in biographies of Richard III., of course, and as an old one in books about Katherine of Aragon and Henry VII., but a book solely devoted to him I can't recall. Browsing through it, I had the impression this one was written pretty well, with an eye for context and the ability to bring the various early players at a Tudor court to life, like Edmund Dudley, who made a career out of reaking in the cash for Henry (not a very likable fellow, Henry VII, but he did leave a very full treasure to his son and like all the Tudor monarchs had a talent for spotting gifted New Men to use who owed their careers to the monarch, not their blood). Considering Edmund died in what even at the time was considered as a cheap show trial so young Henry 8 would become popular I'm surprised no one saw the warning signs about the later early on and am inclined to agree with a more recent Leicester (Robin was Edmund's grandson) biography that if you look at the history of the Tudors and the Dudleys in totem, it's by no means the DUDLEYS who come across as the exploiting parasites.

Im tandem with Scorsese's film, there is a huge coffeetable "George Harrison: Living in the material world" book out, which I saw both with an English andma German publisher, i.e. it is released simultanously in several languages. This is not surprising as it is not a biography but a collection of photos and quotes from and about George. Very much worth aquiring, though. You'd think there can be no more new photos from the Beatles era, but no, in fact there are (note: George was into taking pictures of his bandmates, and by no means only in the early days - for example, there is a photo of Paul, Cynthia and John in India, where poor Cyn as usual is sitting somewhat in the background while Paul and John are goofing around). And of course there is plenty of new material of the solo years. My hands down favourite item depicted, though, is a postcard teenage George and Paul wrote to George's mother from one of their hiking trips. It's all earnest schoolboy writing - "dear Mum, we set out from Paul's at 8:00 am", that kind of thing, with assurances to Louise that they find lots to laugh about en route even if they spend some nights without a roof, and both their signatures. Also of interest is the date, August 1959, because this is a full two years after Paul met John. I hadn't known the Harrison-McCartney solo trips had gone on to this late point where conventional wisdom has it John had become the central figure in both their lives. What's more, while I'm not surprised Louise Harrison kept the postcard, she died in 1970. Which means George must have kept it the rest of the time, considering his widow Olivia could give it to Scorsese to publish.

Just so you know I checked out fiction as well: there is a new novel around, "Song of Achilles", written from Patroklos' pov (or rather, his ghost's so he can narrate the story beyond his own death). On the pro side, this version ism a straightforward gay love story, and there still aren't many fantasy novels offering one. On the minus side, I never could stand Achilles. Which is my problem, not the novelist's, but she doesn't convince me I should like her version, either, especially since she falls prey to various traps of OTPism: demonization and/or sexless Yentaization of alternate canon love interests. In other words, Achilles' wife (the mother of his son who is needed for the story, so she can't be written out, but they have sex only that one time, honest) is a bitch while his slave Briseis is really nice but also respects that there is only Patroklos whom she likes better anyway. Give me strength, thought I, and decided that once I'm back in Munich I must reread "Stealing Fire", where Jo Graham has no problem with m/m love stories not excluding our hero having had enjoyed sex with and emotional ties to women as well. Back to Song of Achilles: the most interesting character of the book is a woman, though, the goddess Thetis, Achilles' mother. Sadly, she shows up very rarely.

Tomorrow: last day and the booktraders' peace award ceremony!

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selenak: (Science Buddies by Mayoroftardtown)

The Book Fair is always among many other things always a great opportunity to chat with people from the industry you rarely see. Yesterday I caught up with two of my favourite publishers of iconic German pulp fiction, Bernhard Schmidt who publishes Karl May and Klaus Frick who publishes Perry Rhodan, aka our attempt to compete with Doctor Who for longest running sci fi series. Like the Doctor, Perry and friends were a product of the Sixties, so Mr. Frick decided to launch in addition to the ongoing adventures in the old continuity a reboot called Perry Rhodan Neo. Apparently this is greeted somewhat like the ST and BSG reboots were, with part of the fandom crying "heresy!" and a part being intrigued. As someone fond of the multiverse and pallel universes, I'm all for it as long as the original timeline still exists as well. And I'm looking forward to reading the rebooted origin story which, as I teased Klaus F., hopefully will be without that mark of the early 60s, the fact that the aliens are captained by a woman excused by the fact their people are degenerated. (I love the early adventures which have some nifty ideas about getting rid of the arms race in them, but yes, the sexism is undeniable.)

Anyway, apparantly the majority of journalists are mundanes unfamiliar with what a reboot is, or the concept of parallel universes, so Klaus F. was happy to talk to a fellow geek, and so was I. Meanwhile, fellow Bamberger Bernard S. told me there is talk about a new film version of Karl May's "Winnetou", currently scripted by Michael Blake who wrote "Dances with Wolves", which sounds promising, except Blake doesn't speak a word of German. And while there might be some Victorian translations, somehow we doubted that they would provide the basis of the film to be. "It might end up as something like the new Musketeers", he said, torn. "Not much Dumas in that one. Though Bamberg in 3D is nifty." "Steampunk Karl May, you mean?" I asked, and we looked at each other, trying to envision that.
"Err."
"Quite."
"Well", he said philosophically, "at least it would sell a few more books."

Memoirs and biographies are a theme this fair. Our most famous feminist, Alice Schwarzer, has just published hers, and at first glance they appear to be well written and cleverly end just when the first copies of her magazine EMMA are sold. As I observed apropos the Thatcher biopics recently, a "growing and struggling, ending with big breakthrough" story is always easier to sympathize with than a having power and holding it story. Alice Schwarzer in her old age has been accused of having become increasingly autocratic - as you do, if 99% of humanity are anything to go buy - but she was one of the pioneers for women's rights in post war Germany. I met her twice, for the first time ages ago at a conference about Heinrich Heine, where she delivered a great presentation on Heine, and I was struck by the warmth and personal charme that doesn't come across in the media.

As the lecture on Salka Viertel had been one of the most intriguing hours of the recent Feuchtwanger conference, I was delighted to discover there was a new book published about her and her relationship with Greta Garbo. It doesn't play coy about the fact the relationship most likely had an erotic dimension as well but doesn't sensationalize it, either; the author does pay attention to Salka as a writer and for example offers the interesting suggestion that what intrigued her about Maria Walewska and made her suggest the subject to Garbo - resulting in their first big flop as a scriptwriter and star team - was the idea of a woman falling for a charismatic person of power, seeing that person descend into megalomania and becoming disillusioned but continuing to love him, now with opened eyes - was basically Salka's state of relationship with Garbo at the time. Though they had a better ending, after decades of ups and downs. In the last year of Salka's life when her illness left her in need of constant nursing and she hardly could talk anymore, having been one of the great hostesses and witty talkers of her day, it was Greta Garbo who in a complete role reversal waited on her hand and foot and chatted with her, distracting her from her pain.

Lastly: the Iceland pavilion is a bit of a let down compared with what other guest of honour countries did in recent years. It basically consists of video projections of the Icelandic landscape - which is great, sure, but what about some history or scenes from the sagas? - and of reading Icelanders.

Posted via LiveJournal app for iPad.

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A quick report about last night's opening ceremony, before I dash of to the first day of the world's largest book fair.

This year's guest of honour is Iceland, and the poster for this year's fair, showing an opened book on a rock, features a neat pun: "Sagenhaftes Island", which means both "mythic Iceland" and "fantastic Iceland" in German. Appropriately, the sagas were often brought up by last night's speakers, along with the detective stories, but only one speaker made a volcano shutting down flight in Europe joke. This was inevitably our secretary of state, Guido Westerwelle.

The speeches in short:

Gottfried Honnefelder, president of the book trader union: I can't believe 8% of those idiots in Berlin voted for the pirates' paty whose declared aim it is to get rid of mental property rights. What are our authors supposed to live from? Do something, politicians, before the rest of the country follows suit. Also, Iceland is nifty.

Jürgen Boos, president of the book fair: actually, the internet is cool and even encourages readers. But no touching the properties rights. And hey, I love Iceland.

Petra Roth, Mayor of Frankfurt: I promise to read all those newly translated Icelandic books. Honestly.

Arnaldur Indridason, author: We may be small, but the rest of Europe totally ripped off our sagas. Looking at you, Tolkien, and you, Wagner, and you, unknown author of the Nibelungenlied. Thanks for inviting us and publishing 500 newly translated books of our authors this fall, though.

Gudrun Eva Minervadottir: We don't all believe in elves, though we are noble savages, kind of. Also, we watch so much American tv that I feel like I attended an American high school with cheerleaders and rugby.

(Audience: we think they call it football, though it isn't.)

Gudrun: But that's cool because tv and films are stories, too, and there will always be stories, which we are celebrating. Yay!

Guido Westerwelle: As opposed to all other German speakers, I won't pronounce a single Icelandic name, instead I will just call the "Those Unpronouncable Names". Volcano joke. We'll support Iceland's request to join the EU. Yay Europe. Enough with the doom and gloom already, be proud to be Europeans, people! My speech was now longer than anyone else's.

Olafu Ragnar Grimsson, President of Iceland: Our Vikings already created stories about settling in Iceland when the rest of you was still busy doing boring stuff. Also our island is still growing. Thanks for inviting us! And keep those translations going, we need the cash after the last bank crash.

selenak: (Default)
Word to the wise: do by all means book a seat instead of just buying a ticket without reservation if you're travelling by train from Frankfurt to Munich. I did, and was very glad about it, as the train is currently crowded like hell with people standing in the aisles.

Which makes it look quite like the book fair itself on the weekend. I don't actually look much for books during the last two days of the fair, the public days, because it's that packed with people. Sometimes you can hardly move. So the weekend is when you meet friends at the fair, go to readings and debates, and wish other people good luck when they try to actually glimpse into a book or two.

One of the book presentations I attended was of a non-fiction book I had read some time ago, Rüdiger Safranski's book about Goethe & Schiller. One question he got was to account for the paradox of Schiller being the more socially progressive of the two (poet of freedom, some of the most famous speeches in German dramatic history, etc.) yet married into the nobility, whereas Goethe was the more conservative yet openly lived with and ultimately married a working-class woman, Christiane Vulpius, who was horribly snubbed by Schiller. (Goethe in his letters to Schiller always includes regards to the wife. Schiller in all his letters to Goethe never once mentions Christiane, not even in thank-you-I-had-a-great-time letters when he had been staying for two weeks in Goethe's house where she would have been his hostess.) Safranski not being wise to the ways of fandom did not bother to bring up the slash explanation but boringly and truthfully pointed out Schiller's wife was the goddaughter of Goethe's ex, the Baroness von Stein who was Christiane's number 1 enemy in Weimar and responsible for most of Weimar society cutting her for near two decades until Johanna Schopenhauer finally offered her a cup of tea. But! he added, suddenly going out of his professor of literature mode and into lighting up in happy fanboy mode instead, he had found a reference in one of Christiane's letters to Goethe from when she was on holidays and happened to be in the same Kurbad where Schiller had gone about two years before his death, and in that letter Christiane writes Schiller not only said hello but offered to row her over the lake in one of the little boats available for the guests, and then did so. "I was so happy when I found that," declared Mr. Safranski. "It was my balm of comfort." ("Mein Trostpflaster.") "I just couldn't stand the idea of Schiller having been horrible to Christiane till the end."

Moving on to the 21st century, Saturday was also when I listened to a presentation by three dissident Chinese writers, all three of whom are living in exile in other countries, and whose number included Bai Ling, one of the two writers whose invite/disinvite/invite caused such uproar and shameful embarassment in September. The others were a co-founder of the independent Chinese PEN and another writer; unfortunately, I have the programm in my suitcase, and I'm sitting in the train right now, so I can't look their names up. Not-the-PEN-founder seems to be a member of the Falun Gong, as he brought up not once but twice that they are the most persecuted of Chinese religions as they are "the most purely Chinese". (I have sympathy for anyone persecuted for their religion, but this singling out and unconditional praise of the Falun Gong made me distrustful of them instead, I have to admit.) All three are writing for an exile Chinese newspaper, The Epoch Times, and had a lot to say about how growing up with the system stays with you even once you've turned against it because of the words, the phrases you use. One of the writers, referencing the Cultural Revolution from the 60s but talking about the decades before and after as well, used an image that stuck with me: "Chinese culture," he said, "is like a beautifully coloured glass. It got smashed irrevocably. Now all we're left with are glass splinters. What the party does is put these splinters into a kalaidoscope, like the ones we use at children, and the image you look at is beautiful, too, in its own way, but it distorts and changes every time you want it to, and nothing is ever fixed." Switching from Chinese - which got translated (the translators were so the unsung heroes of this fair, always having to do three languages - Chinese, German and English) - into German for one sentence, Bai Ling interjected "Die Partei hat immer recht" and said that to understand the China of today we - the German audience, that is - should just think of the GDR, not of Chinese history.

All these speeches on part of the exile writers were very heartfelt and moving, but you know, there was one problem: they were basically preaching to the converted. There were Chinese attendants as well as German ones - actually the room was pretty packed, with all age groups represented - but the Chinese all seemed to be locals from Frankfurt. None from the Chinese delegation. And I don't think the German audience was labouring under the delusion that China is anything but a dictatorship, either. So attention was paid, but not from the people who would have been able to do something with these words.

Saturday evening I met a friend of [personal profile] shezan's, but arrived a bit early at his hotel and thus was sitting in the lobby for a while. Whereupon one businessman type sauntered towards me, looked me up and down in my Saturday outfit (because the fair is so crowded on Saturdays and Sundays, it's wise to wear the lightest things you can get away with instead of the trousers and jackets you wear for the rest of the weak, so in my case I was wearing a short knitted purple dress) and enquired: "Are you free?"

Note to self: now you can say you've been mistaken for a hooker at the Frankfurt Book Fair in your memoirs.

Today was mostly about the Friedenspreis, the peace award of the German book trade handed over in the Paulskirche. This year's recipient was Italian essayist, journalist and novelist Claudio Magris. The laudatory speech returned time and again to Magris' hometown Trieste as a symbol of European strife, European multiculturalism and European unity. Magris' own speech, which was riveting, managed to address patterns and injustices in past and present alike, starting with Italy once having exported fascism and now and more recently populism, that deadening of democracies. (Insert open loathing of Berlusconi here.) He pointed out that we did and do have a war after WWII in Europe, one we're in denial about and which involves organ trade, the camps for refuges, the way they're treated and often sent back, all the dead of illegal immigration and that wasn't counting Bosnia and currently our involvement in Afghanistan. Listening, I decided I needed to read one of his books now; this was a man who knew how to engage his audience on both an emotional and intellectual level.

Also present was nobel prize winner Herta Müller, which later at the celebratory lunch led to Gottfriend Honnefelder (remember, the head of the booktrade association) telling everyone that he had wanted to congratulate her in his own speech at the Paulskirche (there are always four: one by Honnefelder, one by the mayor of Frankfurt, one laudatory speech and one acceptance speech) but she had asked him not to, as this was Claudio Magris' big moment, but now we could congratulate her, yes? So everyone got up and cheered and toasted. Mind you, I bet most of the people present, including yours truly, hadn't read Müller's work, but never mind.

"So," said a lady at my table, "why do you think the Bildzeitung didn't have a headline saying "We won the Nobel prize"?
(Footnote: Bild is our biggest yellow press paper and prone to such embarassing headlines as "We are Pope" - back when Joseph Ratzinger was elected.)
Replied an ex Mr. Speaker of our parliament: "Because the Americans got there first?"

On that note, once I'm back in Munich, I must read all the delicious fanfic I saw tantalizingly referred to by other people on my list, as well as watch The Sarah Jane Adventures. And then I'll probably sleep like a stone. But truly, I would not miss the Frankfurt Book Fair for the world.
selenak: (Default)
One of the benefits of the world's biggest book fair is that you get to listen to all kind of fascinating stories. By which I don't mean the book fair gossip, though that's mildly entertaining. Sometimes annoying and sexist as well. I'll later given an example for the later, but first the most interesting bits from the last two exhausting days:

a) The reading by Mo Yan, from two of his novels, Die Sandelholzstrafe and Der Überdruss. (Again, no idea what the English titles are - considering Mo Yan is the most famous of the Chinese novelists visiting the fair, theyare bound to exist, but I don't have the time to check.) This was done, as all readings, Q & A's and debates with Chinese authors and scholars on the fair, via translators. (Usually the translators translate near simultanous and are sitting in a booth; as translations into German and English - and Mandarin, for the Chinese - are available, the book fair looks a but U.N.-ish right now. They didn't go to that much effort when the Indians were there, presumably because most of them read and spoke in English, which everyone speaks anyway.) He read two excerpts, and first an actress and then the translator of Der Überdruss read the same excerpts in the German versions. This was a fascinating opportunity to compare word melody for someone like me who doesn't speak Chinese, plus everyone could actually recite really well. (Not a given for readings.) Then there were the text excerpts; one was an animal pov, which is Mo Yan's specialty, and one was the start of the novel describing the set up, the hero who has been shot refusing to submit to the unjust underworld judgement of the demons, continuing his refusal despite being bullied and tortured (this was such an explicit metaphor for a show trial, btw, that I was amazed Mo Yan got the novel published) until they let him go and reincarnate near his old family - but as a mule. The excerpts were all very funny in a black humour way, had a rhythm that was downright catchy, and Mo Yan kept up the humour when talking about the writing. He held up the rather slim volume of his original novel, then the really large and heavy German translation and asked his translator, "Martina, have you added romances? Because my critics claim I can't write them, and so you may have improved me!" He also said that usually he takes much longer but he wrote this particular novel in 43 days ("after having thought about it 43 years"), and by hand, not with the computer as opposed to the others - by brush, no less. He said the sensation of brush on paper really helps with the writing. There were a lot of Chinese in the audience, and they asked questions later. They were standard reading questions, but I noticed the formality of the address (as rendered by the translator, anyway). It was always "hochverehrter Herr Mo Yen" - "very honored Mr. Mo Yen" - which sounds more fluent in German, though also old fashioned.

b) The presentation of the biography of Leopold Engleitner, who is 104 years old and a concentration camp survivor. He was present, though most of the presentation was done by his biographer, Bernhard Rammersdorfer; Mr. Engleitner sat in a wheelchair and looked a bit like a very fragile wood elf, talking in caustic Austrian dialect. He's a Jehova's witness, which was the reason for his arrest and captivity in three different concentration camps - Buchenwald, one whose name I'm blanking out on right now, and Ravensbruck. By the end of the war, he was weighing only 28 kilogramms. What I found most sad was the fact that his parents (conservative Austrians deeply embarassed their son left the church and went to the witnesses of Jehovah anyway) didn't want to hide him; most incredible that he did not appear to be bitter. Asked by Bernhard Rammersdorfer whether he had an explanation for reaching such an old age he said because he enjoyed most of his life ("hat mei Freud dran"); I felt awed and humbled.

From the historic, human and humane to the everyday trivia: some bits of book fair gossip:

- apparantly German book trade is doing business as usual, but everyone says the Americans made severe cut backs; a greatly reduced presence, far fewer agents, and several publishers switched completely to non-fiction

- most annoying joke at one of the few receptions that did take place as follows. To appreciate the background: Horst Lauinger is the head of Manesse publishing; Manesse publishes classic literature (read: anything older than a century). Joachim Unseld heads the Frankfurter Verlagsanstalt; he's also the son of the late Siegfried Unseld, legendary publisher of Suhrkamp, and was expected to take over Suhrkamp until S. Unseld got divorced and married Ulla Berkowicz, which resulted in a severe father/son falling out, which resulted in Ulla Berkowicz basically inheriting Suhrkamp and making herself the most unpopular person in Frankfurt by deciding to move the publishing house to Berlin. (And by other decisions, that's just the latest one.) So, at Joachim Unseld's reception, Horst Lauinger declared himself the luckiest of publishers: "Because my authors are so old that they don't have any bloody widows to trouble us." You know, I actually have a lot of sympathy for J.U., but I don't like cheap jokes about widows, and you hear them on every single fair sooner or later. How artist's widows should just be burned, etc., etc. Bah.

I'm really worn out by now - a week of browsing, listening and debating will do that to you, and it's not over yet - but have a growing list of books I want to buy or lend from someone else really badly, like always this time of the year. Today's most interesting browsed-through novel was about two women, who travelled as fairground attractions in the 19th century, "the ugliest woman in the world" and a pretty young girl named Rosie the "owner"/agent added to give the audience a kick by the physical contrast. I also liked a novel about Caterina de' Medici and a non-fiction book by Tom Holland called "Millennium" about Europe in the century leading up to and immediately after the year 1000 AD, which came across was entertaining and very well researched.

Now off to try and catch up online...

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