Jean-Christophe Rufin: The Red Collar

This small novel, The Red Collar by Jean-Christophe Rufin (translation of Le collier rouge) was a great little book. Had a very busy week so I wasn't swimming in free time, but I did manage to crank it out in a couple of evenings. Had it been a summer day, I could have read it in a single sitting most likely.

Set in a small town in France immediately at the end of WWI, the book opens with a jailer reflecting on the oppressive summer heat and the young soldier he has imprisoned deep inside the jail where it's cooler and danker.

When the commanding officer arrives to interrogate the prisoner, the point of view shifts suddenly and we are in Lantier's head for the rest of the novel. He is tasked with getting the "whole story" from the prisoner, a local man who'd been feted as a war hero but then almost immediately locked up after for a capital offense.

There is a young beautiful woman, a child, a village full of those who feel the young man has received a rotten deal. It's Lantier's decision to decide his fate: firing squad? Long prison term? Release?

In the midst of all this a dog sits in the town square barking incessantly: the prisoner's dog who has refused to leave his side throughout the war and even during his imprisonment. The dog is the key to the entire tale.

I won't go into detail about where the story goes or what the crime is that the man is accused of. It would spoil the story, but it was an interesting and engaging read, this novel. The language describing the natural scenery around the town is lovely as is the atmosphere that Rufin creates of life in this small provincial town.

In typical fashion for much contemporary French literature, the commander has a rather patronizing if not disdainful view of the locals and this in one way reflects the time and place and the stark class divisions that were such a part of French society. But it also is a convenient way to write a novel for contemporary middle and upper class French people without having to explore issues of class (something French novelists rarely seem interested in though I would argue that France as a whole is kind of secretly obsessed with ignoring how class operates in contemporary French society).

This book is something of a departure for Rufin whose books tend to be long and unwieldy, if full of interesting views of France in history.

Lots of Anglo readers tell me that they have little interest in contemporary French literature but that's a mistake. The thing about many contemporary French novelists is that they tell good stories and the idea that French literature is chock full of "novels of ideas" or writers who only seem to want to experiment with form or write highly symbolic treatises is rather passe (though not completely so).  Rufin does use symbolism at times in a rather high-handed way, but the fact that he can tell an engaging story mitigates this, I find. French writers are often very interested, too, in the rest of the world (Rufin himself has written books set or partly set in Cairo and Brazil, among other other places).

In any case, it's a book worth reading.

Germany & Canada, differing roles towards migrants, jailed Saudi blogger, Raif Badawi, the Silos in the Old Port: What to do?

An idea for the silos in the Old Port

• A writer with a very personal reflection of how he left Germany because of their anti-immigrant stance and all the xenophobia he experienced, particularly after the wall came down and the two Germanys reunited. Lately, though he's had his eyes opened at how welcoming and friendly Germany has become in the 20 years since his absence, being one of the first countries to welcome refugees from Syria and accepting (so far) more than any other country (Germans out welcoming refugees at train station with gifts and toys and water). Conversely, he looks at how Canada has changed in those years, too, going from a country that is a model of peace keeping to one that bombs other countries. 
• Jailed Saudi blogger, Raif Badawi, releases a translated book of the blog posts that got him into trouble (merely calling for separation of church and state), 1000 Lashes: Because I Say What I Think. PEN World has an excerpt here.
• For those who live in Montreal, here's a list of various ideas with photos/designs for what to do with the Silos along the canal in the Old Port (the site is in French though some great graphics there). Some are great ideas (a huge museum complex, wow, though it'd cost a fortune) and some are standard capitalist fare (Turn them into condos yawn). Honestly, I live not far from them and I'm in the park alongside the silos several times a week. I hope they do nothing with them, at least for now, because that park is one of the best green spaces in the city (and not very busy). 

Brooklyn Book Festival schedule released, memorizing poems, Jean-Étienne Liotard in Edinburgh, Between the Pages looks at language, Reading makes you smarter, Henry VIII was a true baddie: Cultural Digest September 5

Liotard exhibition in Edinburgh

• Brooklyn Book Fair opens on September 20 and its schedule is now available. I've never managed to make it to this Festival nor will I this year. It's been a year of traveling and several more trips coming up so I took a pass from Brooklyn though several people I know will be there. I'd love to see this panel with Mario Bellatin (who was slated to be at our Festival in 2015 but couldn't get a visa in the end) and this one with Guadalupe Nettel and Alejandro Zambra (both of whom we've been trying to get for a few years now). Also on their schedule is Pico Iyer, Edwidge Danticatt, Andres Neumann (another dream writer we'd love to have), Francine Prose, and many others. OK I've got to put Brooklyn on my list for next year...
• Slate considers the benefits and beauty of memorizing poems. Personally, I've several poems that constantly float around in my brain that I memorized when I was much younger. I don't know if it has benefitted me but I sure love that lines of poetry occasionally play in my head at random times during my life.
• NYRB writes about an exhibition in Edinburgh on the work of Jean-Étienne Liotard.
• The literature video series Between the Pages looks at language writers including Julie Barlow, Jean-Benoit Nadeau and Gazette columnist Celine Cooper. Barlow and Nadeau wrote The Story of Spanish which I found to be fascinating. The conversation is a brilliant one.
• It's official: Henry VIII was the worst monarch according to the Historical Writers Association. Beheading wives is not looked fondly upon by historians today, go figure.
• Science of Us asks if reading literature really makes you smarter, better or more empathetic. 

Henry VIII: it's official

On Prolific Writers: from Joyce Carol Oates to Junot Díaz, from Colm Tóibín to Heather O'Neill

An interesting piece in The Millions, reflecting on a piece by Stephen King that defends prolific writers.

There is this tendency in the literary world to look askance at writers who produce too much. A young Quebec writer I know who only published his first novel a few years ago, is already publishing his fourth book. More than one person has remarked to me that he must not be that great of a writer if he can crank out four books in less than four years. (In all fairness his books aren't terribly long).

Stephen King mentions Joyce Carol Oates (who won our Grand Prize in 2012) and the fact that no one, perhaps Oates herself even, is completely sure how much she's written and published because she's written and published so much. And that for most prolific authors, only a handful of books tend to stand out, even if they've written 30.

I recall people seeming a bit frazzled when they were talking about Oates that year, that she'd written so much, they didn't really know where to begin. Some people knew Blonde and some people knew The Falls. But people kept asking me "Where should I start?" with a slightly desperate lilt to the question. I think that people simply felt overwhelmed, that to be an Oates "expert," was a half a lifelong undertaking.

Keep in mind that at a literary Festival, there's always an implied heap of time and work beyond sitting for an hour listening to a writer. If you go to a concert, you might  return home, fire up Spotify and find the artist's album online to play while you roast your broccoli. If you see a movie, you walk out after two hours and are plunged back into the normalcy of your life. You might mention the film to a friend, you might think about it a little. But chances are, that's it. Dance, theatre are the same. But when you see a literary event, often the idea is that you will somehow find the writer's book or books and then read it (or them). So in a certain way, the literary event is simply the introduction to a whole host of time beyond the event. True, a number of people go to an event having already read a writer's work, but even then: if they were completely closed off to the possibility of re-reading or reading a new one, they probably wouldn't be there. Also, not every person attends a literary event with the plan to buy a book, but that's always the goal: of the producer, of the writer, of the publisher. An interesting event is one goal, but getting the public to buy the book is the main goal.

Oddly, I find that the writers who often do very well for us (sell out events, get lots of media attention) tend to be writers who've written 2-3 books maximum: Junot Díaz, Amitav Ghosh, Heather O'Neill, or who might only have a small number of books in translation (Carlo Lucarelli, Bernard Schlink, Olga Grjasnowa, etc.).  And I think it's partly due to the fact that this is what we often do at Blue Met: introduce new writers to our public. But I think it's often due to the fact that there is simply less of a time commitment implied.

That said, there are writers who have written many books that do well: Richard Ford, Colm Tóibín, Russell Banks, and others, but it's not exponential: if we can fill a room with 100 people who've written one book, it doesn't meant the author who's written 8 books will attract 800. Quite the contrary. And I can think of several authors who've written many books who can only attract a few dozen people maximum.

For any literary Festival, an author like Donna Tartt (The Goldfinch) would be a major draw: not only has she only written just a few books (three, to be exact), she doesn't do many public events. Win-win.

Canada refuses invitation to be country of honour at prestigious Frankfurt Book Fair

This story has been making the rounds on social media for the past 12 hours and it's a bit shocking.

Apparently, the Canadian government refused the invitation by the largest book fair in the world, citing budget problems. There is generally a cost associated with this honor, but it translates into book deals for authors, publishers, rights agencies, translators and bookstores, and the roughly five to six million dollars it would have cost is minimal.

There's a link to the story here but for some reason, only the Francophone media, Radio-Canada specifically, is reporting on this so far. The link's in French.

Obviously, I don't know all the ins and outs and there could be some other angle or some other information the journalist wasn't privy to, but if this is true, it's really depressing and frustrating. There aren't enough ways to describe how important this kind of honour would have meant for Canada and the Canadian publishing industry in particular. Instead of Canada, the fair then turned their sites on France who them become the country of honour. They ended up spending more than the amount required and are now reaping the benefits.

Canada to Frankfurt: "Naaaaah, we'll pass..."

For the uninitiated, these fairs are terribly important because everyone from the industry is there making deals: publishers meet writers who talk to translators and book chains and libraries and rights agencies and distributors, all with the idea of facilitating book deals all over the world. If your book's been translated and published in Turkish, in Chinese, in French, in Spanish, chances are the deal happened (or the contact was made) in Frankfurt. It's the biggest and most prestigious book fair in the world (by far) and attracts 275,000 visitors and 9,000 journalists.

So the thought that the Canadian government said no for a measly $6,000,000 is appalling, especially when one considers the fact that after years of essentially being one of the main drivers in creating an identity for Canadian literature inside Canada, the Canada Council for the Arts (funded by the Federal government) has for a couple of years started spending (a small amount of) money trying to promote Canadian literature outside Canada, to put Canada on the map internationally in terms of our artists, writers, musicians, dancers, etc.

I'm sure Canada Council had little to no involvement in the above decision since they have a specific mandate and the Frankfurt Book Fair would have fallen outside it, but it just goes to show how one branch of government can often be undoing what the other hand is trying to accomplish.

Rare chance to take part in a Michel Hellman atelier in Montreal, Herta Müller interviewed by the Paris Review, Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell, Terrance Hayes in Toronto: Cultural Digest September 2

• Comics artist Michel Hellman (Mile End, link in French) is doing a workshop at Drawn & Quarterly. Don't miss this. It's $150 but there are only 10 spots available and it's a rare opportunity to work with one of the masters of the genre but also to walk away with a beautiful notebook that you've created yourself. I'd do it myself but I'm out of town that day. For those who remember, Hellman did an event at the Festival this year, a discussion about Mile End in books with Sigal Samuel (The Mystics of Mile End) and Guillaum Morissette (New Tab). It was a packed event with excellent questions from the audience. Hellman's workshop will be bilingual.
• American poet Terrance Hayes will be in Toronto on September 17 to read his work and be interviewed onstage. Hayes is one of the rising stars of American poetry and represents one of the new voices of our era. With allusions to everyone from Gwendolyn Brooks to race riots to the quiet beauty of domestic life with his family, there's something in his work that melds the personal and the political in very accessible ways. He's really a great performer, too. It costs $60 but it includes a copy of his latest book and a "special gift" as well.
• Herta Müller, winner of the 2009 Nobel prize for literature, talks about her history, her past and her writing with the Paris Review. I've tried reading her work a few times and have yet to gain a foothold into it, but reading this interview makes me want to try again.
• Many hours of lectures by the amazing Joseph Campbell have made their way online. Campbell was a hugely influential teacher and scholar and one of my first youthful obsessions was his series on myth, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, which was very prominent and read often by people coming of age when I did. Bill Moyers' series of interviews with Campbell and subsequent book, The Power of Myth, was also something that every smart person I know read and talked about when it came out.

Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell: highly influential series of interviews

Parabellum by Lukas Valenta Rinner

I love movies that raise more questions than they answer. If I walk out of a film with a satisfied, resolved sense that all is right with the world, then chances are, I will simply forget the movie unless there is something very special about it. But yesterday at MWFF, I saw the former kind of film: one that caused a whole host of questions. It was an Argentine/Uruguayan/Austrian film called Parabellum.

The film is odd. Very odd. It opens in Buenos Aires where an office worker at first seems to be going through his day but very soon it becomes clear that he's getting ready to move or leave. He gets rid of his cat, removes stuff from his office. There is no conversation about this. No voiceover. Just a man's actions that we are supposed to interpret. Cut to the woods and a kind of resort full of other people from the city: everyone is given a uniform and various options for courses: water survival, combat, guns and shooting, etc.

It turns out that the resort is a survival camp and all these city people are training for kind of impending doom or apocalypse. This sense of tension infects the movie, you're waiting for something to happen...meanwhile, rockets or missiles or maybe asteroids keep flying through the sky and exploding somewhere in the distance.

Gorgeous Argentine countryside is a main character

The aspect of this film which is hard to get your head around is the fact that there is very little dialogue: the characters are almost like robots, doing what they're told to do with no emotion whatsoever. There are no characters to hang your expectations onto.

But these facts really make you think about what it is to see a movie: how the emotional component of a film is really key to connecting with the audience. Emotion is almost the starting point of any film. But not here. No characters. No emotion. One almost asks oneself if this is even a film?! Of course, it is, but it's unlike any film I've ever seen.

As I walked out, I just kept asking myself: what just happened? What was that about? What did that all mean?!

Parabellum is the first feature film by Austrian director Lukas Valenta Rinner. Unfortunately, the film only plays once more Tuesday, September 1 at 11:30am...

I love film festivals! At work this week so limited time but I'm trying to squeeze in as many as I can.