There is no venue quite as fitting as Edinburgh for a book festival. In 2004, it was declared as UNESCO’s first City of Literature. The city was once home to the likes of Sir Walter Scott, Robert Burns, David Hume, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Adam Smith, Muriel Spark, and Robert Louis. Stevenson. It continues to inspire writers like Ian McEwan, Ian Rankin, Irvine Welsh, Howard Jacobson, and its most present, famous literary resident, J.K. Rowling. For a few pounds, you can go on the Literary Walking Tour or on the Literary Pub Tour. For free, you can also visit the Writer’s Museum, gawk at the statues of dead authors, or stand in line at one of the cafes where famous authors once drafted their masterpieces. It is the city that sparked the imagination of Peter Pan’s creator J.M. Barrie and immortalized the world’s most famous literary dog, Grayfriars Bobby. And ever year, writers and book enthusiasts swarm in to celebrate the written word.[break]
“Edinburgh provides a brilliant backdrop with huge names who are also supporters and friends of the festival. All year through, we work on organizing, coordinating and scheduling, hoping that people will turn up. And when we open and people turn up, it’s always amazing, almost as if those eleven months of planning never happened,” says Roland Gulliver, program manager of Edinburgh International Book Festival (EIBF).
This year, when the festival ended on August 27, the organizers announced that they had had an approximate of 225,000 visitors in the small, tented area of Charlotte Square Gardens. With more than 800 authors and 750 events, the festival’s director called it the “Olympics of the mind.”
Here is a patchwork of glimpses from some of the festival’s highlights, and excerpts from various conversations:
Ian McEwan launched his 13th novel, Sweet Tooth, at the EIBF
“The book began with my fascination of the Encounter literary magazine scandal, which was funded covertly by the CIA. It was a rather good magazine. The CIA poured millions into culture in those days. I wouldn’t take state shillings but I do take the Arts Council money and I listen to the BBC. Back then, there was an information and research department which helped make sure George Orwell’s 1984 was translated into all languages of the Communist nations. And it made me think. This is where secrecy and literature meet, and is sort of the basis for Sweet Tooth.
“Like my fictional character, Tom, I was in Sussex, wrote short stories, hung around Ian Hamilton and Martin Amis. I gave Tom some of my stories also, an abandoned novel about dystopia. We all wrote about dystopia in the 70s. My heroine is a Cambridge graduate. She couldn’t be from Sussex. No one becomes a spy from Sussex University, it just is not possible.
“In the early 20th century, literary modernism happened and we can’t pretend it didn’t. You can’t write like the old Masters did. I myself like a damned good story with a strong character. I like the sheen of social realism, like to reflect. My two characters – Serena and Tom – have widely divergent tastes in literature. She likes what she can relate to. He likes Pynchon and the metaphysical. The novel itself is intended to satisfy them both.
“I am influenced by American post-war writers like Saul Bellow, Thomas Mann, Italo Calvino before Cosmicomics. Calvino was a wonderful writer, wrote with a larger, political theme – The Watcher is a great story. Those kinds of writers meant a lot to me, writers of beautifully poised things.”
Zadie Smith also launched her book N-W at the EIBF. An experimental and technically surprising book, here are snippets from her conversation“I wrote the first lines a long time ago, years ago and wrote it, led by no plan. I set myself only one rule that was to write it in a way that the book needed to be – in language, it could only exist in language. Not through music or through film. It is a mosaic that is being shattered in many ways. It took me a long time to write it. I didn’t mean to take so long. Every section was a struggle. I really wanted to write about the state of being alive. That is what all novels are to me. In fiction, the tendency is to overstretch, to connect, tie everything up neatly, but it doesn’t always have be that way.
“Plot is a great weakness of mine and it was when I let it be that it came together by itself. N-W is about four different people whose lives are crossed in London. Each section suggested another and it went on like that. Writing is like being a jazz musician, adjusting tone or color. If you are wise, you listen to that some kind of feeling and not write with a dogmatic message. We all experience time differently and that’s perhaps what I was trying to write about. For five years, I was five. I’m 35 now and suddenly tomorrow I’ll be 36. Time speeds up as we grow old. How did that happen? My generation has no visceral sense of life like the medieval English did. When I was writing N-W, I was reading a bit of existentialism. You have to find your own meaning in life, you can’t sit and expect it to come to you. Discovering what kind of person you are is a surprise. I have no sense of what I am like in any aspect. The existential question never changes. You are born. If you are lucky you live for seventy-five to eighty years and in the middle, you have got to do something. There are two facts of life: life is brutish, short, and infinitely unfair; and life is great and beautiful. Both are true.
“Every novelist has to have something that’s easy for them or the writing process becomes too hard. Each writer has their own strengths, and for me, I’m lucky it is dialogue. Dialogue isn’t hard for me. I love to hear people talk, I’m not an eavesdropper, but the way people talk, their accent, slang, I find it interesting.
“This book is also about class. In London, class is a cocoon. There is no communication between classes, it is a city of extremes. Sometimes people from one class look at another in pity or that their life is hard. But I’ve been in different classes, and what everyone wants really is equality of opportunity. People aren’t lacking in skills but they want to be able to use the skills they have to the top of their abilities.
“But class is also self-forgetful. Money is forgetful. It’s very hard to be genuinely alive to another’s way of life.
“It takes me a long time to digest something. I move at a slow pace and being allowed to think for a long time suits me better. I am obsessed with being edited. I need lots of people to edit. I always want more. As people we are delusional and we think that because you wrote it, it is good. We need a lot of help. I am a reader first and I want a novel to be good. I want something fresh to read on every page.”
Susannah Clapp, author of A Card from Angela Carter, on Angela Carter
“I met Angela when I was with the London Review of Books and we needed long essays. People say Christopher Hitchens or Susan Sontag are the greatest essayists of the 20th century but I disagree. Angela was among the best. She came into our office, a tiny room behind a curtain back then, wearing a coat with flying white hair. She was one of the few women who let her hair go white and she looked like a witch or a fairy. She was a famous author already and was courted everywhere. When she was going to die of lung cancer, she made me her literary executor. And I went to her house, I had been there before, but never to the basement, downstairs. She wasn’t hippie exactly but this place was more 60s, rather tumbly and colorful with strange things on the wall and hanging from the ceiling. It was in contrast to the upstairs, which was 50s, sober, plain and modest. She had a battered, gray filing cabinet, and after she passed away, I went through it looking for an undiscovered novel or short stories. There were several unpublished screenplays, and wonderful crayon pictures. One synopsis for a fictional story on Jane Eyre’s stepdaughter, nothing to publish really. There were also poems, which came as a surprise but she had published poems in small magazines. She wrote poems in a way that looked forward to her fiction. She had journals, with writing notes on one page and everyday life details on the other. She made lists of films she had seen and the books she was reading. She loved the movies. Her screenplays were unsuccessful because her language was too rich. The National Theater commissioned one and she was furious when they didn’t use it. Writers never get over that kind of thing. The wireless radio was important to her though. She said, “On the wireless, the pictures are even better.”
“Angela, she was wild and unapologetic. Her own voice was rather surprising and distinctive. Not powerful at all but rather genteel. She rather prided herself in her ability to curse. She was great with pauses and quite foul-mouthed.
“I hadn’t really planned to write on her. I was commissioned to write a series on postcards. Postcards can be secretive and can reveal so much about a person and Angela sent quite a lot of postcards. I had fourteen or fifteen of them from her. And when I started working on her, the idea was to find the disparity or the relation between the picture on the postcard and what was written on the back.”
Howard Jacobson, winner of the Man Booker Prize 2010, launched Zoo Time at the festival. His takes on the novel
The Finkler Question was out and there were reviews and criticisms. The signs were bad. I had overthought it and so on. Like Kingsley Amis says, start a new novel as soon as the last one is done. Be unfaithful to your novel. Right, I thought, I’ll go out with a blaze, I’ll make fun of myself. And I was having a great time writing this novel. Then they gave me the Man Booker Prize! I had to put it aside. But a few years after the Prize, I realized, things were ridiculous still. So I picked it up again and had great fun writing it. My novel, this one, is the most exhilarating book about despondency.“My main character, Guy Ableman, is a novelist and I make fun of him. I would not want to write a sanctimonious novel about a novelist writing. It’s a kind of dystopian novel with publishers shooting themselves all over the place and literary agents hiding in the lavatories. But really, if we lose the novel, we lose something crucial. Opinions are trash. Art subverts opinion and there is no one truth. When you read a novel, ideologies, political opinions and stances on anything just die. Even Tolstoy who started writing Anna Karenina from a judgmental point of view, ended up doing just the opposite. You become a different character, see the world from a different point of view.
“The joke in my book is that everybody is writing and nobody is reading. Today, that’s the paradox. When you go to literary festivals and see the crowds, you would think that everything is as healthy as can be. But it isn’t. Don’t get me wrong, I love doing literary festivals. A little too much than is good for me, I think. It’s not a great crime for a person to try writing and fail to write a good book. The unforgivable crime is the reader who does not know that the book isn’t any good. People say they dislike literature because they don’t ‘identify’ or ‘sympathize’ with the main character. Whoever told anyone that they should read a book to find themselves? The whole sense of what literature is, what it is for, has been lost.
“I want to write the most horrible, wretch-making book but I fear it’s a matter of concern that I have been too well brought-up. To be a good reader, you have to have a strong stomach. The better the reader, the stronger the stomach.”
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