‘Wallstrip’ in need of a new home

Posted on December 3, 2010 by Sam Dub

Wallstrip is a wall sized comic strip commissioned by Southbank Centre as part of Festival Brazil 2010. Renown comic book artists Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá worked with Southbank Centre’s Young Curators to create Wallstrip, reflecting the stories and characters they met throughout both Festival Brazil and the London Literature Festival.

Would you like the chance to rehome this unique artwork? It is made up of 10 boards, which are each 1.525m wide, so it’s about 15metres long. The hoarding is slightly sloping, with one end 3m high, and the other 2.25m high. See more photos here.

You’d need to come and collect the boards from us. If you are interested and have enough space to give it a new home then please contact Louise Abbotts on email louise.abbotts@southbankcentre.co.uk or by phone 020 7960 4307

Filed under: London Literature Festival 2010 | 1 Comment »

Elaine Feinstein, Sylvia Fischerova, Tomaz Salamun & Kristina Ehin: Poetry From The New Europe.

Posted on November 5, 2010 by Sara Debevec

As I was born in Serbia and grew up in Poland, I have experienced the fall of Communism from two different cultures and arguably two different sides of the iron curtain. 1989 brought freedom and economic growth to Poland whilst Serbia was to suffer a decade of struggle and humiliation under the Milosevic regime.  I was very curious to hear the experiences of poets from the so-called New Europe and listen to poetry from and about its shifting boundaries. I must admit I felt very entangled in it- literally. At times I would read the subtitles and understand a few words from the original that the poets were reciting (Czech and Slovenian are similar to Polish and Serbian). I had to shut my ears and focus on reading the translations. There was a language chaos around me and I was enjoying the ride.

Kristiina Ehin was the first on stage. She read her poetry in both English and Estonian and her voice was soothing. She wore a long navy dress with the names of her female ancestors to match one of her deeply sensual and beautiful poems. She talked of motherhood, the moon, fragility and the strength of nature. Her poetry evoked in me both sadness of the passing of time and happiness about the present, but most of all I felt her poetry came from the heart. I could visualize the rain on the hard concrete on her terrace and the warmth of her new born baby’s nose. All the most intimate moments in her life were there, swirling around her on that stage.

Sylva Fischerová was very much different from Ehin. Her appearance on the stage was that of a professor – she knew she wanted to challenge her audience. Her poetry was heavy and sharp. She addressed the past with much thought and careful analysis searching for and struggling with the answers. She was colliding with her words, moulding and shaping the world around her with her poetry.

Sorrow drinks beer. Irony
sips whiskey. She’s my sister:
the same as me, but
where I cry she laughs.

Tomaz Salamun’s poetry says a lot. I must admit there was a lot to take in. It was fast. It was brave. It was like a rock and water at the same time. Intergalaxic. I found it easier to take in at home. In my own space, reading the poems aloud to myself. There is a sort of rhythm to them – a natural rhythm of nature and life and everything in between. His poems are a contradiction – both Godlike and Humanlike at the same time.

I have a wife who loves me.
Sometimes I’m afraid she loves me
More than I love her and I get sad and
depressed. 
I’m happiest in my sleep and when I write.
The masters pass me along from hand to hand.
That’s essential. It’s just as essential as
growing is for trees. A tree needs earth.
I need earth so I won’t go mad

And then there was Elanie Feinstein, a grandmother I wish I’d have had. She is full of adventure. Eighty years old with a spirit of a twenty year old. She asked to see her audience; ‘I don’t know if this is bad but I just can’t see you all down there, can we put some light over here?’ She had traveled the world and she wrote a collection of poems on migration entitled Cities in which each poem represented a city she had traveled to or lived in. She finished with a poem by a celebrated Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva’s, An Attempt at Jelousy – a pleasant ending to a thoughtful evening.

How is your life with the other one,
simpler, isn’t it? One stroke of the oar
then a long coastline, and soon
even the memory of me

will be a floating island
(in the sky, not on the waters):
spirits, spirits, you will be
sisters, and never lovers (…)

How is your life with an ordinary
woman? without godhead?
Now that your sovereign has
been deposed (and you have stepped down) (…)

How is your life? Are you
healthy? How do you sing?
How do you deal with the pain
of an undying conscience, poor man? (…)

Tell me: are you happy? (…)
Not? In a shallow pit How is
your life, my love? Is it as
hard as mine with another man?

Filed under: London Literature Festival 2010, Poetry International 2010 | Tagged: , , , | Leave a Comment »

The Tweetriter and its Tales pt.2

Posted on August 9, 2010 by chrisgps

Arising from the desire to create an analogue alternative to the online games, competitions and celebrity takeovers taking place on twitter as part of Southbank Centre’s Litweeter Festival, the “Tweetwriter” was accordingly created.

The Tweetwriter, to the rough and untrained eye, could easily have been mistaken for an ordinary domestic typewriter, but it differed in three key and important ways:

1.) It was blue and had birds

2.) It had a twitter themed name

3.) It could only be typed on using 140 characters

The Tweetwriter perched proudly at a number of London Literature Festival’s events, and members of the public were invited to continue the story of the “Tweetwriter Tales”, using no more than 140 characters.

Below are some of the stories the Tweetriter spun. Whilst reading the tales, it is interesting to consider how the writers, strangers to each other, are talking through their development of the plot, sometimes drawing out subtleties in passages the original author may have been oblivious to, and sometimes rejecting the predictable and logical to revolutionise, rather than evolve the story.

The Tweetwriter Tales pt.3

17.07.10

A large proportion of the men were struggling red faced up the slight incline, sweat pouring from their deeply wrinkled brows.

It was hard to believe they were still only 14.

“Hello hello how are you my name is John”

“And the boy?” mumbled George, one of the less eloquent adolescents, in a knackered tone.

But, why is Geroge so tired? We have to understand this mystery! Maybe he has been transformed by a witch into a big frog. And have you ever felt like a frog? It’s very tiring…

Try not to be tired John; ask Barbara Kingsolver what the next twist in the plot should be when she has finished her book signing.

But the twist has not yet arrived and the plot is still to thicken. Agreed,, being a frog can be tiring, but working in Egypt as a 14 year old boy for 16 hours a day can turn you into an old man in less than 3 weeks. For George and the rest of the boys, working on the pyramids is the only life they have known.

For when one of the worlds greatest wonders is destroyed by meteor showers and the tourism trade is almost non existent, the only option is to rebuild the nations pride using any means necessary

The Tweetwriter Tales pt.4

17.07.10

The cat leapt from the top of the kitchen top onto the chequered lino floor. A trail of blood red footprints were left behind. Feathers stuck gruesomely around its mouth. A slow grin lingered.

The carcass that remained was not a pigeon however, not even a sparrow or a crow, but something altogether more gruesome…

A mix of the three

One beady eye still open, the wing stuggled its last.

The pigeonsparrowcrow was no more. And kitty was looking for a new adventure..

She turned around dropping the animal and fled into the night

It escaped and went to its nest. He couldn’t see properly with his beady one eye so the poor birds broken wing accidentally broke with the gushing wind, and suddenly fell down towards the busy dusty road.

Before he ran passed clutching her hand the young girl screaming as he pulled her down the road. The man picked up the injured bird and passed it to the screaming girl in a bid to silence her.

But she would not shut up, so he gave her a big slap. However she cried louder. At this he realised she would not be silenced and apologised. She beamed up at him…

How very strange to have the devil beaming right at you. You see, she likes to keep her friends close but her enemies closer. He is her enemy. But she wants something he has,

“Nothing you say that I think is worth listening to, you get me? Yesterday I was disappointed that we were in the presence of such ridiculous people. Did you know that I was lost of things to say with them? Anyways I he doesn’t forget…”

Whilst the two continued to converse, out of the nearby tower block came a knight in shinning armour on his trusty steed. He brandished his cardboard sword and charged towards the two of them.

She realised she was in love with him. The man of her dreams. He was cute like no other.

So they shared cherry buns iced with pink icing, and a flock of tiny birds pecked crumbs and lifted her aloft into the cloudless night sky.

Meantime however, with the knight’s back turned, a dragon crept onto the royal estate in a fiery fury, looking to cause some trouble.

He saw the lovely pink icing and he decided to breath fire on it. He opened his mouth but all he could do was stare. He wondered if breathing flames onto such delicious icing would be a sing, so he ate the icing instead. “Mmmm yum” he said. I could just do with a cigarette after that. He took out a cigarette and tried to light it with the flames of his breath but he couldn’t light it. He just couldn’t get the flames to appear at all. I suppose fire and icing just don’t mix.

Filed under: London Literature Festival 2010 | Leave a Comment »

The Tweetwriter and its Tales pt.1

Posted on August 2, 2010 by chrisgps

Arising from the desire to create an analogue alternative to the online games, competitions and celebrity takeovers taking place on twitter as part of Southbank Centre’s Litweeter Festival, the “Tweetwriter” was accordingly created.

The Tweetwriter, to the rough and untrained eye, could easily have been mistaken for an ordinary domestic typewriter, but it differed in three key and important ways:

1.) It was blue and had birds

2.) It had a twitter themed name

3.) It could only be typed on using 140 characters

The Tweetwriter perched proudly at a number of London Literature Festival’s events, and members of the public were invited to continue the story of the “Tweetwriter Tales”, using no more than 140 characters.

Below are some of the stories the Tweetriter spun. Whilst reading the tales, it is interesting to consider how the writers, strangers to each other, are talking through their development of the plot, sometimes drawing out subtleties in passages the original author may have been oblivious to, and sometimes rejecting the predictable and logical to revolutionise, rather than evolve the story.


The Tweetwriter Tales 1

07.07.10

They met at a literature night. Mid humid concrete left her feet balmy. He watched as she ordered another ice water. She didn’t see him at first.

She was absorbed by the colour of the wine bottles.

The wine bottles glistened and shone deeply and sweetly as she slowly looked up from her ice water

She noticed a rolled up piece of paper stuffed into one of the bottles

A shopping list: 1x eggs, 1x costa rican, 1x salmon, 1x gun

She thought of her lover, Gina, and her beautiful smile, knew that all was good, that they were going tomorrow to the beach. She crossed the gun off the list.

Damn the iced water, she ordered a neat gin and downed it in one. She felt the booze course through her bitter veins with a feeling of intense satisfaction, tonight would be the night that everything she has previously thought would conflagrate in the exercise of her selfish will, she decided,

although it was likely that the football would be on, again. She sighed brushing auburn locks from a furrowed brown. Murder was a terrible thing, but murder it must be…murder most foul

and so off she set with her eggs and her gun. The man at the bar, seeing her leave, suddenly stood up…

and began to follow her out the door carrying a plastic bag…containing a piece of salmon. He followed her down the road, feeling the bitter night bite at his neck.

As she neared the front door of her first story flat she was confused to find it half open, a scattering of broken glass on the doorstep.

She continued cautiously, the eggs and gun still in her hand, the man still a measured distance behind her

The Tweetwriter Tales 2

14.07.10

The wealthy few tossed their luxurious scraps for us worms to scramble and fight over.

Some of us worms developed a taste for those scraps and clawed their way to the top of the pile.

I think there is as was the unspoken free association of thought, living images and time spent well following art.

Coming back to the subject of worms, these catch the time in the morning. (just before breakfast)

Breakfast is good especially with jam and tea followed by a delightful horse ride.

Filed under: London Literature Festival 2010 | 1 Comment »

Gary Younge asks ‘Who are we?’

Posted on July 21, 2010 by Alex Rowse

I have a confession to make. On Tuesday the 6th of July I had the opportunity to speak to the writer and journalist Gary Younge ahead of the discussion of his latest book, ‘Who Are We- And Should It Matter in the 21st Century?’, in the Purcell Room at the Queen Elizabeth Hall. And I’ve been sitting on this chat for far too long. The problem is that Gary is far too an intelligent and eloquent journalist for a sapling of a journalist like me to feel comfortable writing about, but it was an absolute pleasure to talk to a man who I admire for his writing, his liberalism and his humanity.

Bidisha, who chaired the event, blogged about it here as did Comfort here.

‘Who Are We?..’ discusses the problematic nature of the labels of race, religion and gender, when really it is our experiences as humans that shape who we really are. Gary draws on case studies from all over the globe to highlight the notion that what our individual ‘identities’ are too often depends on who is judging or asking- but we should find a common higher ground to overcome the issues that come hand in hand with identity. The numbers of people with mixed-race heritage are rising, Britain is in a quandary over the influx of immigrants to its shores and to top it all there is a test of ‘Britishness’ for those hoping to make the move to ‘our green and pleasant land’. We don’t know who we are, and there is no better time for this book.

As a black man of Barbadian heritage who grew up in England and now lives in New York, Gary Younge has personal experience of the difficulties involved in being asked where one is from, . Like him, when I’m asked where I’m from I struggle, as generally the asker is not satisfied with ‘West Sussex’ when they can see Chinese blood in me. What genuinely aggravates me is that pesky ‘equal opportunities’ form where I find myself reluctantly ticking the ‘Mixed-other’ box. But as Gary says ‘those boxes are not meant to make us feel good, but to give us a sense of what’s going on.’ He points out France as a country that does not track race within it’s census, as they say that everyone is French. But not everyone is treated as French, and Gary advocates the census as a way to ‘bring order to the chaos’.

‘Race is nonsense, but it’s a nonsense that has meaning unfortunately. There is only one race, and that’s the human race. It’s how we’re split up that has meaning.’

Universal experience is examined within ‘Who Are We?…’ and it’s Gary’s own experiences on his travels across America that provided a catalyst for the writing of this book. ‘What I had been thinking was made particularly acute by the responses to 9/11 where we were forced to choose between American Imperialism or Muslim Fundamentalism. It forced us to pick sides when there should have been more space, more human space.’ It is that idea of humanity as the higher common ground that threads throughout ‘Who Are We?’ and through merely talking to Gary. When he says such things as ‘I look forward to the day when race is as meaningless as height’, it does not sound idealistic but achievable, and that was the audible consensus of the audience after hearing him speak. Inspiration is contagious it seems.

I asked Gary how he would respond to the question of his own identity now, having solidified his ideas into a book. His honest answer was that becoming a father had changed how he perceives himself far more than writing ‘Who Are We?…’ did, but his response to others would depend upon who they were. At the event he told a story about his son at nursery who was told by three different children: ‘you’re black’. The mother of the one white child freaked out. It’s amusing but also telling about politics involved with identity. For instance (and I’m wary of racial categories now) a young white person asking Gary where he is from, could very well get a different response to an elder black person. But the simple question ‘who are you?’? For the author of an incredibly thought-provoking book, the answer would be ‘me? I’m Gary.’

alexrowse.blogspot.com

Filed under: London Literature Festival 2010, Misc | Tagged: , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

My Animal Life

Posted on July 20, 2010 by nkechi2010

The impression that  Maggie Gee gave me at her event for  My Animal Life,  was that writing for her was like food itself. It nourished her at the same time though I got the impression that writing helps her to plot her way through life. For she touched upon antidotes from her life with so much passion and conviction that I was pulled me into her inner world  as a writer and most importantly she touched upon her relationship with writing, self, others and life. All on a Sunday afternoon.

Maggie is a petite woman with a clear etched out sensibility on how she feels about the writing industry and her role as a writer in it. And it was with these insights that she had nurtured life into the thirteen books that she has written. Indeed Maggie lead us through various stories on her life  all with the gaiety and  optimism she has for life. As a writer she “Always writes about something that is of burning interest” In the case of My Animal Life, her memoir the  need to write was prompted by a short illness. This reminded Maggie of her mortality and also in case she “Got caught out with death”. Another reason for writing her memoir was that she has a daughter and she felt that she had never sat down long enough  to talk to  her about life.

And so we are taken through Maggie’s life. Although her background is not a literary one she notes,  her drive to write was prompted by her need to  be ” free, truthful and authentic with a universal voice” I was then led to the view that for Maggie her memoir served as her affirmation as she puts it  she is “Just not brains on legs, but   humans have souls” so in her memoir she touches on the frailties of human lives. “Sex and death are part of life, so is science. These are ways of understanding the world we wish to write about. “Writing can be like a performance, like a tight rope walker, when you are working you have the most wonderful feeling, yet there is no safety net!”

Filed under: London Literature Festival 2010, Misc | 1 Comment »

Slavoj Žižek, Two Types of Rabble

Posted on July 20, 2010 by Slavoj Žižek

In talking about rabble, Hegel latently draws a key distinction (in the guise of the opposition between the two excesses of poverty and wealth) elaborated by Frank Ruda: members of rabble (i.e., those excluded from the sphere of rights and freedoms) “can be structurally differentiated into two types: there are the poor and there are the gamblers. Anyone can non-arbitrarily become poor, but only the one that arbitrarily decides not to satisfy his egoist needs and desires by working can become a gambler. He relies fully on the contingent movement of bourgeois economy and hopes to secure his own subsistence in an equally contingent manner – for example by contingently gaining money on the stock-market.” The excessively wealthy are thus also a species of rabble in the sense that they violate the rules of (or exclude themselves from) the sphere of duties and freedoms: they not only demand from society to provide for their subsistence without work, they are de facto provided for such a life. Consequently, while Hegel criticizes the position of the rabble as being the position of an irrational particularity that egoistically opposes its mere particular interests against the existing and rationally organized universality, this differentiation between the two distinct rabbles demonstrates that only the rich rabble falls under Hegel’s verdict: “While the rich rabble is, as Hegel judges correctly, a mere particular rabble, the poor rabble contains, against Hegel’s judgment, a latent universal dimension that is not even inferior to the universality of the Hegelian conception of ethics.”

One can thus demonstrate that, in the case of rabble, Hegel was inconsistent with regard to his own matrix of the dialectical process, de facto regressing from the properly dialectical notion of totality to a corporate model of the social Whole. But does this mean that all we have to do here is to enact the passage from Hegel to Marx? Is the inconsistency resolved when we replace rabble with proletariat as the “universal class”? One can argue that, on the contrary, the position of “universal rabble” perfectly renders the plight of today’s new proletarians. The classic working class is exploited through their very participation in the sphere of rights and freedoms, i.e., their de facto enslavement is realized through the very form of their autonomy and freedom, through working in order to provide for their subsistence. Today’s rabble is denied even the right to be exploited through work, its status oscillating between that of a victim provided for by charitable humanitarian help and that of a terrorist to be contained or crushed; and, exactly as described by Hegel, they sometimes formulate their demand as the demand for subsistence without work (like the Somalia pirates).

Slavoj Žižek’s new book Living in the End Times is available from http://zizek.us/books/

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The Prince of Pop Culture

Posted on July 19, 2010 by Alex Rowse

Bret Easton Ellis’s stint of publicity in the UK for ‘Imperial Bedrooms’ includes a video interview with the Guardian in which he develops some of the topics that were up for discussion in last week’s reading and Q&A in the Queen Elizabeth Hall.

You can view the video here.

It’s interesting viewing for anyone who missed out on the LLF event as he’s such a dry, sarcastic character- really what you’d expect from reading his novels. Susie Feay, our chair for evening, got some great answers out of him including the information that ‘a novel comes from pain and chaos’, which really does nothing to dispel the myth that creative people are all manic depressives. My regret is not asking Ellis what he meant by stating in the audience’s Q&A that he didn’t see what was so wrong with misogyny. I hope he was joking, just as he pretended not to know who Baudrillard is, but Ellis pointing out that Hemingway was a misogynist in his time does in no way mean that it’s acceptable in ours.

The audience’s Q&A did descend into comedic chaos as one…two…three questions about Ellis’s fondness for reality television show ‘The Hills’ were asked, and the ‘American Psycho’ author had no qualms about rejecting questions about his philosophical influences that he didn’t want to answer. It was hilarious, but also a shame as for a person who has never been a huge fan of Ellis’s, I was looking forward to finding out more about the man who writes the most brutal sex scenes I’ve ever heard of. That’s why I find this video interview so compelling. At Southbank Centre he touched upon the violence within his work, drily saying that ‘I guess I should have known that people are emotional even though a book is made up with made up people’ and here  he goes a little deeper with the Guardian in his discussion of the link between love and sadism.

All credit for the title to Charlotte, my fellow Storyboxer.

alexrowse.blogspot.com

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Population remix….

Posted on July 18, 2010 by nkechi2010

In my previous post, on the Population extravaganza I described how I was totally captivated by the event. I decided to catch up with Pianist, Peter Edwards.  I was drawn to do this, as by coincidence a friend had sent me a link for a documentary that Peter has been involved in a month or so before the literature festival began. Read on to find out more.

What’s your role in Tomorrow’ Warriors?

I’m the musical director of the Tomorrow’s Warrior’s Jazz Orchestra. I was also  on the Tomorrow’s Warriors artistic development programme from 2005-8 under the mentorship of founder of Tomorrow’s Warriors – Gary Crosby OBE.

I was thoroughly mesmerised by Population at the Southbank. During your introduction at the event you mentioned that Population began as a jamming session, How did you all take that leap from jamming to creating pieces?

Gary had wanted to do a project with Lemn Sissay for some time and in December 2008 they managed to find time in their very busy schedules to discuss a potential project. After pitching the idea of a music and poetry
project, Gary called me in to participate in a series of sessions with himself and Lemn. Lemn brought in some of his poems, Gary brought his bass and I had a piano and a recording device to capture some sketches. It was a very organic process. Lemn would read a poem and I would improvise something that complimented the words. It was a lot of grooves, repeated vamps and I spent time listening back to recordings and tried to refine what we had. I think the leap came when Lemn brought ‘What if?’ (the last part of Population). Lemn liked the sketch that I had put together to accompany his poem. He asked us to play with him the following day in a tv recording that was later broadcast on Channel 4  http://www.dvdance.eu/lemn.html The project just grew from what we had achieved with What if ? For me that poem was the prototype all the music in population.

How did you arrive at the themes (which include the cosmos and Darwinism) for Population?

We had been given a performance at the Science and Arts festival which was commissioned by The Royal Society. The remit for the project was that the themes should be scientific. I did some research on the history of The Royal Society and I came up topic areas like the cosmos, time, knowledge,  electricity and wrote some sketches for each theme. Lemn sent me themes that he was writing on (Darwinism, seeing near and far etc, the first meeting of the royal society etc) and then when the 3 of us got together again we  matched the appropriate poem to go with the music and developed a rough structure for each piece.

How did Dennis Bovell get involved in the project?

Lemn was very keen to have some sort of intervention from an outside source. Gary suggested that Dennis would be a good person to manipulate sounds created by the band. It turned out to be an inspired choice.

How did you navigate the relationship between the poetry and music in Population?

I tried to make it was simple as possible at first. The sketches of the pieces only had piano and bass so I decided to restrict passages where Lemn was going to read to a rhythm section (piano bass drums) accompaniment.
The ensemble music was written around that so that so there was a dialogue between Lemn and the band. I tried to think of Lemn like a solo instrument and was very conscious not to write to much music underneath his words. It’s very similar to writing band accompaniment for an instrumental solo.

What future plans, if any do you all have of working together?

Population was very well received so fingers crossed we’ll be doing it again in the near future.

There is also a fascinating documentary “The Queens Suite”about your journey of discovery with the work of Duke Ellington, How did this journey begin?

It was another project that Gary Crosby had offered to me while I was doing my masters at Trinity College of Music. I was searching for a good dissertation topic and Gary had given me a CD of the Queen’s Suite. I did a research project on the story behind The Suite and Gary suggested that we put together a jazz orchestra to play the music. Fast forward to September 2008 and the band had its first open rehearsal in the foyer of the Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank. After the rehearsal I was approached by documentary film maker Corine Dondhee who was fascinated by the music and the story of how Duke Ellington met and wrote music for Queen Elizabeth II. To find out more about the journey go to http://kck.st/cbGGo1

Filed under: London Literature Festival 2010 | Leave a Comment »

Anecdotes from The Lacuna

Posted on July 18, 2010 by Miriam Nash

Barbara Kingsolver’s talk and Q&A about her Orange Prize winning novel The Lacuna was a festival highlight for me. I finished reading the book last week and I can honestly say I’ve been missing the main characters. Despite the significant weight of its 670 pages, I have carried it everywhere for over a month. One day, during a particularly compelling part of the story, I left my copy at home and had to endure the woman next to me on the tube tucking into hers with relish. I was further ahead, but I still read over her shoulder.

The Lacuna tells the tale of Harrison Shepherd, household cook and novelist, who crosses between Mexico and the USA charting artistic, political and personal happenings from 1929 – 1951. In a blog post below, Bidisha gives an excellent introduction to Kingsolver and the novel, so here I will share a few of my favourite anecdotes from Kingsolver’s talk.

I always wonder how novelists arrive at their titles and the central images of their stories. When I first picked up The Lacuna, I wasn’t sure what the title-word meant. Looking it up revealed a multi-layered meaning:

An unfilled space or interval; a missing portion in a book or manuscript; a cavity or depression, especially in bone. (Mac Dictionary)

All of these things are central to the novel, so I expected Kingsolver had come up with it early on in her writing process. In fact, it arrived at the eleventh hour. Six years into the writing, she had no idea what the novel was called. Working on a passage in which Harrison explores a cave in Isla Pixol, Mexico, she reached for her Roget’s thesaurus and looked up ‘cave’….’grotto, vault, crypt, lacuna’. Lacuna – she ‘heard the angels singing!’ A moment when everything fell into place. Read the novel and you’ll see why she was so excited.

Kingsolver’s talk was full of warm and revealing stories like this. As Bidisha says, she is a fantastic speaker as well as writer. She talked about the grief she is now receiving from translators, due to the fact that for the first 271 pages of the novel, Harrison’s diary does not include a single use of the first person – hard to translate but even harder to write. This is an essential device in building him as a character who is uneasy about being present in the world – even in his personal journal. Later this privacy will be stripped from him by the Communist witch-hunts of McCarthyism.

Anyone who reads the novel will discover what a thorough and dedicated researcher Kingsolver is. She begins with ‘big ideas’, transforms them into plot  (‘I have to keep you turning the pages’), and then comes the research. She finds out exactly what the gaps in her knowledge are before she makes trips to the locations of her novels. ‘There isn’t any Google Smell’, she points out, explaining the importance of being able to convey the authentic smell, taste and touch of a place. ‘If I just imagined it, it would be boring’ she says. I very much doubt that, but the way she manages to balance intense historical and cultural research with pure imagination astounds me.

‘I clean my office once per book!’ she tells us. The boxes, photographs and piles of papers that have become The Lacuna have now been cleared away. The next book is moving in.

Filed under: London Literature Festival 2010 | Tagged: , , , | Leave a Comment »

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