Summer Reading is a Breeze

Posted By: Adrian Slatcher, 02 July 2010

Here we have Adrian Slatcher's final Worlds Literature Festival blog, looking at a few of the readings that took place during the week.

A big thanks go to Adrian for reporting various elements of the week in such fine detail. You can find his earlier blogs in Latest News, and can also visit his The Art of Fiction blog and follow @adrianslatcher on twitter. 

The "book group" has been reaching new audiences and in new ways this summer in Norwich with the Summer Reads programme, where a series of books have been selected and promoted through local bookshops and libraries. It was therefore a particular pleasure, as part of the Worlds Literature Festival, to see three of the writers on that programme invited to Norwich to read at the Millennium Library.



A large crowd indicated the popularity of this initiative, and listeners were treated to extracts from three very different novels. Naomi Alderman's second novel The Lessons saw us transported to a hot summer afternoon with a group of Oxford University students who are acting as reluctant babysitters to a young boy. As he climbs trees, pretending to be a monkey, they close their eyes and lie languidly in the sun. He climbs higher and highter into the tree, out of their easy grasp, and we feel that this ordinary afternoon is going to turn into something potentially more momentous. She leaves the readers at a crucial point in the story, wanting for more.

In contrast Mick Jackson's The Widow's Tale has the male author taking on the persona of his protagonist, a sharp, edgy, somewhat cantankerous old lady. It's a great act of literary ventroquilism. The third writer Nii Ayikwei Parkes, reads from his novel, Tail of the Blue Bird, set in his native Ghana. A dark, funny tale of an underwritten community, the listeners are immediately transported to a setting that few of us would know directly. What is impressive is how he makes few concessions to explaining the world he's discussing, but assumes his audience will understand.



Along with other authors reading this week, J.M. Coetzee, Simmone  Howell and Chloe Hooper, these books form an impressive and eclectic reading list.
 
Sex or Work
 
Sex and work. What else is there? We gathered at the new Thomas Paine lecture theatre at UEA for a special Granta night, where their two last issues, “Sex” and “Work” were given away in our goody bag – which one did you get?


 
Granta has grown in size, it’s a thicker volume than I remembered; but it’s also changed, seemingly less worthy, more sprightly, and this evening gave Norwich an opportunity to experience the new Granta – with a range of writers who have been, or are about to be published in the magazine. The theme for the night was the forthcoming Granta anthology “Going Back” – incidentally the name of my favourite Dusty Springfield song – and we were given a series of readings that made us reconsider our ideas of the familiar.
 
First on stage was Jon McGregor. He read from his latest novel Even the Dogs and gave a viscerating account of a particular new world order, which followed the drug crop from Afghanistani poppy fields to a vandalised phone box in an English provincial town.
 
Jon kickstarted an evening that also gave us Evie Wyld, reading a somewhat personal piece, Colin Grant, with his memoir about his father, and Granta stalwart Andrew O’Hagan leaving the audience in stitches with an extract from his new novel written from the unexpected perspective of Marilyn Monroe’s dog.
 
Fantastic as the readings were, the discussion afterwards was equally revealing. Granta editor Ellah Allfrey and Writers’ Centre Norwich’s Chris Gribble led a fascinating discussion. Granta has always broken down the borders between fiction and non-fiction, and each of these writers had, in some ways, confronted their own particular conflicts in the pieces they had written for the magazine.
 
 
Australians in Europe
 
The final night of readings as part of Worlds offered up three Australian writers. Chloe Hooper’s book The Tall Man – also one of the Norwich series of summer reads –  is an investigation into the death of an aboriginal man who died in police custody, and of the policeman who was the arresting officer. Hooper’s reading resonated with the dust of the hot, dangerous place where the incident happened.


            
Sri Lankan born Michelle de Kretzer read from her novel The Lost Dog and American born Steve Amsterdam gave us a short story from his forthcoming novel of connected stories Things we didn’t see coming.
 
All three writers offered very distinct offerings, yet were, as the night advertised, distinctly “Australian Voices.”
 
Melbourne is one of the first Unesco cities of literature, a status that Norwich is currently hoping to emulate, and it was particularly rewarding to have the opportunitiy to hear a range of very different writers from the other side of the world.  In a week when the Vuvuzela’s of the World Cup could have drowned out any serious discussion, we were reminded of how stories, both fictional and real, are able to travel across oceans and still engage our attention.