Note: remember to scroll down to the bottom for picture highlights from the day.
Well this is it folks, my final diary entry of EdBookFest 2011. I know I post it a couple of days later than would have been ideal, but such is the pace and madness of EdBookFest, that I hope you will forgive me for having delayed (mainly because I hit a wall of fatigue really hard. I so need to work on my fitness and stamina 
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Urs and Helen
Although I had always intended to come into Charlotte Square today for the Will Self event at 8pm, I hadn’t expected to find myself at the Urs Widmer/Helen Walsh in the Speigeltent at 10:15. It was author/translator Donal McLaughlin who had encouraged me to come along. He’s responsible for translating Widmer’s first book to the English language, My Mother’s Language (University of Chicago Press). In Switzerland, Widmer is something of a literary legend, but in this country he is almost unheard of. On the strength of today’s event though, he’s not going to be unheard of for much longer.
Even though I was primarily at this event to see Urs Widmer, let’s not forget that there was another author there too, and she went a long way today to impressing me greatly, as well. Helen Walsh comes to EdBookFest with her third novel Go To Sleep (Canongate Books), which tells the harrowing tale of a first time mother who spirals into the grip of post-natal depression.
Walsh read first, from the first part of her book and from near the end of it, both to give us an initial impression of the chief protagonist Rachel’s mindset and thoughts on pregnancy, and to show us how far she had descended into a ‘heart of darkness’. It was a powerful reading, as I’m sure you can imagine, and any notion I had that this book was primarily for a female audience was quickly dispelled as I became more and more engaged with a prose that was filled with depth and raw emotion.
Widmer was up next, and before his translator read on his behalf he gave us a snippet of his novel in the vernacular. I can’t understand a word of German, but Widmer’s prose still rang with a certain tuneful resonance. My interest was piqued. McLaughlin took over reading three extracts from Widmer’s novel, giving us a good taste of the style of his writing. At first Widmer very much reminded me of Australian novelist, Stefan Zweig, but as the reading went on I realised that Widmer’s prose was much more extended than that. He seems to write with the same profundity as Zweig, but with more description. His prose, albeit in a translated form, was absolutely beautiful (a testament to the quality of McLauglin’s translating skills too).
Turning over to questions, chair Diane Hope, after noting that both novels were based on personal experience, asked Walsh why she chose to write a work of fiction instead of a memoir. Walsh responded by saying that fiction had always operated as a ‘safehouse’ for her. “I can run amok and be vocal and say what I want in fiction, in a way that I couldn’t in a memoir,” says Walsh. She does note however, that there is nothing of her own journey with her own son in Go To Sleep, but she couldn’t have written the novel without going in to the same heart of darkness that Rachel went to.
Speaking of his book, Widmer said that life had given him a real story that he just had to tell. However, not wishing to spoil the only subject he had for a story, he kept waiting and waiting for the right time to start writing it. “This is the kind of book that can only written at a certain age,” said Widmer, “and when the ‘heroes’ of the book are no longer alive. The trouble is the lover of this book never died. He was 90, 94, 95, and finally, with my patience running out, I started the book with the line ‘today the lover of my mother is dead’. He wasn’t dead at all.”
Widmer also revealed that because he couldn’t live with the fact that My Mother’s Lover focuses so much on his mother, and so little on his father – “it made my father look like an idiot,” said Widmer – he ended up writing a novel based on his father too (it’s called My Father’s Book, and it will be published in English this November).
There’s a little more to this event but I’ll tell you about it later. For now let it be known that I was mightily impressed with Urs Widmer (he’s going to be another big star in this country), and pleasantly surprised by the profound depth of Helen Walsh’s writing (it wasn’t that I was unimpressed before, I just hadn’t read her). I’m glad Mr. McLaughlin encouraged me along.
Meeting the amazing BookRambler
With the event finished it was time to hang around for the next eight hours for the Will Self event, which I was hugely looking forward to (it was the second ticket |I put in my shopping basket back in June ). No problem I thought. I’ll just work away with a bit of writing in my most favoured of surrounding i.e. the Spiegeltent.
I started tapping away on the keyboard, and who should come across and introduce herself, but none other than the wonderful fellow blogger, Janette Currie aka BookRambler. I’ve known Janette for a long time now but have never met her face-to-face. So it was a real pleasure finally putting a face to that name. Would it surprise you to know that Janette is both utterly charming and supremely intelligent? I wasn’t surprised either, that much comes out in her blogging, and it seems to be the run of things with everyone that I’ve met at EdBookFest this year i.e. they’re infinitely brighter and infinitely more interesting than I could ever be
Fatigue creeps in
After my chat with Janette I got back down to work, but soon realised that a real tiredness was creeping in. Hoping to shake it off I went for a stroll, only to bump in to my good mate Colin Galbraith, who accompanied me back to the Speigeltent for coffee and a chat. We had a good lengthy chat (he even managed to take this dreadful photo of me. I look demented ) before Colin had to head home for a prior engagement.
I was on my own again, and only six hours to go until the Will Self event. I started to get back to work, but soon an overbearing sense of fatigue started to wash over me again. I knew I’d finally hit the proverbial wall, and it became clear that despite my huge excitement at the prospect see Will Self later on in the day, there was no way I was going to last another six hours. It was then that I decided to make the difficult decision of calling it a day, and heading off home so that I could catch up on some much needed rest. In retrospect that was the right decision to make (I’m pretty good at listening to my body), but I’m still kicking myself for having missed Mr. Self. I know there’ll be other opportunities though, and I take comfort in knowing that.
So with my ‘bailing out’ bringing something of an anti-climax to the end of EdBookFest for me (because I have nothing scheduled for the final day), I bring my final EdBookFest diary entry for this year to a close. It was at this point that I was going to pass on my final thank-you’s and farewells, but I think that that deserves a post of it’s own.
Thank you for reading all my diary entries folks, and remember this may be my last diary entry for EdBookFest 2011, but it’s not the end of my coverage of the festival on RobAroundBooks. I still have a myriad of official events reports to post, and I will be working my way through these over the next few days. So keep your eyes peeled for those. I leave you with a few picture highlights from the day:
About Rob
