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The public and the private: Notes from the Sydney Writers’ Festival — Part II

May 24, 2012 – 5:00 pm, by Bethanie Blanchard
   

A girl sits on a crowded train reading aloud an explicit section from Nabokov’s Lolita:

She would try to relieve the pain of love by first roughly rubbing her dry lips against mine; then my darling would draw away with a nervous toss of her hair, and then again come darkly near and let me feed on her open mouth, while with a generosity that was ready to offer her everything, my heart, my throat, my entrails…

The businessman sitting beside her departs, presumably to avoid the passage’s passionate conclusion, looking alarmed and awkward.

This was the official ad for the 2012 Sydney Writers’ Festival, played on the screen before almost every event. The video always elicited a laugh from the audience, and it is a provocative illustration of the theme of this year’s Festival: Public / Private – or as the ad’s tagline puts it: ‘These days, private is public.’ In his opening address, Festival Director Chip Rolley noted that ‘we now share publicly things we might only have told our loved ones.’ Our innermost thoughts and private feelings are broadcast. Perhaps not on a crowded train, but certainly on social media and, as has been shown in the UK hacking scandals, such private utterances are not always publicised with our consent. It is, therefore, a very relevant theme, and was reflected beautifully in many of the sessions I attended – circling on themes of identity, personal obsession, and the things that drive a writer to write.

I’m sitting in a packed theatre with my hand raised in the air. Though I’m in the front row, there’s a mirrored wall to my right and in it I see a forest of arms raised around and behind me. Anita Heiss, in a session on her memoir ‘Am I Black Enough For You?’ had asked those of us who identify as Australian to raise their hand, and as the Chair of the session Anne Summers noted, it was over eighty-five per cent of the room. Heiss then asked us to keep our hands up if we have any other nationalities in our heritage – almost nothing of the forest was diminished. It was a powerful moment in the room, a way into Heiss’ recounting of the Bolt racial discrimination case, and her explanation of her own identity – ‘I’m Aboriginal, but I have other heritages too.’ Heiss then asked those who identify as Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander to stand and show ‘what we look like and the careers we have’ – they were directors, board members, policy makers.

The session was packed, the long line beforehand spilling out along the pier, and broadcast on a large screen in one of the cavernous warehouses. I’m not sure if it was visible on those screens, but sitting as I was directly in front of Heiss, it was clear how deeply distressing the recounting of the case was for her, and it was difficult to watch the otherwise sunny and charismatic Heiss so affected. The challenge was to her very sense of herself – ‘I was always the black girl’ she said, an identity given to her by white people. ‘They give you an identity, and then they take it away.’ She spoke of the racist comments that still spew forth on the Amazon listing for her book, and of the fact that she wasn’t called to testify at the Bolt case because she was ‘more black than they had expected.’ Fighting back tears, Heiss asked ‘What other group of people in Australia has to sit in a witness stand and defend who they are?’ The intersection of the festival’s two modes was most potent here.

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Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby film trailer released

May 23, 2012 – 12:00 pm, by Bethanie Blanchard
   

‘New York, 1922. The tempo of the city had changed sharply. The buildings were higher. The parties were bigger. The moons were looser and the liquor was cheaper. The restlessness, approached hysteria.’ 

Confetti falls, fireworks explode and sparkle, expensive shirts are flung from mezzanine floors, orchids are in abundance, sleek cars glide, while Jay-Z and Kanye pump in the background. Released this morning was Luhrmann’s first taste of his adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic text (some might say ‘sacred’, given the early reaction to this new adaptation). 

This is Gatsby on crack – it’s bright and brash, and everything you’d expect from a Luhrmann film. The first thing that struck me was how startlingly bright, lurid, almost oversaturated its colours are – compared to the muted, watercolour shades of its most famous 1974 adaptation to screen. Indeed, far from the stately pace of the book, this watches almost like an action film.

Sadly, from the trailer we don’t get the effect of 3D, although I must say that I think the ever-watchful eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg will be particularly affecting rendered in this new medium (see 1.55 mins into the trailer below). Read More »

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Notes from the Sydney Writers’ Festival — Part I

May 21, 2012 – 8:00 pm, by Bethanie Blanchard
   

Scribbled notes / Late nights / Early mornings / Lilting author signatures still fresh inside new novels / The mesmerising experience of prose read aloud by the author who penned it / Black coffee / Dead phone batteries / Lightbulb books hanging overhead / Sitting in the green room watching authors prepare for their sessions / The sunny sky and glittering water almost mocking my decision to sit inside theatres all day / Getting lost in the winding streets of Sydney / Wise and kind advice from the lovely Jennifer Byrne / Audience questions that are monologues / Media pass like a magical key / Nights spent at the Chaser’s Empty Vessel in the cavernous Pier 2-3 / Anita Heiss’ tearful recounting of the Bolt case / Jonathan Biggins’ derisive tirade against the worth of bloggers – ‘If I need a root canal, I don’t go to see someone with a dentistry blog.’ Sigh / That strange man who insisted at two sessions that Malcolm Turnbull and Godwin Grech had something to do with a plane going down on the Kokoda track / Meeting Tara Moss, Kristen Tranter, Jason Steger, Susan Wyndham, Chris Taylor, Charlotte Wood, Paddy O’Reilly, Deborah Forster / The Harbour Bridge a magnificent looming presence in the distance / My suitcase arriving home three kilos heavier from the weight of new books to consume.

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Guest Post — When the adaptation ruins the original, or how I began to hate Jane Eyre

May 15, 2012 – 3:00 pm, by Bethanie Blanchard
   

Guest post by January Jones

Book to screen adaptations are not a new phenomenon, however, the recent popularity of such films has reached heightened proportions. You’d have to be living under a rock to have missed the hype surrounding recent blockbuster The Hunger Games; the first film of a trilogy based on Suzanne Collins’ bestselling young-adult series. Despite widespread praise and a position as one of the highest grossing films, it has also been plagued by controversy surrounding what some fans believed to be an ‘inaccuracy’ regarding three characters’ ethnicity. This resulted in angry fans taking to Twitter to complain about the casting choices, with such comments as ‘To all my hunger games readers out there: Did anyone picture Rue as being black? No offense or anything but I just didn’t see her like it’ and ‘Cinna and Rue weren’t supposed to be black… Why did the producer make all the good characters black?’ Of course, as has been discussed since, Collins had written those characters’ ethnicities very specifically in the novels, and such interpretations displayed an almost wilful textual incomprehension, not to mention blatant racism.

However, it does raise interesting questions regarding the imagination and expectation of the reader in the adaptation of an original work, and as I discovered, not only in film adaptations. Fictional texts will often reference, rewrite, and derive inspiration from works that have preceded them. This begs the question, what exactly is at stake in the adaptation of an original work? And what happens to this original work as a consequence? Do aspects of the rewrite affect it or does it remain a stand-alone piece?

I recently considered such questions while watching Cary Fukunaga’s screen adaptation of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, one of my favourite novels. I first read Jane Eyre after it was a required text for an introductory literature class I undertook in my first year of university. I was instantly drawn to the gothic themes and complex characters, cementing my fascination with gothic literature and the Brontë sisters. But my real attraction to the novel was Jane herself. She was the first female protagonist I had come across who was strong, intelligent, and so I believed, a proto-feminist. Jane demanded equality in her relationship with Rochester and insisted on her independence. Watching Fukunaga’s film, however, I suddenly found the story utterly unpleasant and my earlier interpretations naïve. Evidently, this had little to do with the film, although the poor quality of the adaptation didn’t help. Instead, my newfound intolerance for the relationship between Jane and Rochester originated from reading two novels that adapt the Brontë story; Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys (1966) and Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938). Neither of the novels would be considered adaptations in the strict sense, however, each are clearly informed and inspired by the original.

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Miles Franklin 2012 shortlist announced

May 3, 2012 – 3:00 pm, by Bethanie Blanchard
   

        

The shortlist for the 2012 Miles Franklin Award has just been announced, and it appears to be decidedly free from the controversy that plagued it last year — we are neither in ‘sausage-fest’ nor ‘cock-forest’ territory. There are five works in the shortlist, down from a longlist of thirteen, and with three female writers among the titles — Anna Funder, Gillian Mears and Favel Parrett — women make up over half the list.

Frank Moorhouse is the only former winner, who won in 2001 with The Dark Palace, part of the author’s ‘Edith trilogy’, which his current nominated work Cold Light is the final instalment. A debut novelist also makes it onto the list, Favel Parrett with Ask the Shallows. 

In terms of publishers, there is an even spread, with no two works by the same house. UQP (Birch), Hamish Hamilton (Funder), Allen & Unwin (Mears), Vintage (Moorhouse), and Hachette (Parrett) are all represented.

The five shortlisted novels are:

  • Tony Birch Blood
  • Anna Funder All That I Am
  • Gillian Mears Foal’s Bread
  • Frank Moorhouse Cold Light
  • Favel Parrett Past the Shallows

Interestingly, in their statement on the site, the Trust Company wrote that this year the judging panel was formally authorised to ‘use their discretion to modernise the interpretation of Australian life beyond geographical boundaries to include mindset, language, history and values.’ This may suggest that the widely tipped favourite, Anna Funder, is even more likely to take out the award. It is a great expansion of the selection criteria regardless.

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Liticism’s Miles Franklin Countdown: Anna Funder’s All That I Am

May 2, 2012 – 9:00 am, by Bethanie Blanchard
   

*spoiler alert: this is not intended as a straight review and I do refer to key plot points in this analysis.

In the context of the Miles Franklin and its criteria of presenting ‘Australian life in any of its phases’ Funder’s work seems, initially, difficult to advocate. Though the ‘now’ of the novel is the primary protagonist Ruth’s home in present-day Sydney, and Funder often writes the harbourside landscape of the city beautifully – ‘Out the window a rosella feasts from a flame tree, sneakers hang-dance on an electric wire. Behind them the earth folds into hills that slope down to kiss that harbour, lazy and alive’ – any moments of ‘nowness’ are almost always a narrative intrusion, as surprising and alarming to us as they are to Ruth, jolting us up out of her reveries and into the present with the often coarse language of Bev, Ruth’s caregiver: ‘You got any more rubber gloves? These’ve got holes in,’ she interjects mundanely at one point, ending Ruth’s recollections. Ruth describes herself as ‘a vessel of memory in a world of forgetting,’ but her memory is the reality of the novel – far more real than her over-varnished Bondi Junction home with Bev bustling about inside it, or the white hospital ward with its interchangeable nurses.

Sun-drenched, sparkly Sydney is the light to the gloom of the Nazi era the novel depicts, and thus the bright present works to counter the inky shades of darkness that mark Ruth’s remembrances in much of the novel. Funder’s observations are adept, and there are many incisive comments on Australian life, especially her description of a particular type of middle-class suburban dweller:

People say babies look alike, or the very old, all grey and sexless and sunken-skinned. But for me it is the middle-aged women of the eastern suburbs who are so hard to distinguish. They are all neatly, crisply put together, stout-bodied under striped shirts with their collars up, the hair streaked and smoothed to the exact same substance.

Ruth’s attitude, though usually superior, is sharp and often comic. She has lived here long enough to be biting but still affectionate about a country so utterly removed from the persecution and horrors she has known.

And yet, for all the amusing outsider perspectives on Sydney, one simply wants to press that morphine button so Ruth can slip back into her recollections, and the work can return to its real story – pre-World War II and the fate of the ‘five-pointed constellation,’ Toller, Dora, Hans, Bertie and Ruth.

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JOMAD podcast

April 26, 2012 – 5:30 pm, by Bethanie Blanchard
   

JOMAD — I Heard You Like Books? is a new Australian literary podcast by Johannes Jakob and Madeleine Crofts, and I was thrilled to be invited as the guest on the most recent episode.

You can listen to the full episode here, where we talk about analysing (and stalking) Bret Easton Ellis, the Miles Franklin longlist, being paid not to read (or, alternatively, going to jail to read), Charlotte Wood, Karin Altenberg, Romy Ash, Etgar Keret, literary raps, senior critics, marking your books and ‘accidental documentation’.

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Emerging Writers’ Festival program released

April 24, 2012 – 10:00 am, by Bethanie Blanchard
   

The Emerging Writers’ Festival begins in Melbourne on May 24 and the full program of events has been released today, which you can view here.

I’m very excited to be taking part in the festival — I’ll be hosting a panel event, Industry Insider: Emerging Critics on Monday 28th May at 6pm, where I’ll be discussing the state of literary criticism and how to begin your career as a critic, with Kerryn Goldsworthy, Anita Sethi and Richard Watts.

Hope to see you there!

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Stories victorious: Etgar Keret’s Suddenly a Knock on the Door

April 23, 2012 – 8:00 am, by Bethanie Blanchard
   

Fantastical, absurd, surreal, playful, comic, bizarre, dark. Keret’s short stories have the quality of fables, or the sort of baffling dreams that compel you regale all who will listen in the morning, and then wonder quietly to yourself what you may have ingested the night before. It has shades of Kafka, Borges, even, at times, Dr. Seuss. Fish can grant wishes; people have zips underneath their tongues and can unzip, becoming an inverted version of themselves; a haemorrhoid grows so big it suffers from a man; the very wealthy have the ability to purchase the climate of their choice, provoking riots by those who endure rain and storms while their wealthy neighbors tan.

The experience of Suddenly a Knock on the Door isn’t so much of reading a collection of short stories, but rather of sitting in an audience watching a man at the height of his skill perform jazzy riffs on the form of the short story. This is the fifth collection for the Israeli writer, and Keret is often at his best when writing about the art of composing – as in ‘The Story, Victorious’: ‘This story is the best story in the book. More than that, this story is the best story in the world…It’s super contemporary, and timelessly literary’ – and the collection begins and ends metafictively with the writer himself forced to perform.

In the opening title story, Keret turns his hesitations and difficulties with how to begin, the terror of a blank page and the crippling thoughts of the audience’s expectations, into an allegory where three men armed with guns and a meat cleaver force the writer ‘Keret’ to tell them a story. But when Keret attempts to conjure what he calls ‘something out of something’ and turn the frightening absurdity of his situation into a tale, the three men object. They want ‘something out of nothing’: fiction, the type of writing he has established himself as a master of, Read More »

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Orange Prize shortlist announced

April 18, 2012 – 10:00 am, by Bethanie Blanchard
   

     

The 2012 Orange Prize shortlist was announced last night. The Orange is the UK’s annual prize for fiction written by a woman, celebrating ‘excellence, originality and accessibility in women’s writing throughout the world.’

There are six titles in the shortlist, down from a longlist of twenty. American novelists make up half the list — Madeline Miller, Cynthia Ozick and Ann Patchett – with British (Georgina Harding), Canadian (Esi Edugyan) and Irish (Anne Enright) authors making up the other half.

In terms of publishers, Bloomsbury seems to be the winner here, with three of its novels — Painter of Silence, The Song of Achilles and State of Wonder – on the shortlist.

A debut novelist, Madeline Miller, makes it onto the list, and with Téa Obrent taking out the prize last year for her first novel The Tiger’s Wife, it will be interesting to see if a debut novelist can win again. The list also includes a previous Orange Prize winner, Ann Patchet, who won in 2002 with Bel Canto.

The six shortlisted novels are: Read More »

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