Considering that “I reeeally like this book” was one of the first things I heard a presenter say, I wasn’t sure at first if this year’s International Festival of Authors would live up to the hype. But the trek down to the lakeshore for a lineup of including Douglas Coupland, Umberto Eco, and Guy Vanderhaeghe proved well worth it, despite a few missteps.
Organizers enlivened the readings this year by grouping together writers of diverse origins and styles into single events. Author Nick Bantock (Griffin and Sabine)’s multi-media presentation shared the floor with Indian novelist Samrat Upadhyay, for example.
This strategy had some mixed results when it came to the author interviews. Sometimes it was revelatory, like Eco discussing the semiotics of 9/11 with Nobel chemistry laureate John Polanyi. The conversation between hot novelist Andrew Pyper and playwright Jason Sherman was also solid, but perhaps that was to be expected, since they’re both media personalities from Toronto and have the same stuff to complain about.
But loopy musician Jane Siberry interviewing Coupland (she “reeeally” liked his book) was just cringe-inducing. She was trying hard to be quirky and interrupted him far too often, infuriating the audience of Coupland fans. People muttered “Shut up” until one man actually yelled it at her. You heard it here: heckling at a literary event. Coupland would have made everyone happy by cutting her off, but he was far too polite. In fact, he wasn’t really what I expected—just a guy telling funny family anecdotes from his book in a Stuart McLean-ish way. A friend of mine recently complained to me that the Generation X author had “lost his edge”—who knew?
The best reading came from Newfoundland author Wayne Johnston, who read from his much-praised new novel The Navigator of New York. The book’s descriptive, Dickensian style lent itself well to a live reading, and Johnston’s lulling voice didn’t lessen its power. The story follows the son of a famous Arctic explorer as he travels from the Arctic to New York at the turn of the last century. Rapt listeners actually gasped when he ended his reading with a minor cliffhanger—a clever move, considering the pile of his books for sale in the lobby.
Brit Michel Faber, another author exemplifying the current trend towards historical novels, spoke Tuesday about his 800-page Victorian tome The Crimson Petal and the White with Globe and Mail columnist and novelist Russell Smith. The public’s taste for massive novels instead of shorter ones or short story collections is a curious one, and it makes for strange encounters between self-professed TV-haters like Faber and the U.S. pop culture machine. When it was mentioned that his book had already been optioned for a movie starring Kirsten Dunst, Faber said the only film he’d seen her in was Spider-Man. He’d caught bits of it on a plane without bothering to turn on the sound, but said he could understand it because everything was so exaggerated. “Spider-Man is pre-literate. You don’t need the headphones,” Faber quipped.
The Harbourfront Reading Series continues throughout the year with appearances by notable Canadian and international authors.
