By sandy
The 26th annual International Festival of Authors is on in Toronto, and yesterday I spent a rainy Sunday afternoon attending readings by Jonathan Coe and Tim Winton. I liked the format: the whole thing was hosted by George Murray, a local poet and founder of the lit blog Bookninja, who introduced each of the authors in turn for a relatively short reading, then set up an interview where Jason Sherman, a local playwright, interviewed the authors together.
Jonathan Coe's reading from his most recent book, The Closed Circle (a sequel to his popular novel The Rotter's Club), had us all laughing out loud at several points: an inattentive father in a playground on Sunday, sipping latte with one hand and talking on his mobile with the other instead of pushing his daughter on the swing; a "sex strike" by a wife in return for her husband's use of bad language in front of the children; histrionics over becoming a literary editor. Definitely on my "to buy" list.
Tim Winton's reading from The Turning was just as amusing, but for different reasons: although the prose was not particularly comedic, his asides to the audience were very funny. The Turning is a series of intertwined short stories set in western Australia, where I have visited but not travelled extensively, but his descriptions were tremendously evocative of the highway and countryside through which the characters travelled. The final bit that he read had a disorienting fast-forward through the future lives of the characters that made me catch my breath, and still sticks in my mind.
What I found most enjoyable and interesting was the conversation between the two authors. Winton, on the road for three weeks now and obviously homesick, had been reading Coe's book The Rotter's Club before coming to the reading. He seemed the stereotypical open and friendly Aussie, a counterpoint to Coe's more reserved British attitude. Although they both claimed to dislike reading aloud from their own works (a strange admission to make at a public reading), Coe appeared more as an introvert forcing himself into public appearance, whereas Winton appeared as an extrovert who interacted easily with the audience but didn't like the restrictions enforced by a reading, and admitted to re-editing his works on the fly during readings. In response to audience Q&A, they both spoke about the process of writing: Coe pre-plans his plots and characters carefully before starting to write, whereas Winton doesn't do any planning and said that the linkages between the stories in The Turning were more or less accidental.
Interesting that the reserved Brit who carefully plans his writing produces such amusing stories, whereas the casual Aussie who doesn't plan ahead ends up with such introspective prose: almost like their writing is the opposite of their public persona.
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