First Drafts
The Prospect magazine blog
Edward Davey
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1st February 2010
In conversation: Ian McEwan
The highlights of Saturday morning were two sensitive, probing and humane interviews of contemporary authors, Paolo Giordano and Mario Vargas Llosa, conducted by one of Colombia’s most celebrated contemporary writers, Hector Abad Faciolince. Faciolince is best known for his autobiographical work El olvido que seremos, a searing account of the political violence in Medellín—the second largest city in Colombia—in the 1990s which led to the assassination of his father, a prominent university professor outspoken in his condemnation of para-military, drug-related violence (a work now being translated into English by the prize-winning translator, Anne McLean).
Faciolince is a generous, kind, and erudite man, and his conversation with Paolo Giordano, in Italian, drew out many of the facets of the 28-year old author from Turin, whose novel La solitudine dei numeri primi (The Solitude of Prime Numbers), has been a worldwide publishing phenomenon. Giordano, a physicist who is to present his doctoral thesis next week, spoke about the tormented adolescence of Alice and Mattia (the two principal protagonists), his literary influences (including Ian McEwan), and the process of writing the book itself. For a young man (enviably) caught up in perhaps unexpected global success, Giordano seemed kind, unassuming, reflective and critically aware.
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David Killen
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1st February 2010
This month’s cartoonist is NAF
NAF’s cartoon (above) appears on page 32 of our February issue. A selection of his cartoons for Prospect will be published on First Drafts over the next month. He can be contacted at andy_naf@yahoo.co.uk
First, give me your autobiography in 100 words or so
Raised by a loving family in Edinburgh, I studied biological sciences before embarking upon a career as a zookeeper. I looked after primates and snakes (a classic combination) but ended up slaughtering more animals than I kept alive so, tired of playing God, I ran away to South Africa to work on a game reserve. The game reserves were full, however, so I hit rock bottom and with nowhere else to turn and with nothing to lose, I became a cartoonist. I still survive in this sleazy profession, occasionally supplementing my income by playing the banjo.
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Edward Davey
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31st January 2010
Cartagena: a literary lilt in the air
The fifth Hay Festival in Cartagena, Colombia’s jewel on the Caribbean Coast, has begun in style. The sun has shone brightly, drawing out the vivid yellows, pinks and blues of the colonial cit’s houses, churches, theatres and cafés; the breezes from the sea sweep through the streets; salsa and the sound of fruit-sellers bellowing out their wares adds a lilt to the air; and a flurry of linen-clad authors, readers and observers meander from one literary event to the next. The festival began on Wednesday evening in Colombia’s cosmopolitan capital, Bogotá (the “Athens of South America,” as it is sometimes referred to on the continent), with an hour’s conversation between Ian McEwan and Festival Director Peter Florence. Five hundred or so people listened with rapt attention as McEwan talked about his work, in particular On Chesil Beach: its composition, characters, influences, the melancholy of Florence’s disappearance from the last pages, the context of the time, their inability to overcome their traumatic experience.
It was a wide-ranging conversation, touching on the value of the novella as opposed to the novel; the mathematical structure with which McEwan begins the planning of each book that he writes; his experience writing screenplays and libretti, a humbling demotion in the case of screenplays from the role of God to a scribe whose work is subject to constant change at the whim of directors, actors and the rest; the celebrated passage in Atonement in which Briony contemplates the fingers of her hand, which the Colombian students present had found extraordinarily powerful; and the wider impact McEwan’s novels have had on his readers, here and worldwide. It was a fascinating hour and one could hear a pin drop in the packed public library in which the event was held.
Arriving in Cartagena, there is a buzz in the air. Octagenarian Gabriel García Márquez is here, a rare and exciting event as he spends most of each year in his permanent home in Mexico City. Your Prospect blogger made his perennial pilgrimage to the author’s forbidding but stylish house, built in the sixties by Colombia’s preeminent (late) architect Rogelio Salmona, to see if he might catch a glimpse of the great man. But Gabo has – surprisingly – left the city for a day or two: might this coincide with the presence of Mario Vargas Llosa, the great Peruvian novelist? As Gerald Martin’s biography of ‘Gabo’ explains, the two men have never spoken – despite an earlier strong friendship—since Vargas Llosa punched García Márquez, and almost knocked him out, outside a Mexican cinema in 1976. The cause of the punch has never been known, although conjecture abounds. Read more »
A S H Smyth
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29th January 2010
My literary crush: Wendy Cope
I am on board for the fourth annual Galle Literary Festival, held in Sri Lanka. Until a few days ago the only sold-out events were the piss-ups, the concerts, and the sit-down dinners with famous authors—so don’t try telling the local literati that drinking isn’t where it’s at.
Partial list of famous authors: Wendy Cope, Antony Beevor, Artemis Cooper, Rana Dasgupta, Gillian Slovo, Michael Frayn, Claire Tomalin, Louise Doughty, Shyam Selvadurai, Ian Rankin. “Partial” because not impartial. The other day someone asked me who the biggest name was going to be this year. I tried Cope, Frayn, Beevor, Slovo… WG Sebald… Antoine de St Exupéry… ASH Smyth… but nothing. Eventually I gave in and mentioned Rankin. Big reaction, followed by confession of ignorance regarding Rankin’s actual output. Horrifying conclusion: you’re not famous if they haven’t heard of you in Sri Lanka.
I have my own event to prepare for, “The literature of post-war Sri Lanka,” a panel discussion relegated to the fringe festival since it’s deemed not to be as relevant a topic as the private life of a royal mistress living in 18th century London. So naturally, I have spent the past few days indulging in any and all diversionary activities.
Saturday: went to watch an Erich Kastner movie at the Goethe-Institute, where my girlfriend introduced me to an elderly Sri Lankan poet called Clive James. He informed her that he studied only the Romantic languages—the ensuing confusion was fun to watch. Went to meet an architect for advice on a book we’re writing on Geoffrey Bawa: he tells us that Geoffrey’s famously gay brother, Bevis, once killed a woman during sex (this was told to us in what you might call “Colombo confidence”: a story told in hushed tones but clearly intended for repetition).
Sunday: composed a poem in honour of Wendy Cope, and had a local design studio print it up as a postcard for distribution around Galle. I also sneaked into the festival’s official bookshop and slipped a few copies into Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis. Wendy Cope is my heroin(e)—a writer who showed me that poetry could be funny.
Monday: email from Wendy Cope, consenting to interview request. Score! (Question: what is the etiquette for presenting tribute poems? Should I go down on one knee, or climb something very tall?)
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William Skidelsky
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29th January 2010
This year's Australian Open champion? Think again
A predictable wave of patriotism has attended Andy Murray’s serene progress through this year’s Australian Open, and there seems to be a growing expectation that Britain is finally set to have a grand slam winner. But the inconvenient truth is that Murray is almost certainly going to lose. Why do I think this? Bias is probably a factor. I am a Federer fan, and so (unpatriotically) I don’t want Murray to win. Don’t get me wrong: I would like him to win a grand slam, I’d just rather he didn’t do it at Federer’s expense.
But even if bias is removed from the equation, I still think, objectively, Federer is the overwhelming favourite. Murray is undoubtedly playing extremely well, but I haven’t seen anything in his game over the past two weeks to make me think it has changed significantly enough. In terms of their head-to-head record, it’s true, Murray has the edge over Federer—he has beaten the Swiss six times, while Federer has beaten him on only four occasions. However, Federer made a revealing comment a couple of months ago, shortly before playing Murray (and winning) at the end of year ATP tour finals tournament in London. “It’s up to me whether I beat Murray,” he said.
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CityBoy
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27th January 2010
Goldman Sachs: everyone in the top 20 per cent
So Goldman Sachs are the first out of the traps to make it clear just how sorry they are for making so much darned money.
Partners at the firm have announced that they are rationing themselves to a meagre £1m bonus package each in a move which, I suspect, will be repeated across the financial sector as businesses aim to appease an angry electorate and increasingly belligerent political class.
While this will certainly leave their swollen pockets looking rather like a windsock on an eerily calm day, what is most interesting about this latest round of public self-flagellation is who it will not impact. If you guessed those very same traders who got everyone into the mess in the first place then give yourself a pat on the back.
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Colin Murphy
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26th January 2010
The world's media has been to slow to show Haitians helping each other recover from the earthquake
If Haiti was visited by an “apocalypse” or “Dantean” horror in the aftermath of the earthquake of 12th January, then there was one news story that perfectly captured it.
The streets of Port-au-Prince, the devastated capital, were littered with roadblocks made of corpses. Earthquake survivors, out of either anger or trauma, or perhaps Caribbean voodoo superstition, had piled bodies high across the streets, in protest at their neglect.
The story made headlines around the world. Oddly, though, for such a visceral image, the headlines didn’t appear to be accompanied by photos of the scene. Still more oddly, then, the story was attributed to a photographer, Time magazine’s Shaul Schwarz. Schwarz had told a Reuters reporter he had seen two such roadblocks on his travels across the city, and Reuters sent the story global.
By the time the story reached the Independent, it had acquired the further authority of being attributed to (nameless, but apparently numerous) “eyewitnesses,” rather than to a solitary photographer. Many papers distorted Schwarz’s comments to give the impression of these roadblocks being widespread, even as Schwarz himself was telling the BBC that he had seen one such roadblock, and hoped it might have been a “once-off.” The story fostered the impression of a city reverting to savagery in response to the savagery of nature visited upon it.
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John Elliott
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25th January 2010
What really happened between Edwina Mountbatten and Jawaharlal Nehru?
The Jaipur Literary Festival is becoming a major event not just for literary folk but also for India’s prestige-conscious society. Here in the grounds of the city’s Diggi Palace hotel, a charmingly faded pile built in the 1860s as a grand town house for a rural Rajasthan ruler, Delhi’s self-appointed social elite have all mingled with the crowds (around 27,000 people have attended in total), along with famous writers and ambassadors from the US, UK and other countries, without demanding (as they usually do) exclusivity and front row seats.
In a country where prestige and patronage count for so much and do so much damage, it is striking how the festival straddles India’s vast social divides, with sessions on the Dalits (untouchables) at the bottom of India’s social strata, as well as to the lives and loves of the Indian dynasties and the British royal family.
It was fitting that one of these sessions focused on Queen Victoria’s fascination for two particular Indian men, explored in very different ways by two Indian authors. The Exile, by Navtej Sarna, an author and Indian diplomat is a historical novel about the life of Maharaja Duleep Singh who became prominent in Victoria’s court when the queen was in her 30s. More revealing was Victoria and Abdul, Shrabani Basu’s biography of a servant, Abdul Karim, who became an influential and often disruptive adviser to Victoria on India, “a good looking, extravagantly dressed servant…hated by the Queen’s household both for his race and class”.
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John Elliott
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22nd January 2010
Over 12,000 attending Jaipur festival last year
The Jaipur Literary Festival is only in its fifth year but it’s already billed as Asia’s biggest such event, and with more than 12,000 attending last year, it’s now the biggest free literary festival world-wide—you only pay for the food (and the books).
I came yesterday from my home in Delhi, to this famous old pink Moghul city—the capital of the Indian desert state of Rajasthan—where you sense the magic of India’s history and see all the modern fun and chaos as well.
The festival started this morning but last night the organisers were learning a tough lesson: if you hold a festival in a country which is a terrorism target and has thick fog in winter, prepare for the worst.
Over the past few days more than a dozen speakers have been marooned abroad due to problems with obtaining Indian visas, which are becoming more difficult to obtain as anti-terrorism measures are put in place. And yesterday more than 100 people, both speakers and delegates, were stranded in fog at Delhi airport for several hours, unable to take off for the 250km flight here.
As darkness fell, two of the key first-day speakers were still yet to arrive: Her Majesty Ashi Dorji Wangmo Wangchuck, the queen mother of the remote Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, and Girish Karnad, a famous Indian playwright, film-maker and actor, who was due to deliver the opening address on “Entertaining India”.
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Tom Streithorst
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21st January 2010
Campbell has learnt nothing from the Iraq war
To a hammer, every problem is a nail. Alastair Campbell tells us, in today’s Financial Times, that the main lesson we should take from the Iraq debacle is that next time we invade a minor third world country, government officials need to spin it better. Considering that Bush and Blair, back in 2003 were able to drag our countries into war, despite little genuine cause and massive popular opposition, I would have thought that spin was one of the few Iraq war government policies that actually succeeded.
Let us not forget: Saddam Hussein, although a despicable tyrant, had no weapons of mass destruction. He was a threat to no one but his own people and few of them, by the way, are now grateful for our invasion. Our optimism, brute force, cowardice and pathetic planning turned a totalitarian state into something even worse, an anarchic hellhole. I will never forget, in 2006, being told by a man who had spent 6 years in Saddam’s jails how much better things were under the Ba’athist regime. Today, much of the Iraqi middle class is in exile, hundreds of thousands have died, violence still endemic, the economy in tatters.
The war devastated Iraq; it damaged us as well. The international reputation of Britain and the United States have suffered, we have wasted trillions of dollars, thousands of our soldiers lives, and accomplished almost nothing. The big winner in Iraq is Iran and the fundamentalist Shia groups allied with it. If the war’s purpose was to control Iraq’s oil, that plan too was a failure. The civil war years cut Iraqi production to a fraction of its pre-invasion levels and in the recent oil field auction, Russian, Chinese, Angolan oil companies secured more of Iraq’s oil than American and British companies, without their militaries having to go to the trouble of invading.
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