LITERARY PURSUITS
Wet but inspiring
MAITHREYI NANDAKUMAR
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The marquee may have been sodden and the carpets soaking, but this year’s Hay literary festival was still worth a visit.
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Photo: Justin Williams
FESTIVE SIGHT: Marquees are pitched on fields for an event studded with celebrities.
Making it to the English town on the Welsh border (“Hay-on-Wye: is it some kind of sandwich?” Arthur Miller, seen on someone’s jumper as we jostled the crowds) from Bristol sounded vaguely straightforward, as it i
s a mere 75 miles away, but it was a journey through winding roads, in the lashing rain, passing stunning landscape of undulating forests and scenic fields.
A journey with a sense of mystery as we felt like modern Hobbits lost in the dense wilderness meandering our way befuddled by the crooked roads. We had a few changes of direction (three point turns on fairly empty country roads) to reach this little town famous for its second-hand bookshops, tucked away in a suitably obscure corner of this island.
Squelching out of the field turned car park, we braved the rain and passing cars that not very thoughtfully splashed us as we crossed the road to get to the festival site — where marquees of varying sizes had been pitched on a neighbouring huge field.
The 1.00 p.m. event at the Segovia tent on a wet Sunday (May 25) was Jhumpa Lahiri. Not being “Friends of Hay”, we queued up outside past the drenched deck chairs on the grass (apparently Saturday was quite sunny and people could sit on them whiling the time away with a book) and two sheep under a wooden shed to entertain children in good weather. The poor fleecy bundles stood so still that we thought they were inanimate until we saw them shivering in the damp cold.
A small stream ran across the floor of the marquee over the sodden carpet, as we saw Jhumpa standing outside in a grey and white striped coat over a skirt (a summery blue with white polka dots) and a pink silk scarf tied tightly round her neck, looking quite stoic considering the extreme conditions.
She was the celebrity everyone had come to see. She was paired with Emily Perkins from New Zealand (promoting her Novel about my Wife). The two writers sat on stage to be interviewed by Ariane Koek from the Arvon foundation. First up was Ms Perkins, who was gracious about her secondary status and cheerfully engaged the audience with the outline of the story about a husband coming to terms with the fact that he might not have known his wife at all when she’d been alive. Jhumpa looked on, sighing quietly to herself at the relentless sound of the rain falling on the canvas tent setting a grim background — a bit of it reflected in those grey-blue eyes and striking face.
Emotional punch
When she walked up to read an extract from Unaccustomed Earth, her latest book of short stories that’s shot to No. 1 in the NY Times best-seller list, she read out a passage that not only packed an emotional punch, but was also immediate in its resonance to those who’ve experienced a life uprooted and transplanted in foreign lands, and the ways we adjust (or not) and carry on.
In the discussion that followed, Jhumpa paid homage to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter from which the title of this book has been taken. Growing up in New England (Hawthorne territory), she said how she’d found the great American writer most alien to her when studying him at school.
Through the years she’s realised that Hawthorne’s subject matter of people settling in the promised land of the United States is not that different from what she’s trying to do in her writing. We are still seeing a microcosm of American society as it is today through the experience of the Bengali community settled there. She said she felt as if she and Hawthorne had shared a firm handshake through the centuries.
The 21st Hay literary festival was studded with celebrities and famous writers (former president Jimmy Carter went down a storm, well, literally; Salman Rushdie spoke at length about art in the Mughal period; famous atheist and author of God is not Great, Christopher Hitchens held court bullish and sharp; octogenarian and prolific essayist Gore Vidal spoke with vitriolic passion about the state of the U.S.; environmental campaigner and journalist George Monbiot spoke in a similar vein about our overheated planet).
American influences
The U.S. continued to compel the hordes that packed into the Barclays Wealth tent later that afternoon at 5.30. The time in between was spent in the cosy confines of the festival café drinking hot chocolate and cups of cappuccino with sticky buns to keep warm. Shashi Tharoor is described in the brochure as a New York based internationalist — he hosted an energetic panel discussion entitled “State of the Union”, with two British journalists who are covering the U.S. elections (Matt Frei from the BBC, and author of Only in America, Jonathan Freedland from the Guardian) and Jacob Weisberg from the online magazine Slate, who was promoting his book The Bush Tragedy that compares the life of George Dubya to another doomed war-monger and subject of the Shakespearean tragedy Henry V. He sees the current president’s life as a personal struggle in the shadow of his father’s exceptional career. Why, asked Jonathan Freedland, didn’t he go into therapy to exorcise his inner demons instead of going to war in Iraq? Yes, it looked likely, that the next President is most likely going to be a man. Was Obama too much of an intellectual like Adlai Stevenson who ran for President in the 1950s, asked Shashi Tharoor? An accomplished writer he certainly is, they said, but what set his campaign above that of Hillary Clinton and John Mc Cain is the fact that he’s garnered the Internet effectively to captivate a whole generation of youth to get involved in the democratic process. So, they concluded that the state of the union was actually pretty good.
Climate change and the environment were heavily featured in this festival. As we walked out of the main pavilion, we felt a light behind us. “Is that the sun?” someone shouted hopefully. Sadly it was a mere light bulb coming on. In that moment, one realised that such days may become the norm if we let the earth heat up too much. Worries, I suppose that were for another day.
The writer is a freelancer based in Bristol.
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