Literary weekend

I'd booked a ticket for this year's Gollancz Festival at Foyles ages ago, because I'd quite enjoyed last year's despite grumpiness about the lack of diversity, and as it was the same day as T was due to be in London for the Times crossword championship it seemed like a good day to go to London myself. As T's plan had always been to go down on the Friday and stay near the championship venue at London Bridge rather than relying on the trains being running smoothly enough to get him there on time on the Saturday, when I found out that there was a book launch for a friend's translation of a novel about divorce by a Swedish feminist academic at Hatchard's on the Friday night it seemed to make perfect sense to combine the two.

Unfortunately, despite leaving work at ten to four which should have been plenty of time to get to Piccadilly for 6pm, I ended up on my backup train, the 1638 to Marylebone, as the 1631 to Paddington was delayed by half an hour, and despite leaving on time the Marylebone train ended up taking 40 minutes longer than it was supposed to do to reach London, so I didn't get to the book launch until 7pm, by which time I'd missed the initial discussion (and the canapes) and the questions from the audience were just starting. Also, it meant I ended up standing at the back along with several people who I suspect of only having come for the free wine, as they appeared to be carrying out their own whispered conversation all the way through, but what I did manage to hear was interesting and the book sounded enjoyable enough for me to buy a copy, and it was nice to catch up with friends (and meet slemslempike properly for the first time) afterwards.

The organisers of the Gollancz Festival had clearly taken on board feedback from last year's event about diversity; all of the panels had at least one woman on, and five out of seven had more than one, with two actually having more women than men. Racial diversity was more of an issue, as the only non-white panellist was Aliette de Bodard, and the gender balance of authors represented in the books on display both in the festival itself and along the stairs leading up to the auditorium on the top floor of Foyles was less good, but it was still an improvement. The panels themselves were generally interesting, and I minded less about the lack of audience questions than I did last year, I think possibly because the panel discussions became genuine discussions and weren't just authors talking about how they wrote particular things. As well as the serious discussion, which engaged thoughtfully with how sf reflects the present state of the world* (despite Adam Roberts' rather Panglossian assertion at one point that the world is better now than it has ever been without either interrogating the terms in which he was defining "better" or considering just how fragile that progress is; happily this was robustly contended by Antonia Honeywell and Jaine Fenn), the afternoon session featured a couple of more "fun" panels, one a virtual deathmatch between the panellists' preferred weapons, and the other a similar contest to determine the scariest monster, and I felt that that having the mix of serious and lighthearted panels worked well. It was also lovely to catch up with Caroline and K, as well as getting to spend a bit more time with a couple of other people I've only met in passing at Nine Worlds before, even if I was feeling a bit overpeopled by the end of the day and ended up making a slightly abrupt exit after we encountered a bloke who I think was from the BSFA and who appeared to have an underdeveloped sense of personal space as we were meandering down through Foyles after the event had finished. As I then had to negotiate the Tube to find T in the courtyard of a pub near London Bridge where he was catching up with crossword people, and then the Tube again back to Marylebone before being able to relax in the relative quiet of the Oxford train. And today I am definitely glad to be at home in the quiet and not having to negotiate crowded spaces or interact with people.

* I hope there was no-one from the Daily Mail at the event, as I think they would have had an apoplexy at the amount of anti-Brexit sentiment being expressed.

Reading: Death at Victoria Dock

In her fourth appearance, Phryne Fisher finds herself mixed up with Latvian anarchists in the quest to find two men who shot out the windscreen of her Hispano-Suiza as she was driving home one night, and also shot a beautiful young man who died in her arms when she got out of the car to investigate. At the same time, she is asked to investigate the disappearance of a teenage girl from a wealthy Melbourne family. With the help of her faithful assistant, Dot, her adopted daughters Ruth and Jane (I do wonder if their names are a Brat Farrar reference) and the faithful Communist taxi-drivers Bert and Cec, Phryne unravels both of these mysteries with typical aplomb. Entertaining fluff as always.

Reading: Love/War

The book I went to the launch party for on Friday was Love/War (original title Århundradets kärlekskrig) by the Swedish feminist and Professor of Nordic Literature at the University of Helsinki Ebba Witt-Brattström. It takes the form of a dialogue between an unnamed couple whose 30-year marriage is unravelling, messily and bitterly, fragments of conversations as they fight and attack one another with words, almost reconcile and then pull apart again. It's sharp and witty and vitriolic, peppered with literary and musical references, and written as fragments of free verse. The characters emerge clearly even though we only see them through their words; she is a feminist academic, made bitter by emotional neglect and physical abuse, he is both condescending and needy. Unnamed, their arguments have a universality that might be lost if they were given names; everywoman versus everyman*.

I really enjoyed this; it's beautifully written (and beautifully translated**), thoughtful and thought-provoking but also very funny in places. I'm very glad that Nordisk Books decided to produce an English translation and will be keeping an eye on their future output.

*Well, not exactly everywoman and everyman; happily I don't recognise my own marriage in their arguments, though I see resonances of many conversations about relationships I've had with many friends over the years.

**for which I am very grateful, given that I only know one phrase in Swedish, and that is the Swedish for "Has anyone seen my moose?". Oddly enough, that doesn't appear to have figured in this book.