Public Readings

At the Jaipur Literary Festival in 2013, the Booker prize-winning author Howard Jacobson raised the question: Are literary festivals, such as Jaipur, becoming an alternative to the activity of reading?  He was making a joke at his own expense, because he admitted that he loved speaking at literary festivals.  It was terrific fun, it was flattering, but it was not really the business of literature. “The novelist should never be seen, should never be heard, for himself.  The book should do all the work.  You open a book, you read the book—all you need to know about the book is in the book.  Everything else is just external flimflam.”

Is he correct? Is there an element of shallowness in going to hear a writer read from their work and then discuss it in front of hundreds of people, many of whom have never read anything by that author, and perhaps never will, and are more interested in the author as a celebrity than as a writer?  What does seeing a writer really contribute to the act of reading?

I ask myself this question all the time.  At the Collingwood Public Library we often invite authors to visit the library.  In 2015 we invited seven authors.  The latest was Debra Komar, author of The Bastard of Fort Stikine, who was here on October 29. We had an excellent turnout for the event, and the audience enjoyed the presentation.

Komar is a forensic anthropologist and her book is about using modern forensic methods to solve a crime that occurred more than 170 years ago.  Her discussion was fascinating. We were dismayed to learn that most of the work forensic scientists do in literature and on film is nonsense.  For example, DNA is not a foolproof method of identification.  In fact, the best it can do is offer a degree of probability. Also, fingerprints are not unique.  It is possible for two unrelated people to have the same fingerprint, which is why police want prints of all of your digits, not just your thumb.  The same holds true for retinal scans.

Komar explained how she solved the murder of a Hudson’s Bay Company chief factor in Fort Stikine in 1842.  She explained the circumstances surrounding the murder, how she recreated the timeline by reading interviews found in the HBC archives, and how she recreated a three-dimensional model of the scene of the crime using surviving sketches and testimony.  And then she stopped.

“But if you want to know who did it,” she said, “you will have to read the book.”

There was a collective sigh of disappointment at this statement, but I think it is fair to say that we will all read the book now.

Komar noted that solving the puzzle was really only part of the issue, perhaps not even the most important part.  She is more interested in questions of justice than guilt.  If we solve a crime and punish the perpetrator, is justice served?  Does mediation, for example, serve the community better than supermax prisons?

I guess what I am trying to say is that we spent a lot of the evening circling around the book, rather than discussing it.  That, in itself, made for an interesting evening.  The book, in this case, was just the hook to get us all in the room.  But not all books lend themselves to this kind of discussion. 

When Cathy Gildiner came to promote her memoir, Coming Ashore, earlier in the year, she did not read from the book at all.  Instead, she retold stories from the book and had us in stitches.  It was like watching standup comedy.  In fact, it was exactly like watching standup comedy.  But wouldn’t the stories have been just as funny if we’d stayed at home and read them for ourselves?  Perhaps.  But, in this case, there really was something wonderful about hearing the author tell the stories in person.

So maybe author events serve a different purpose than close personal reading. And maybe that is our answer to Jacobson. In 2000, J.K. Rowling, gave a reading at Skydome in Toronto to more than 20,000 people, which at the time broke the Guinness record for largest ever public reading.  The sound system was terrible, and the noise of 20,000 excited people in a confined space threatened to drown the proceedings, but the children loved it.  For them it was a celebration of a fictional world that had become as important to them as the factual world they inhabited daily.  They had grown up with Harry Potter.  He was as real to them as their parents.  We do not need an author to explicate her book, as Jacobson contended, the book is sufficient; but that is not why we go to literary events.  We attend these things to share our enjoyment of reading with others.

So join us on Thursday, November 26 at 7 pm for the last of our author events for 2015, when award-winning author Alison Pick will read from her memoir, Between Gods. Pick will be talking about unlocking family secrets and her difficult journey to reclaim her Jewish heritage.  It promises to be another thought-provoking evening.

--Ken Haigh