Literary Thrills: Beijing Bookworm Literary Festival Day One

My head is spinning and it is not because it has been a month and a half since I updated this blog. It’s also not the head cold I am in the process of developing, although I suspect all the NyQuil I am about to take will definitely produce that effect. No, my head is spinning with ideas. Thoughts. Philosophies. Words. Today was the first day of the Beijing Bookworm International Literary Festival. Those of you who know me know I love to read. And those of you who don’t know me, well, you must have guessed I like to write. I can’t tell you how excited I am about this festival. I can tell you that I have been preparing for it since December, when I signed up to become a festival volunteer. As I wrote earlier today on Facebook, I’m terribly happy to be involved in a cultural event. In English. Especially since for the last five years my only cultural event has been people watching at the Linyi McDonald’s. (Hanging out with pilots 24/7 for that year at the Shijiazhuang Airport was a cultural experience all its own, one that perhaps deserves its own blog. Or book.)

Maybe it’s the caffeine. Maybe it’s the crowded café/bookstore I’ve just come from, but my ears are buzzing and my thoughts are bouncing around in my brain. I spent the morning listening to two authors, one a mathematician and one a physicist, discussing the effects of science on their work. I spent the early afternoon listening to a crime fiction writer discuss the craft. I spent the evening listening to a BBC reporter discuss the savage battle of Kohima in WWII. Tomorrow there’s more.

Each of these events has sent my mind off in completely different directions, as each dealt with such different topics. I’ve been scribbling notes in my moleskine (yes, I am that clichéd – wanna be writer with her writer’s notebook) all day. Anyway, here’s an effort to make some sense about how I spent my day.

First up was a discussion between Paolo Giordano and Guillermo Martinez, an Italian physicist and Argentinean mathematician respectively, about the influence of their scientific backgrounds on their fiction writing. They both started off pretty much immediately stating that they didn’t think it was a major factor, but through the course of the conversation it became apparent that in some ways, it most certainly was. Whether that meant writing characters with their same background, or featuring some aspect of their discipline in the plot, or even just the method and style of writing. Martinez said (and this is probably a terrible paraphrase) that a mathematician takes numbers, orders them, and writes them down on the lines of a paper, just as a writer takes ideas, orders them, and writes them down on the lines of a paper. The take-away was not necessarily the age-old advice to “write what you know,” but that who we are or how we are trained is inescapably part of us, and will come through in our writing. I’ve been trained in nursing, library science, Spanish language and aviation. How’s that coming through, I wonder? As schizophrenia?

Next, the same Guillermo Martinez as above examined the genre of classical crime fiction and how it works. And because I adore crime fiction, and all kinds of intrigue, mystery and thriller, I was fascinated by what he had to say. He referenced Jorge Luis Borges, who outlined six laws for crime narratives in an article he wrote. He discussed how these laws could be applied, and also transgressed. Then he asked each of us to write the first few lines of our “would be” crime novel, meeting these three criteria: give some hint that this is a crime novel, set the tone of the novel and be gripping. He then critiqued each opening. He said that my beginning was clever, but that he didn’t think it would turn out to be the kind of classic crime novel we were discussing. (And he was right; I’m afraid I wasn’t channeling Agatha Christie today. But he thought it was clever! A real, live WRITER! I owe it all to Jessica Fletcher!) While I don’t know that I’m going to be busting out my own crime novel anytime soon, I will certainly be a more critical reader of the genre. I’m attending two more of Martinez’s events and I am eager to read his work in Spanish. (I’ve read The Book of Murder and The Oxford Murders, in English only.) I feel like I’ve discovered a new world – Latin American crime fiction.

My last event featured BBC reporter Fergal Keane discussing his historical nonfiction book Road of Bones, about the battle between British and Indian troops and the Japanese at Kohima, an Indian village near the border with Burma, during WWII. While I like crime fiction, I love military history. I just finished reading Keane’s astonishing and chilling story of entering Rwanda just after the genocide, Season of Blood: A Rwandan Journey. Sobering doesn’t even begin to describe that book. Let’s just say I read it before bed and had trouble sleeping. I haven’t yet read Road of Bones, but I picked up a copy this evening and Keane was gracious enough to dedicate it to the memory of my grandfather, who served in India during WWII. A few years ago, I came across a picture of my Grandpa Jim as a young man, sitting on an elephant. I had no idea he had been in India, and I still don’t really know what he did there. Since finding the picture, I’ve become fascinated by the China-Burma-India Theater, in part because of my overactive imagination, but also because it is a lesser known front, overshadowed by the big events of Europe and the Pacific. Before the photo piqued my interest, I only had The Bridge on the River Kwai as a reference. Beyond that, however, my experiences with aviation in China have also informed my interest. One can’t really work in aviation in China without considering the Flying Tigers, and I’ll read anything I can get my hands on about them, too.

Keane’s talk was riveting, and like his Rwanda book, at times sobering. As part of his research, he interviewed veterans of the Kohima battle, both in Japan and the UK, and when he said that in one interview, a kind, old Japanese man, incredibly polite, described beheading his enemies, one after another, I just really didn’t know what to think. War is not nice. And Kohima was not nice. I’m not terribly good at writing book reviews, but I’m sure I’ll have more thoughts on this subject as I read through his book. I’ll try to share some here.

So now I’m at home, sipping chicken soup and drinking hot tea, hoping that this cold will blow over fast. I’m going to need all my strength to get through another twelve days of literary thrills. I might not run marathons or scuba dive or climb mountains, but I am literate and loving it. And on that completely cheesy and geeky note, see you tomorrow!

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Tagged as: Beijing, books, Bookworm Literary Festival, Fergal Keane, Guillermo Martinez, literary festival, Paolo Giordano, Reading, writing