dispatch from the edinburgh book festival

Goodness, where to begin?  I've never before experienced a city literally awash in culture as Edinburgh is at the moment.  It accosts you as soon as you step outside - street entertainers, fly posters, people on pan-pipes (okay, so maybe that doesn't exactly classify as "culture"), pop-up theatre venues on every street corner.  At every minute I want to be in several places at once.  I feel engorged with culture and still greedy for more.  Could I fit in just one more show?  Might I be able to catch another reading?  Can I afford to miss a performance all the reviews assure me is totally "unmissable"?

It doesn't help that we're moving in a fortnight (back to Berlin), and that we've had a stream of visitors, and that I've also been learning to drive (just passed my test!), and my husband's dissertation was due in this week, and I'm teaching my Arvon course next week...

I feel a little overwhelmed!

But I want to catch my breath for a second at least and share some of what I've seen.  So let me begin with a round up of my highlights from the Edinburgh International Book Festival.

Soon after I arrived in Edinburgh, the festival's director Nick Barley invited us to join him on a daytrip to a remote beach he retreats to on weekends with his family.  We wrapped ourselves up warm against the wind, piled into their camper van, made a fire to roast sausages, my dog went bananas racing up and down the beach, and the braver souls in our party even donned wetsuits and dove into the Scottish sea!  We also talked a lot about books, about Nick's role as festival director, how he developed the programme, and the amount of planning that went into it all.  But I don't think that I really understood quite what a huge operation the Edinburgh book festival is until I turned up last week. 

The whole of Charlotte Square, normally a staid fenced green surrounded by stately Georgian facades, is currently transformed into a thronging hamlet of marquee/theatre tents.  Photographer Chris Close's remarkably animated author photos line the walkways and give a strong identity to the festival (oddly enough, I knew Chris already because he was a fellow student on the screenwriting course I took earlier this year).  Outside each venue is a whiteboard on which that day's programme of events is marked up each morning.  So many events!  So many authors!  Almost 800 authors are taking part this year.  The festival expects to welcome around 22,000 visitors.  And many families, it's certainly the most family-friendly literary event I've encountered.  With so much of offer, I initially tried to focus my attention on short story writers, largely because I felt I needed some sort of focus.

Ali Smith was the first author I saw, and she charmed her huge audience with a reading from her new novel There But For The.  Rife with puns and light-hearted word play, the writing was impish, tricksy, and totally engaging.  She told us afterwards that she believes puns to be the foundation of language, and this new book is her exploration of this belief; words are clearly a game for her, and every word is worthy of thought.  This quirky toying with language is a characteristic you find in her stories too.  She's written 4 collections already and made a point to stand up for the short story at the end of the conversation, talking about the freedom they gave her to experiment.

Jennifer Egan, meanwhile, who appeared alongside Karen Russell, told us that she doesn't feel altogether comfortable with her writing being termed experimental.  This might sound odd considering the nature of her most recent Pulitzer-winning book A Visit From the Goon Squad (I've just started reading it and think it's going to be brilliant) which takes the form of a polyphonic, time-jumping tale that even includes a chapter told as a Powerpoint presentation (you can find that particular chapter in full-colour on her website here).  I spoke with Jennifer briefly before her event and asked her what she considered her book "to be" because I knew that a few of the chapters had been published previously as free-standing stories.  'I think of it as entangled stories,' she said, 'but my publishers didn't want that on the front of the book.  Instead they called it a novel.'  It was an interesting comment and reminded me of something I once heard another Pulitzer prize winner Elizabeth Strout say about her book Oliver Kitteridge - 'I always thought of it as stories, but my publishers weren't happy with that so they called it A Novel in Stories.'  Such publishing tactics don't really surprise me, and I'm sure a lot more copies are sold as a result, but it does make you wonder how many other story collections (or entangled story collections) might be out there masquerading as novels.

Karen Russell, by the way, was bright-eyed and very likeable.  I've been wanting to read her stories for ages, especially because a good friend told me they reminded him of mine (I bet she knows the Parrot Jungle, the Florida theme park that features in the second story in my book).  Russell's new novel Swamplandia! grew out of one of the stories in her debut collection.  It's all about a girl called Ava, daughter of a female crocodile wrestler.  The extract she read had a carnivalesque fantasy quality that seemed at once grounded in truths; she herself described the book as a 'family story about loss that just happens to be in a whacked out register.'

I also feel very privileged to be able to say that I spent an hour and a half last week in conversation with Tobias Wolff, an author celebrated as an American master of the short story genre.  Earlier I'd stood in the bookshop and read his story 'Bullet in the Brain', which is so perfect and economic and moving that I urge you to search it out in a bookshop near you and do the same.  It's only six pages, and by the time you finish you'll probably do like me and march right up to the counter to purchase the full collection, so I feel it's okay to encourage some bookshop reading.  The conversation we had deserves to be covered in a separate account, so I won't report more on that right now.  Suffice to say, he was an absolute pleasure to talk with - humble, warm, generous.

Who else did I see?  On Wednesday night I went to a really interesting discussion with Michel Faber, Lucinda Coxon, and Romola Garai, who were talking with Claire Armitstead of the Guardian about adapting the truly-brilliant 800-page Crimson Petal and the White for a three-part BBC TV series.  Faber seemed hugely relieved that Coxon's sensitive and challenging adaptation hadn't turned his story into 'Pretty Woman in crinolines.' 

The day before that I heard Ida Hattemer-Higgins talk about the obsession with Nazi history that spawned her highly-autobiographical debut novel The History of History.  'Fiction is a strange realm of the imagination verging on insanity,' she commented, although did take pains to point out to one questioner that she considered herself to be 'much less insane' than her protagonist Margaret.  She read a number of extracts that powerfully conveyed the queasy, surrealist style of the book - more Bulgakov than Kafka, she asserted.

I've met countless interesting people in the festival's backstage yurt, had lunch yesterday with my agent who was up to chair an event, and also attended a few book festival parties - one hosted by the Edinburgh City of Literature to celebrate the city's emerging writers, another in Canongate's pop-up bookshop where their new Canons series was proudly on show. 

So it's been great, and it's been exhausting!  I'm hoping to catch two of the Booktrust Best New Illustrators Viviane Schwarz and Levi Pinfold later today so I'd better get on with posting this.  If you have the chance ever to come up to Edinburgh for the book festival, I absolutely absolutely recommend it.  It's been brilliant.  Thank you, Nick.