The Man Booker winner 2008, Anne Enright, predictably drew a big crowd on Sunday morning and she proved to be an excellent speaker but the speaker and the chairperson didn’t jell particularly and it led to the session being interesting but somewhat frustrating.
The chairing was done by a local based writer, Kapka Kassabova, who was very intense. The role of the other person on stage is to ask the questions and guide the session along. They don’t have to be self effacing but they do have to realise the session is centred primarily on the guest. I am pretty sure it wasn’t an ego thing with Kapka who certainly sounded sincere and interested throughout but she got too caught up with the questions she asked to concentrate enough on the answers!
When Anne Enright was asked what “breaks” the women in her fiction, the answer she got was that we could just as easily ask, what breaks men as Anne E. felt wearied by questions that start “women….” as she is not necessarily putting herself out there as some sort of spokeswoman for the women of Ireland or for women in general. Unfortunately Kapka K. wouldn’t give up on this and kept it going.
I won’t bang on too much myself except to say that it was interesting to hear the take on shame and Irish culture (she doesn’t think that the Irish were sexually repressed but more sexually oppressed as the R.C. church put it always at the forefront of people’s minds! She was asked where the Irish women novelists are (and it’s true that these days the big names in Irish literary fiction are mostly male) and she said they’re off writing chicklit (and that includes Marian Keyes at the top of the pile and a whole bunch of others). She felt that chicklit fits in well on the emerald isle since there’s an Irish thing about women being “lovely”, permanently defensive, unthreatening and “nice.” That’s why she describes herself as “The Anti-Rose of Tralee.”
She’s a very interesting woman, a great speaker and very funny. It seems a pity that the session got wound up in some endlessly circular questions. The questions from the floor seemed to do the same and one of them – and I think it was about grief but I couldn’t be sure! – was so convoluted it was unanswerable. That may have been the reason that the later John Gray session had a system where questions were written and placed in an envelope then delivered to the stage so that the off the wall and the excessively convoluted questions could be omitted.
Philip
