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By:
Maeve Friel,
on 11/22/2014
Blog:
An Awfully Big Blog Adventure
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I love coming across literary sculptures, whether they are the slew of Paddington Bears which recently appeared in London, a dapper James Joyce leaning on his cane on Earl Street in Dublin or Don Quijote and Sancho Panza trotting through the Plaza España in Madrid.
This curious monument of a man sitting amid the tentacles of a giant octopus is also a literary monument. It is in Vigo, in Galicia in North-Western Spain - but what is it?
It is a homage to the French novelist Jules Verne, often described as the inventor of the genre of science fiction, and to the Galician references in his much-loved adventure Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.
First of all, the sculpture reminds us of the terrifying chapter in which Captain Nemo and the crew of the submarine Nautilus are attacked by giant squid, as in the English translation, or more correctly by giant octopus (les poulpes, in French). Galicia, renowned for spectacular seafood, is particularly in thrall to the octopus and Pulpo a feira, octopus in the style of the fair, is its signature dish - boiled in huge cauldrons by the pulpeiras, specialist octopus cooks, the tentacles snipped up with massive scissors and sprinkled with olive oil and pimentón.
But there is another chapter of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea which takes place right in the Ría de Vigo, the Bay of Vigo. This was the real life location of a major naval disaster in 1702 when English ships burnt and scuttled the French and Spanish fleets which were returning from the Caribbean laden with treasure from the New World. In the novel, Captain Nemo comes to Vigo to loot the ships´treasure.
Around the Nautilus for a half-mile radius, the waters seemed saturated with electric light. The sandy bottom was clear and bright. Dressed in diving suits, crewmen were busy clearing away half-rotted barrels and disemboweled trunks in the midst of the dingy hulks of ships. Out of these trunks and kegs spilled ingots of gold and silver, cascades of jewels, pieces of eight. The sand was heaped with them. Then, laden with these valuable spoils, the men returned to the Nautilus, dropped off their burdens inside, and went to resume this inexhaustible fishing for silver and gold.
I understood. This was the setting of that battle on October 22, 1702. Here, in this very place, those galleons carrying treasure to the Spanish government had gone to the bottom. Here, whenever he needed, Captain Nemo came to withdraw these millions to ballast his Nautilus. It was for him, for him alone, that America had yielded up its precious metals. He was the direct, sole heir to these treasures wrested from the Incas and those peoples conquered by Hernando Cortez!
Don´t miss the monument to M. Verne if you are visiting this less well known corner of Spain, a place redolent with stories of shipwrecks, smugglers, fishermen´s tales and foot-weary pilgrims, the furious music of bagpipes and an all-pervading smell of octopus and sizzling sardines. And of course, I recommend that you read the book too!
www.maevefriel.com
By:
Maeve Friel,
on 10/22/2014
Blog:
An Awfully Big Blog Adventure
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By diversity, they mean “books by and about all kinds of people… boys, girls, all different colours, all different races and religions, all different sexualities and all different disabilities and anything else you can think of – so our books don’t leave anyone out.”
Benjamin Zephaniah whose Terror Kid is the Guardian Teen Book Club choice says:
“I love diversity. I love multiculturalism… It makes Britain´s music interesting. It makes our food interesting. It makes our literature interesting and it makes for a more interesting country … To me it’s not about black, white, Asian; it’s about literature for everybody.”
And there you have it: the criterion must be the quality of the literature. I see little value in writing or publishing books to satisfy some sort of quota to reflect the percentages of ethnic or racial populations or other minorities.
The Guardian published
a list of 50 books chosen to represent all manner of cultural diversity, from the amazing Amazing Grace by Mary Hoffman to Oranges in No Man´s Land by Elizabeth Laird.
Here are a few of my favourite books that are outstanding in every way and that also open windows on to different ways of seeing the world.
The Arrival, by Shaun Tan, is a wordless book about the experience of emigration/immigration, following the lonely journey of a man to a new country where everything is different and inexplicable. (He signed my copy when he spoke at a Children´s Books Ireland conference a few years ago and it is one of most treasured possessions.)
Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, is a graphic novel based on her experiences during the cultural and political upheaval of the Iranian revolution after the overthrown of the Shah. This is a real eye-opener from the first pages showing tiny girls swathed in unfamiliar and unwanted veils in their school playground.
My Dad´s A Birdman, by David Almond, illustrated joyfully and colourfully by Polly Dunbar, is a terrific book about a young girl and her dad who is so overwhelmed with grief that he goes off the rails. It is suffused with love and tenderness and faith in the act of flying as Dad and daughter take part in a madcap and magical contest to sprout wings and fly across the river.
Wonder by R.J. Palacio is the story of Auggie, a boy with a shocking facial disfigurement who is
starting 5
th grade after years of home schooling: imagine how he is dreading it - “I won´t describe what I look like. Whatever you´re thinking, it´s probably worse.
I would like to add two more joyful books to the mix:
From Tangerine Books, a wonderful
picture book, Larry and Friends, by Ecuadorian illustrator Carla Torres in collaboration with Belgian/Venezuelan writer Nat Jasper celebrating the modern melting pot that is New York.
Larry, the New York dog, holds a party for all his amazing immigrant friends among them Magpa the pig from Poland who became a tightrope artist, Laila the Iranian entomologist, Edgar the Colombian alligator street musician, Ulises, the Greek cook and a host of other talented and tolerant newcomers to the city – all apparently based on real people and how they met up.
The book project was successfully funded by kickstarter – see more about it
here.
As you can see, the illustrations are divine - this is Layla, the Iranian entomologist who works at the museum.
And finally, another great classic is The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats (1963), possibly one of the earliest American picture books to feature a young African-American hero – although this is never mentioned in the text. It simply tells the story of a young four year old boy discovering snow in the city for the first time.
www,maevefriel.com
www.maevefriel.com/blog
You can also find me on Twitter @MaeveFriel
After nearly two years in Panamá, I am back in my own house in a tiny village in Alicante, Spain. (That´s my front door with the lovely iron door knocker which is very traditional in this area - it´s a gloved hand knocking at the door with an orange.)
When I first went to Panamá, I knew little about it except that it had a canal and a hat (and the hats, it turned out, were actually from Ecuador). I quickly embarked on a rapid immersion course of Panamanian ecology, political history and culture. My head was soon spinning with tales of Spanish conquistadors, Welsh and English pirates in the Caribbean, runaway slaves, pearl fishermen, the 49ers who crossed the isthmus to get to the California gold rush, the Chinese workers who built the railway.
I read about the thousands of men who died of yellow fever and malaria during the first doomed attempt by the French to build the canal. I learned how President Truman engineered Panamá´s independence from Colombia in 1903 and the subsequent land grab so that the Americans could take over and complete the canal. I read Grahame Greene´s Getting to Know the General about his friendship with the dictator Trujillo who made the Americans return the canal to Panamanian governance. I visited the grave of ballerina Margot Fonteyn whose Panamanian playboy husband was shot and left paraplegic by a furious husband. I went to an exhibition about Paul Gauguin´s stay in Panamá when he worked as a labourer on the canal during the French era.
Panama city was a city of huge contrasts, with soaring skyscrapers and an old and very beautiful colonial city emerging from years of neglect.
I spent weekends walking in rainforests or visiting South Sea and Caribbean islands. We took the train through the jungle (from Pacific to Atlantic in an hour) and did a full canal transit (about eight hours).
On the nights of the full moon, we joined the hundreds of drummers who gathered around the huge curutú tree in the City of Knowledge. I overcame my fear of heights and swam in a swimming-pool on the twenty-seventh floor of our apartment building.
The biodiversity was amazing - blue morpho butterflies as big as saucers, a sloth which hung on the school playground fence, flocks of pelicans on the roof of the fish market, gangs of bandit coatimundis raiding the bins, a toucan in the mango tree and huge migrations of vultures which soared over the city in October and November making their way from Canada to Chile. One week, millions of luminous black and emerald butterflies crossed the isthmus, clouds of them fluttering over the heads of the joggers on the coastal strip - it was like living in a Gabriel García Marquez novel.
Surely, I thought, I can get a book out of all this.
Last winter, I started a novel which is set in Panamá in the 1920s but I haven´t even got a decent first draft yet. However, since leaving the country, I have discovered something very important.
I need to do some very major surgery. I need to cut the hooptedoodle (the part that readers tend to skip, as Elmore Leonard called it). There is too much information. I don´t need my reader to know as much as I now do about my beloved Panamá.
Actually, what I most need to do, is close that door up there and ignore anyone knocking.
www.maevefriel.com
www.maevefriel.com/blog
I am not a great football fan but I must admit that this World Cup business looks very different when you are in Latin America.
I visited an ethnic Kuna community in the San Blas islands just as the football got under way and children were out in force, many of them barefoot but wearing Brazilian shirts as they played makeshift games on the island´s airstrip (there is only one flight a day so the rest of the time, it becomes a play area!)
In Panama city, cars are decked out with Colombian or Venezuelan flags. Flat screen tvs have appeared in shopping malls and coffee shops, attracting audiences cheering for Uruguay or Mexico or Argentina or Chile. There is widespread desire for the Cup to stay in Latin America.
As I am trying to track down and read children´s literature from Central and South America at the moment, I was delighted to come across this month a very powerful book by Chilean writer, Antonio Skármeta, The Composition (illustrated by Alfonso Ruano) which not only has a football crazy protagonist but also addresses what life is like for children living during a dictatorship. And, heaven knows, so many Central and South American countries have suffered under dictatorships.
Skármeta spent many years during the Pinochet dictatorship in Germany - you may know him as the screenwriter of the film Il Postino which tells the story of the friendship between Chilean poet Pablo Neruda and his postman. You may be as surprised to learn as I was that the book is set entirely on an island in Chile, not in Italy. The film was great - the books sounds even better.
The Composition opens with Pedro´s disappointment that his parents have given him a plastic soccer ball for his birthday instead of a white leather ball with black patches, like the ones real soccer players use.
The streets are full of soldiers with machine guns. Pedro´s parents are fearful and distressed. They huddle around the radio, listening to foreign radio stations, turned on at a very low volume. One day when he is playing soccer on the street, he sees soldiers arrest the father of one of his friends. When he asks his parents if he is for or against the government, his mother tells him that children are not for or against anything.
At school, an army officer announces a cash prize for the best composition on the children "What My Family Do At Night". What will Pedro do?
The writing is subtle and humorous and effectively shows how children are capable of understanding situations and making moral decisions.
It is only at the last page when Pedro´s father says "We´d better get a chess set then", that we learn that Pedro wrote in his composition that he plays soccer and does his homework and his parents sit on the sofa and play chess all evening.
From July, I will be a little less "scattered" - after almost two years in Panama, I am moving back home to Spain (with I hope frequent visits to England and Ireland). Now if I could only get a decent first draft of my book finished before I leave...
www.maevefriel.com
www.maevefriel.com/blog
I´m on Facebook too.
This weekend Children´s Books Ireland are holding their 24th annual conference at the Light House Cinema in Dublin with a glittering array of national and international speakers. It will kick off with the inaugural address of the new Irish Children´s Laureate, Laureate na nóg, Eoin Colfer. The conference has always been a stimulating and inspiring and fun highlight of the year for writers, illustrators, booksellers, teachers, librarians and all lovers of children´s literature.
This year the chosen theme, the F word: Failure - is intriguing. The programme says they are inviting writers “to reflect on the times in their careers where things have fallen apart, deadlines went out the window and defeat was snatched from the jaws of victory.” What do you do when you are turned down by agent after agent? How do you get past the fear of failure? How do you keep going if your books are no longer finding a publisher (perhaps after years of regular commissions)? And how do you find the true grit and determination to turn the failures into triumphs, to keep going when no one actually has asked you to write in the first place? Will a book award pave the way automatically to a successful and lasting career? No doubt there will be many thoughtful discussions and a lot of laughs too. I am terribly sorry that I am so “scattered” that I will not be there.
At times when my work in progress gets stuck or I am failing to meet a deadline, I sometimes look to the wisdom of other writers and the many lists of tips and advice out there. But the one I find the wisest and the most entertaining is Anne Lamont´s timeless advice in her book “Bird by Bird”:
Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he’d had three months to write, which was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said, “Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.”
Bird by bird – that´s the way to do it. Just write the next sentence and carry on until you have finished.
Happy Book Day! No, I haven´t got my dates mixed up. 23rd April, is the
UNESCO World Book and Copyright Day, a worldwide celebration of the book, the publishing industry and the intellectual property rights of the author. (Britain and Ireland as always are out of step with the rest of the world!)
The date was chosen by UNESCO because both Miguel Cervantes (1547-1616) and William Shakespeare died on that day (although that is not strictly true because of the difference in the Gregorian and Julian Calendars).
In Spain, Cervantes Day has been celebrated since 1923 and Cervantes is treated with the same veneration and respect as Shakespeare. In Cataluña, the day coincides with the feastday of their national saint, St. George or Sant Jordi, and there is a longstanding tradition there of people exchanging roses and books on 23rd April although this custom is widespread throughout Spain now. Many bookshops present you with a rose when you buy a book and nearly all stay open late. There are thousands of book related activities throughout the country.
If you were in Madrid today, you could celebrate the life of Cervantes by going to the Convento de las Trinitarias, an old convent in the Barrio de las Letras (The Arts Quarter), where the Academy hold a memorial Mass
with an empty coffin on display. Cervantes chose to be buried here because the Trinitarian Monks had helped organise his release after he was kidnapped and enslaved by Algerian corsairs on his return from the Battle of Lepanto (where he lost an arm): unfortunately, the location of the grave has long been lost.
Or you could take the train out to the old university town of Alcalá de Henares where Cervantes was born, the son of a barber-surgeon and a minor impoverished aristocrat. His home is now a
casa-museo and is a fascinating glimpse into 16th century domestic architecture.
Or you could go farther afield to Argamasilla in Castilla La Mancha. This small town claims to be the home of Don Quixote, "the place whose name I do not wish to remember" -
(el) lugar de La Mancha de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme. It is now firmly on the literary tourist map, on the Ruta de Don Quijote, a fabulous landscape with its wide horizons, crumbling castles and dozens of white windmills on the crests of the hills.
Cervantes, always poor, always unfortunate in business and in love, was thrown into prison in Argamasilla. It was here that he said he had the idea for Don Quijote, who may have been based on the local Duke Rodrigo de Pacheco, the duke of the long countenance, who suffered from mental illness. His ex voto portrait hangs in the local church (he´s the man in the ruff, bottom right hand corner):
Or you could simply take down a copy of Don Quixote, the Ingenious Hidalgo of La Mancha and browse. Often cited as the first modern European novel, and nominated again and again by writers as their favourite book, it is funny, touching, wise and full of beautiful language - and yes, there are boring bits too but you can skip them. There are literally hundreds of editions, including ones illustrated by Honoré Daumier, Gustave Doré, Salvador Dalí and Pablo Picasso. In the whole literary canon, are there any profiles as recognisable as the long skinny lance-wielding hidalgo and his small round companion Sancho Panza?
Can I also recommend
Don Quixote´s Delusions - Travels in Castilian Spain by Miranda France, an unusual travel book/memoir/literary biography. It will make you laugh out loud but is also a scholarly and insightful introduction to Don Quijote.
I have not been above borrowing a little from Cervantes. My books
Tiger Lily - A Heroine in the Making, Tiger Lily - A Heroine with a Mission, Tiger Lily - A Heroine for All Seasons all feature a girl who, like Don Quijote, has also become a little mad from reading so many books and determines to become a heroine and escape from her home in the Middle of Nowhere in search of adventure.
"When Don Quijote went out into the world, that world turned into a mystery before his eyes. That is the legacy of the first European novel to the entire subsequent history of the novel." Milan Kundera
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