23rd Vancouver International Writers & Readers Festival: 3 Views of Vietnam

Teddyrose@1

14 years ago

On October 19th at 8:00 PM I had the great privilege of attending this event. It was fabulous.

The following are the 3 authors who participated and their bios, plus a bit about their latest books and a bit of what they talked about at this event:

Please note, the bios are taken directly from the festival guide and the book descriptions are taken from the book, and are not my own words. What is written about the event is from me, except of course, the quotations. The photos of me with Ms. Gibb and Mr. Schroeder were taken with my camera by 2 helpful audience members who were waiting to get their own books signed. I took the photo of Mr. Marlantes, myself. No photos we allowed during the event, itself.

Bios: Camilla Gibb is the author of four novels—Mouthing the Words, The Petty Details of So-and- so’s Life, Sweetness in the Belly and, her latest, The Beauty of Humanity Movement—as well as numerous short stories, articles and reviews. She was the winner of the Trillium Book Award in 2006, was a Scotiabank Giller Prize short list nominee in 2005, won the City of Toronto Book Award in 2000 and received the CBC Canadian Literary Award in 2001. Gibb was one of two Canadians named to the prestigious Orange Futures List, recognizing 21 promising international authors. She has also served as vice-president of PEN Canada.

Book Description for her latest book, The Beauty of Humanity Movement:

Set in contemporary Vietnam, this is the story of a country undergoing momentous change and the story of how family is defined — not always by bloodlines but by the heart.

Tu’ is a young tour guide working in Hanoi for a company called New Dawn. While he leads tourists through the city, including American vets on “war tours,” he starts to wonder what it is they are seeing of Vietnam —and what they miss entirely. Maggie, who is Vietnamese by birth but has lived most her life in the U.S., has returned to her country of origin in search of clues to her dissident father’s disappearance during the war. Holding the story together is Old Man Hung, who has lived through decades of political upheaval and has still found a way to feed hope to his community of pondside dwellers.

This is a keenly observed and skillfully wrought novel about the reverberation of conflict through generations, the enduring legacy of art, and the redemption and renewal of long-lost love.

Event: During the introduction, the host, Jerry Wasserman said that Ms. Gibb had her first child just 5 weeks before this event. I must say, she looked terrific!

Camilla pointed out that 60 percent of Vietnams current population was born after the Vietnam war. She said that she wanted to explore the stories of that population, the untold stories. She said that the novels “is about characters I know and love.”

Bios: Karl Marlantes is a graduate of Yale University and was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University. He served as a Marine in Vietnam, where he was awarded the Navy Cross, the Bronze Star, two Navy Commendation Medals for Valor, two Purple Hearts and 10 Medals. His Vietnam experience informs his acclaimed first novel, Matterhorn, which he crafted over a period of 30 years. He lives in rural Washington state.

Book Description of his latest book, Matterhorn:

The novel is set during the winter monsoon season of 1968-69 on and around a fire support base called Matterhorn, located in the mountains of the remote north-western corner of Quang-Tri Province. The protagonist, a young and ambitious Marine lieutenant, wants to command a company to further his civilian political ambitions. Two people stand in his way. The first is a well-loved, combat-weary lieutenant of his own age, who desperately wants out of the bush, but who does not want to leave his Marines with an inexperienced and overly ambitious officer. The second is an angry young leader of the company s radical blacks, who has all the political skill, savvy, and ambition of the protagonist. As the protagonist experiences the costs of combat, he sees the terrible results of his ambition and starts to change, learning that compassion and heart are more important than ambition and skill.

Event: Mr. Marlantes said the Matterhorn is “the central metaphor for self-inflicted wound and mistake.” His book took 30 years to get published. He wrote it right after the war and publishers told him that people didn’t want to read about it. He pitched it again in the 80’s and was told that there were too many books about the war, and then he finally got published. Each time it was rejected, he refined it some more but he never gave up.

Bios: Adam Lewis Schroeder is the author of the story collection Kingdom of Monkeys, a Danuta Gleed Award finalist, and the novel Empress of Asia, nominated for the Amazon.ca/Books in Canada First Novel Award and the Ethel Wilson Fiction

Prize. His story, “This Is Not the End My Friend,” appears in Darwin’s Bastards: Astounding Tales from Tomorrow. His new novel is In the Fabled East. He lives in Penticton.

Book description of his latest book, In the Fabled East:

From one of Canada’s best young voices comes a sweeping literary adventure set against the backdrop of French Indochina.

Paris, 1909: Adélie Tremier, a young widow suffering the final stages of tuberculosis, flees for French-occupied Indochina, through the lush forests of Laos, to seek out a fabled spring of immortality that might allow her to return to her nine-year-old son.

Laos, 1936: Pierre Lazarie, a young academic turned Saigon bureaucrat, is sent by Adélie’s son, now an Army captain, to find his longlost mother. Although his assigned quest fulfills Pierre’s fantasy to travel up the exotic Mekong, he is saddled with his colleague Henri LeDallic, an Indochina old-timer who would rather glory in his loutish past than hunt for ghosts in the jungle. Yet what this mismatched pair discovers forms the mysterious heart of Adam Lewis Schroeder’s brilliant and compelling new novel.

Bridging history from 1890s Aix-en-Provence to American involvement in 1950s Vietnam, In the Fabled East is a rich and sensual depiction of Southeast Asia, charting the loss of innocence of both individuals and the world at large. Echoing Graham Greene and Joseph Conrad, this is historical fiction written with wisdom and panache.

Event: Before Mr Schroeder started his reading, he held out his book for the audience to see and said, “this is a beautiful book.” Then he partially removed the dust cover and said, “see, it’s even beautiful under the dust cover.” The crowd laughed. His reading was superb, he used excellent voice inflections, movements, and facial expressions. It was like he was acting it out for us.

When it came time for questions for the audience, I only got to ask one. I asked Mr. Schroeder if he ever considered reading books for audio. He said it was up to the publisher but thanked me for my praise. Later, when he was signing my copy of his book, Empress of Asia, he said that he was going to ask his publisher about it because he thought it was a good idea for his book. I pointed out that he would be great for reading other author’s works aloud as well.

Going into the event, I knew already that I wanted to read Camilla Gibbs latest book, The Beauty of Humanity Movement. In fact, I hoped to read it before the event however it hasn’t arrived from the publisher yet. One of my all time favourite books is Ms. Gibb’s, Sweetness In the Belly!

Now that I have heard more about all three books from the authors, themselves, I want to read all 3 books! As the title of my blog says, So Many Precious books, So Little Time.