Event photos: Steven Galloway, Christian Bök, Sarah Hampson, and more

From April 19-25 Moncton, N.B. hosted its 11th annual Frye Festival, a bilingual literary festival named after Northrop Frye, who grew up in Moncton. The festival features workshops, panel discussions, and readings by writers from around the world.

Steven Galloway signs books after a Book Club event on Thursday, April 22. (Photo by Dolores Breau, courtesy of The Frye Festival)

Christian Bök performs sound poems at Soirée Frye on April 22nd. (Photo by Dolores Breau, courtesy of The Frye Festival)

Noah Richler, Annabel Lyon, Linden MacIntyre, and Nico Ricci take the stage for an Evening of Canadian Literature on April 23. (Photo by Dolores Breau, courtesy of The Frye Festival)

Sarah Hampson signs a copy of her new memoir Happily Ever After Marriage (Knopf Canada) at the book’s launch at Jump Restaurant in Toronto on April 27. (Photo courtesy of Knopf Canada)

Author Rona Arato reads at the launch of her children’s book Mrs. Kaputnik’s Pool Hall and Matzo Ball Emporium (Tundra Books) at Chapters Bayview Village in Toronto on May 2. (Photo courtesy of Tundra Books)

Steven Galloway to Barbara Kay: I’m a Canadian novelist and proud of it

Last week, National Post columnist Barbara Kay stirred up some controversy when she trashed Lisa Moore’s novel February for being both unmanly and unreadable – a symptom of what Kay describes as an overly feminized, government-coddled publishing industry. In today’s paper, author Steven Galloway offers a rebuttal, arguing that Kay’s literary sensibility just isn’t very, well, literary:

Ms. Kay’s complaint isn’t with Canadian literature, it’s with the lack of Canadian blockbuster commercial fiction. My suspicion is that Ms. Kay can’t tell the difference – how is it that she thinks the literature of our country differs from the literature of any other country? Most contemporary literature is overwhelmingly reflective, personal and not ripped from the headlines. And that’s the way it should be. Novels are not twitter, they are not sitcoms and they are not action movies, and the moment they are, literature ceases to exist.

On the issue of arts grants, which according to Kay create a culture of mediocrity and smug navel-gazing, Galloway has this to say:

Yes, Canadian literature is subsidized. So are tourism, mining, forestry, automobile production, small business and oil. In 2006 the petroleum industry alone received $1.4-billion in government subsidies in the form of tax breaks. I’ll apologize for our subsidies when they apologize for theirs, because what writers do is every bit as important and vital as putting together cars, docking cruise ships or cutting down trees.

Galloway’s response is a well-needed antidote to Kay’s over-heated polemics. But the tinge of elitism that creeps into his argument – he says the type of book Kay would like to see more of in Canada “may well be entertaining but it would be neither a novel nor literature” – is a little off-putting. Surely, if commercial fiction can’t aspire to literature, it at least qualifies as culturally meaningful. And many novels that subsequently earned a place in the canon were first conceived of as entertainments.

Litbloggers weigh in on Giller picks

A brief survey of responses to yesterday’s Giller shortlist announcement:

• Bookninja argues that Marina Endicott’s Good to a Fault got the nod by advertising on Bookninja.com
• Oddsmaker Pinnacle Sports places the smart money on Rawi Hage’s Cockroach
• IFOA blogger Andrew Westoll feels bad that Nino Ricci and Steven Galloway were left off
• Alberta librarian Peter Bailey bemoans the lack of Western Canadian nominees

Cellist vs. Cellist

Seems there’s a bit of controversy brewing around Steven Galloway’s novel The Cellist of Sarajevo, which was published a few months back by Knopf Canada. (Read Q&Q‘s review here.) According to the CBC, the real-life cellist Vedran Smailovic, who served as the inspiration for the book’s title character, is now demanding compensation for it, claiming that Galloway never contacted him to seek permission to be included in the novel.

With a stool and his cello, Smailovic once played on top of the rubble from a deadly mortar attack in Sarajevo. In plain view of snipers, he played for 22 days straight — one day for each person killed during the mortar attack.

So does the character in Steven Galloway’s book, published this year. It’s a war tale woven around three characters in Sarajevo and their reaction to a cellist character inspired by Smailovic, whose story has travelled around the globe.

[...]

Smailovic said that if people are making money off tales from his past, he is entitled to a share of it.

“They put my picture, my face, on the front, on the cover with no permission. They don’t ask me — they use my name advertising their product. I don’t care about fiction, I care about reality.”

Whichever way you look at it, this is a pretty sticky situation with no clear-cut answers. It’s hard not to sympathize with Smailovic, but based on the info in the CBC piece, it sounds as if Galloway only ever meant to pay homage to the man, and that he did so in a fairly respectful fashion. The Smailovic character is prominently featured only in the first five pages of the book, he never speaks, and he is mostly used as a thematic device to link the other three characters. Galloway even sent Smailovic an autographed copy of the book, which suggests that he expected Smailovic would like it.

Our guess is that Smailovic probably doesn’t have a very good understanding of how the publishing business works, and is under a false impression that there are Hollywood-style profits coming Galloway’s way. And we kind of wonder if maybe the CBC doesn’t have the best understanding of publishing either, as the piece implies at one point that Galloway should (or could) have offered compensation to Smailovic or the other 25 people he interviewed in researching the book. First of all, it was just background research for a work of fiction, not non-fiction, and second, the CBC would presumably be much more outraged if they discovered Galloway had paid people for the stories, which is one of the age-old ethical taboos of journalism.

As for Smailovic’s concern about being put on the book’s cover, he has more of a case there, but even that is not so cut-and-dried. The cover (which you can see here) is indeed a photo of him, but it’s oriented so that his face and most of his body are cut from the image, as if the cameraman was wandering away from the nominal subject to take in the devastated surroundings instead. In fact, it could be argued that the cover is attempting to show, in visual terms, that the cellist is not the book’s real subject at all, which only helps Galloway’s case.