Archive for the ‘fangirling’ Category

Posted on October 21, 2011 - by MG

How I fangirled Haruki Murakami at the #welovemurakami party

Some years ago I wrote a blogpost I am so going to fangirl Haruki Murakami… about my favourite living author. Despite my vow, it turned out to be more difficult than I’d anticipated. I couldn’t find an email address or anything. I thought about sending a letter to his UK publisher, Random House, but something told me that they would probably not pass it on. Murakami is obsessive about his privacy, he’s probably not that interested in fan mail. Maybe it gets boring after a thousand or so? (Message to my readers – I’m not tired of fan mail yet!)

The desire to celebrate Murakami must have built up into something unbearable because when Zool Verjee (@cadmus08) started tweeting about the upcoming launch of 1Q84, I couldn’t resist urging him to organise a party at Blackwell’s in Oxford.

It turns out that another Oxford-based author, Dan Holloway, had been doing just the same thing. Also that Blackwell’s in Oxford is a hotbed of Murakami fans who were delighted at the chance to throw a party for the sheer joy of Murakami-love and shared delight at the appearance of a hotly-anticipated new novel (watch the trailer for 1Q84.)

So last night saw a bunch of Oxford folk gather in the shop for the We Love Murakami party. In honour of Haruki’s own obsession with jazz and cocktails, we had the pleasure of a live jazz pianist. And I mixed Cosmopolitans, Coolman Martinis, Sea Breezes and Shirley Temples, with help from newly-recruited mixologist, Steph.

We shared stories of how we came to love Murakami, what his writing means to us, there were impromptu readings of favourite passages from his books. We voted on our favourite books (mine s0 far is The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle). On pink and blue postcards, we jotted down thoughts of what Murakami means to us. There were pop quiz questions with book prizes (I won a copy of Norwegian Wood for our 19-year old daughter).

Euan from Blackwell’s recorded videos of the speeches. He’s sending footage as well as the postcard jottings to Murakami’s publisher who have promised to pass them on to Haruki. (and we believe them!)

Really a special night of great warmth and affection for a writer than I’m pretty sure none of us with ever meet, but whose inner world has touched us to our very core. That’s what readings is for, at its very best. I am but a humble entertainer, but even humble entertainers need sustenance to inspire our writing. Any writer that inspires me; Murakami, Junot Diaz, Pedro Juan Guttierrez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Kazuo Ishiguro, well, I’m forever in their debt.

Thank you Blackwell’s for such a wonderful evening!

Posted on October 13, 2010 - by MG

Festivals and Prizes (part 2 of 2)

From festivals – to prizes!

Last week was off to a cracking start when I was lucky enough to be the guest speaker at the School Librarian of the Year Awards for 2010.

If you watch this video from Teacher’s TV you’ll see my shock and delight that I was able to announce TWO winners. And that’s from a very strong shortlist! It was a joy to be able to see the work that all the honour list of librarians has put into the ‘Learning Resource Centres’ in their schools. I quite envied the kids at Kevin Sheehan’s school in Offerton, Stockport, who got to enjoy, amongst many other activities, a Doctor Who theme day.

Then it was on to St. Gregory the Great School, Oxford, where a House competition was run to find the best school poet for National Poetry Day. Four talented young poets stood up to represent their houses before a packed hall at lunchtime. The brilliant Raymond Pelakamoyo won for Benedict House with a poem about Home that brough the house down. (You can watch the video of Raymond Pelakamoyo below or on Youtube)

Then…back home to hear two exciting announcements – the fabulous news that fellow Redhammer client, author Michelle Paver had won the Guardian Children’s Book Prize. And that one of my favourite authors, Mario Vargas Llosa, novelist and former Peruvian presidential candidate had finally won the greatest prize in Literature, the Nobel Prize.

• FT reports Mario Vargas Llosa wins Nobel Prize
• Time reports Mario Vargas Llosa wins Nobel Prize

Huzzah and thank goodness! For those of us who carry resentment that Jorge Luis Borges and Graham Greene were never given their due recognition by the Nobel Committee, Mario Vargas Llosa was another thorn in our side. Now he’s won! Now he is officially the literary equal of his former friend and subject of his doctoral thesis (until he punched him in the face in Mexico City), Gabriel Garcia Marquez!

I’ll confess that I have yet to finish the two books that are considered to be Vargas Llosa’s greatest contributions to the American Novel.

• The Green House
• The Feast of the Goat

And I haven’t yet read Conversations in the Cathedral, which Vargas Llosa told an audience at the 2009 Oxford Literary festival, was his own favourite. Or The War at the End of the World.

But! I have read and loved The Time of the Hero, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, Captain Pantoja and the Special Service, Who Killed Palomino Molero, The Storyteller, The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta and The Bad Girl.

Readers who know their onions are now nodding and thinking, yes, she’s a lightweight, only read the shorter, more entertaining novels. That’s what makes Vargas Llosa such a genius and such a worthy winner! Unlike most Nobel winners he can write dense politico historical epics, comedy, thrillers and murder mysteries. As the guy who announced the Nobel said, Vargas Llosa is a STORYTELLER.

He can write ANYTHING and make it awesome.

If you haven’t read anything by him, start with Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter. And yet again, thanks to Alan Hoyle, former boyfriend of my mother’s for giving me this book for honeymoon reading over 20 years ago and introducing me to your literary hero and now mine.

Three cheers for Vargitas and Peru!

Posted on July 29, 2010 - by MG

I talk about mobile phones vs book for kids, and swoon at Avon from Blake’s 7

Some book publicity events are planned months in advance…and some spring up on you all surprising, like.

Last Thursday I’d planned to be in London to renew my Mexican passport at the embassy, after a bit of a saga as you might know if you follow me on Twitter. Suddenly a little new story broke, about some research collated on behalf of Scholastic Children’s Books UK, that in the UK more under 16s own a mobile phone than own a book.

The research was based on a survey of 17,000 under-16s in the UK. Apparently almost 9 in 10 young people in the UK own a mobile, whilst fewer than 3/4 (73%) own a book. 80% of children who read above the expected level for the age have books of their own. This drops by 22% for those that read below the expected reading level (58%).

It was the last day of term for most maintained schools in the UK, so what better chance to stir up some interest in summer reading for kids?

Scholastic wanted one of their authors to be available for comment, so I was invited to stay over until Friday and do some radio interviews. Sixteen, actually, some live, some pre-recorded.

One interview was at my local radio station, JackFM of Oxford. It’s just down the road from me actually, so Sophie Bruce had a bit of fun teasing me about being in London in a recording studio, when I could have just popped in. And guess who does the in-betweeny-voice bits for JackFM? It’s Paul Darrow, aka Avon, the sexy heart-throb star of BBC TV’s Blake’s 7.

Now if you’ve read my bio, you know that I heart Blake’s 7 but I specially heart Avon, spent most of my teenage years (ahem and a bit longer too) dreaming about being a crew member on the Liberator and having my wicked way becoming really good chums with Avon.

Paul Darrow, a charming and very lovely guy, was always most kind to his fans. Once for his 40th birthday I got all my school friends to sign a card to Paul. He replied with a signed photo for every girl in the class, how cool is that? And a letter addressed to the Ladies of Fallowfield.

Sophie of JackFM asked me if I’d like her to get Paul to record a message for me, and I said that I’d like to know that he remembered the Ladies of Fallowfield. Who are now the dowagers of Fallowfield, but never mind.

Paul, being full of awesome and everything, did just that. Ladies, listen to this without swooning, if you can.

Posted on April 27, 2009 - by MG

The Wondrous Oscar Wao

There may be a new writer for me to swoon over. Haruki Murakami may be given a run for his money.

Here’s a book I’d been waiting to read until it came out in paperback and I had a really good stretch of uninterrupted time to enjoy it. Now I know I don’t usually blog about new books, because well, there are so many brilliant book review blogs, I’d rather leave that to them.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (by Junot Diaz) though, was a crystal-exploding-in-my-cortex type of book. You know when you feel like a book was written specially for you?

This one won the Pulitzer Prize, too. So it must be good.

Reading Oscar Wao felt to me like reading a funky hip take on Gabriel Garcia Marquez/Mario Vargas Llosa, set to a reggaeton rhythm…but about a character whose references were straight out of my own young-adulthood; Dungeons and Dragons, Blake’s 7 and Doctor Who, Watchmen, Lord of the Rings.

To my young blog readers – this is probably one to save until you are an adult. I would NOT want you to tell your parents I recommended this book. Like many works of Latin American literature, especially those set in brutal dicatorships, there are tales of violent atrocities and some extremely ‘adult’ situations.

To the old fogeys among you, READ THIS! It’s probably unlike any book you’ve ever read. It’s unlike any book I’ve ever read but then I can’t imagine there being another book like it.

Here’s the story: Oscar is a fat nerdy boy growing up in New Jersey. He adores comic books, fantasy role-playing games and sci-fi, he also falls hopelessly in love with girls all over the place but to no avail. Oh the shame of it, because he for all his geekery he is still a Dominican (from the Dominican Republic – it’s the Spanish part of the island of Hispaniola, the other half is French/African Haiti).

Dominican men are meant to be super-macho! They’re akin to Afo-Cubans – part African, part Spanish – 100% macho. Oscar’s mum nods with approval when aged 7 he dates two little girls at once. Once they dump him, Oscar’s romantic life is effectively over. Until much later, when fate returns him to the island of his heritage – and final destiny.

The story of Oscar is narrated with dispassionate energy by Yunior, a close friend. It’s not just Oscar’s tale but the island story of his mother and grandfather, just two of the many, many victims of the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo. Hideous horrible violent and utterly unjust things happen to his mother and her family. It’s all described by Yunior with the pitiless yet sympathetic omniscience that is similar to the sweeping narratives of Garcia Marquez and Vargas Llosa. More minimalism though, which I like. Which I admire, too.

Historical footnotes provide more information – and it’s here that the voice becomes irreverently venomous. The DR sure was a total rathole (putting it VERY mildly) during Trujillo’s reign, a nightmare totalitarian state where justice ceased to exist and fear ruled supreme.

In common with other Great Writers, it’s not just the power of the story but the evidence of wisdom, shrewd observations of depths of human truths which mark out this author. Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant.

Note to authors. Set your story in a totalitarian state and watch as plot just falls out. When every single person might legitimately be a liar who is about to feed your hero to a torture machine, the streets are paved with pure High Drama.

Posted on July 20, 2008 - by MG

I am so going to fangirl Haruki Murakami…

“Norwegian Wood” by Haruki Murakami - One of my favourite books ever. 

Well I am! (Details at the end of this post, and I promise to keep you all updated…)

I only wish I could claim to be the first children’s author to be massively influenced by the wonderful Japanese author Haruki Murakami. Even if there aren’t any Japanese children’s authors who are evidently under his spell – and how could there NOT be – there’s Daniel Handler.

Daniel Handler – aka Lemony Snicket, author of “A Series Of Unfortunate Events” once wrote a brilliant article with the succinctly direct title: I Love Murakami. Handler, being a graduate of English and a Very Clever Bloke to judge by the cut of his gib,  writes eloquently of Murakami’s general excellence in a way that I never could.

But I do know what reading Murakami did for me and it’s nothing less than this: it enabled me to write a publishable novel.

I’ve written before about the day I met several publishers who were interested in acquiring ‘The Joshua Files’. And one of them commented “We can’t believe this is your first novel!” to which I replied (laughing) – “Well it’s not – it’s my first publishable novel. I’ve written three before this.” “So what happened,” they asked, “between writing the other three and writing Joshua Files?”

So I told them the truth. In the meantime I’d read almost all of the works of Haruki Murakami.

Backtrack a little. There I was with two manuscripts written in 6 months and both getting essentially rejected by agents. Actually the second ms was getting some interest but it wasn’t quite making the grade. And I understood this: without a quantum leap, my writing was not going to be good enough to be published. Something had to change; something major. I had maybe 50% of what was needed. The rest of the 50% was going to have to come with hard study, graft and experience. Or a bolt from the blue.

I couldn’t be bothered to do it the hard way. Crumbs, I was almost 40 years old! I didn’t have too much time left to get a writing career off the ground whilst I was still young enough to enjoy it (both my parents died aged 46 – that gives you a sense of urgency…).

So I began actively to search for the bolt from the blue.

I read a book on how to structure stories for screenplays, even wrote a screenplay for practice. And meantime, I read all the works of an author until then unknown to me – Haruki Murakami.

Bless TIME Magazine – it was the second time in my life that reading an article there literally changed my life. I read about this Murakami guy whose new book “Kafka On The Shore” was selling like hotcakes. The combination of elements that his stories used sounded scrummy – mysterious young women, missing cats, magical realism, laconic and distant young men, jazz, Schubert, Beethoven, Mozart and dreams. Too good to be true!

So I went to Borders and picked out three books “South of the Border, West of the Sun”, “Sputnik Sweetheart” and “Norwegian Wood”. (Kafka was only out in hardback and I’m stingy). I figured I’d dip my toe first…I began with “South of the Border, West of the Sun” because it’s the shortest.

From the first page I was – more than captivated – almost possessed. There was something about this wistful, minimalist and apparently very straightforward style that was entirely new to me. It was direct and with the simplest of language, sprinkled with unusual and naturalistic metaphors, tapped something deep within.

This is common for readers of Haruki, so I hear. Fans talk about feeling that their brains have been altered. I read that book almost at one sitting and finished in a daze, wondering what had just happened. I moved on to “Norwegian Wood”, a longer read, and began to feel even more deeply moved. It’s a story of a boy aged 19 who falls in love with a strangely troubled girl, with tragic consequences. But the sequences where the two teenagers walk together, talk and fall in love reminded me so keenly of the first time I fell in love, one summer in Mexico when I was 18, that I actually began to cry from the memory. And frankly, with sorrow for the fact that I broke that boy’s heart by being too afraid to let what developed between us grow into anything permanent.

Okay so we all fall in love for the first time and it’s often painful. When we’re middle-aged of course we look back and wonder. That’s what Norwegian Wood is about – a guy in his late 30s looking back at his first love. Nothing new under the sun, and yet Murakami’s writing spoke – as no other writer ever had – directly to those memories. It brought them back. Sad though they were – it was good to see them again!

Dang, I thought. My boy hero needed some of that Murakami wisftulness and haiku-like poetry. It could be just the antidote to the high-octane action and conspiracy thriller elements. I was already planning a sequel to the original version of Invisible City. So I wrote the first few pages, under the influence of Haruki.

It changed something. The character was totally different to the first boy I’d written. He was lost in grief. He longed for his missing father, or at least for answers. The disappearance of Andres Garcia had tapped deep into his psyche, with resultant disturbing dreams. In fact I stole one of my own dreams, from when my mother died.

So when I came to rewrite my boy-hero-discovers-hidden-Mayan-city story, I knew exactly what he sounded like. That particular chapter, by the way, now appears near the opening of Joshua book 2. (Still no title…)

There are homages to Haruki all over Invisible City, if you know what to spot. The most obvious one is the jazz motif. The second most obvious is the Hotel Delfin (Dolphin) – of course a reference to the infamous Dolphin Hotel of “A Wild Sheep Chase” and “Dance, Dance, Dance”.

Haruki’s memoir “What I Talk About When I Talk About Running” is out soon, and of course I’ll be buying it right away and eating it up.

But also – I’m going to send him a copy of “Invisible City”. Yeah I know, stalkah, fangirl… I just have to though. He has to know how grateful I am.

This is how good Haruki Murakami is; amnesia-worthy i.e. worth getting the memory of reading him wiped from your mind so that you can read him all over again for the first time.

If you want to know more I recommend reading this: Ten Things You Need To Know About Haruki Murakami (quite accurately subtitled The key facts about the coolest writer in the world today.) And for a taste – just a teeny one – here’s a short story of his: On seeing the 100% perfect girl one beautiful April morning.

(And if I receive a reply – which I doubt because he’s a GENIUS and I’m NOT WORTHY – I’ll let you know what he says…)