A few weeks ago I attended the Brooklyn Book Festival for the first time. I really enjoyed the day - it was so exhilarating to be surrounded by other book-lovers and listen to so many fantastic talks at inspiring Brooklyn venues in such a short amount of time. The festival could certainly have been expanded to a full weekend event, similarly to the Philadelphia Book Festival two years ago (I didn't go last year); hopefully the organizers will consider a more relaxed pace for next year's installment that would allow festival-goers to attend even more events. (There is also something called Bookend that takes place right before the Brooklyn festival but it didn't involve author events.)
While the Brooklyn Festival deserves to become the premier literary festival in the country since so many authors are based in Brooklyn, a lot of it felt rushed since we had to walk from one venue to the other in Brooklyn Heights and the sessions were often in the form of group readings/presentations. The Philadelphia Festival back in 2010 didn't group authors together so each author could hold a decent-sized reading and answer questions from the audience, and overall attendees got more out of each session than at the Brooklyn Festival, but the latter had many better-known authors. I attended some truly magical poetry readings at the Free Library of Philadelphia (with many other literary types) back in April 2010 - really, there was an audience for it. I see no need to cram 4 poets in one session as was the case for the Brooklyn session on "Poetry of Loss". But surely the organizers will work on improving those issues for next year.
The highlight of the day was that I got to see Jhumpa Lahiri at St Ann's Church, in a discussion with Liesl Schillinger. I had never seen her in person before and was thrilled at the opportunity, although I didn't bring books to sign. Of course meeting a writer is a double-edged sword - sometimes it is better to only keep the idealized image in mind rather than being faced with the real person with unavoidable flaws - but Lahiri looked as expected and came across as kind and humble, especially when she described her beginnings as a writer and the day a short story of hers appeared in The New Yorker for the first time. (She couldn't find the issue in newsstands and called her husband who described to her in minute detail how the story had been set in the magazine to convince her that it had indeed appeared.)
Lahiri also read from her current novel-in-progress, and I've got to admit the disappointment came from her writing rather than her (endearing) personality. The novel is, again, about Indians with top-notch higher education - there's something about grad school in physics - and the voice is exactly the same as in her previous books.
I've bought her two short story collections, and as much as I adored the first one I felt that the second one, for all the accolades it received when it appeared, just repeats much of what she has said before: the voice is similar, the setting is similar, and the editing is subpar at times, as if the whole affair had been rushed. There were some good stories, and the collection was decent, but it certainly was not the monument of great story-telling some people have made it to be. I also read a few pages of her first novel in a bookstore and wasn't interested enough to buy it.
Lahiri is someone I admire immensely as a writer (I will always cherish Interpreter of Maladies), but it feels that, instead of making her readers discover whole new worlds with her, she is overly focused on a tiny part - a hamlet rather than a world - that she will revisit again and again without progressing as a writer or changing her voice or undergoing any kind of transformation as she matures.
There were a few signs in the new novel that give hope maybe this will not be the case after all: in the chapter she read, the "action" (the term is used loosely) seemed to happen in India in the recent past, so maybe the issue of acclimatation in a foreign country such as the US won't be at the forefront this time. On the other hand, this was supposed to be the third chapter of the book so maybe it was a flashback. But overall it felt like she wasn't much renewing herself, and yet I adore her writing and everybody was enthralled by her appearance at the festival. (The church was packed to capacity, it seemed, and leaving after the talk proved to be a very long endeavor.) It'll be interesting to see the novel as a final product when it's published. Lahiri is someone I really want to see succeed, maybe because I had barely moved to the Boston area when I read her first story collection and not only shared many feelings with her protagonists but recognized many of my favorite Boston/Cambridge haunts in her pages.
I ended up the day by picking up a copy of Literary Brooklyn and making my way back to Manhattan on the Brooklyn Bridge in a gorgeous fall day. The next Brooklyn Festival will be held in September 2012. In the meantime I'm already looking forward to the Philadelphia Book Festival mid-April 2012!
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