Farewell, MWF 2011

As we decamp from Beer Deluxe, accept that no, we can’t live in the magnificent BMW Edge, and unplug our laptops from ACMI powerpoints, I have to admit it’s nice to have some breathing space and an opportunity to reflect on another brilliant MWF.

Of course, there were some low points. For example, when the MWF team thought up the theme ‘Stories Unbound’, I’m pretty sure they didn’t mean that I should accost festival guests with questionable snippets of my life experience every time I had a wine (or eight). Plus, the usual festival dashing about meant that I didn’t catch all the sessions I wanted to; despite daily trying to one-up festival director Steve Grimwade in terms of how many I managed to see, I had to lie to beat him.

But I am always energised when I reflect upon MWF events, and my memories from the past eleven days provide no exception. Here are my 2011 festival highlights, in no particular order:

1. Peggy Frew’s reading at the launch of The Big Issue fiction edition. Like a lot of festival punters, I’m often in two minds about readings, but when Frew finished reading from her Big Issue story, ‘Camping’, you could hear the audience collectively, finally exhale.

2. Speaking with debut and early-career novelists Melanie Joosten, Jessica Au, SJ Finn and Raphael Brous about love, growing up, work and ghosts in Melbourne’s New Wave

3. The passionate and incendiary Mona Eltahawy on the uprising in Egypt and how it was inspired by and will influence the politics of the Middle East

4. Engaging in a bit of Julia Zemiro-love at Friday Night Live

5. The modest but utterly original César Aira discussing his slim novels and his unusual no-editing, ‘flight forward’ technique

While all these experiences are defined by having been part of MWF 2011, they are also springboards that will propel me into directed and engaged reading for the rest of the year and beyond.

As always, my thanks to the MWF team for an inspiring, varied, well-run and exciting festival. And this year, a guernsey too to Melbourne weather, which was mostly salutary, mostly kind.

What were your highlights from MWF 2011?

Thriller now: Berlin Syndrome and Before I Go to Sleep

A friend of mine is currently reading Melanie Joosten’s Berlin Syndrome, a fantastic psychological thriller about a young couple’s increasingly complicated relationship. When I asked him what he thought, he said it was a wonderful book, but its emotional impact was so great that he would have preferred to see it as a film: that way the pain would only last two hours, rather than the week it took him to read it.

For me, thrillers always bring to mind the ancient Greek concept of catharsis, the release of built-up emotions experienced by an audience at the conclusion of a play – more specifically, a tragedy – but they’d also experience relief: thank goodness their life was nowhere near as bad as that.

Thrillers do something similar; certainly, good ones build up an inexorable tension that begs to be let loose in a fitting yet unexpected conclusion. Because of this – or maybe I’m just a masochist – I much prefer thrillers in book form rather than as films. I love the absolute but safe immersion, the detail and the psychological depth we’re able to access through the written word. Berlin Syndrome, written in close third person, delves into the minds of the two young lovers, allowing us to see from two perspectives how something with the potential to become love turns into something much more sinister.

UK author SJ Watson’s Before I Go to Sleep also creates this immersion beautifully. Watson developed Before I Go to Sleep through the Faber Academy, from the seed of a news story about a man with epilepsy. ‘The bedroom is strange. Unfamiliar. I don’t know where I am, how I came to be here.’ So begins the story of Christine, which slowly takes in countless revelations, including the discovery that the middle-aged stranger she wakes up next to is her husband, and that as a result of head injuries she once suffered, she cannot retain memories; she wakes up every day as if she were young again.

Christine has been keeping a journal, though, a record of her new days. The entries from this journal become a retrieval of her identity that is as gripping and urgent as it is painfully incremental. The intimate first-person account is consuming: we know only what Christine knows, and hunger for more; and yet, it’s unreliable: as Christine uncovers more of her past, it becomes unclear whether she can trust even her own written memories.

As it happens, the film rights to Before I Go to Sleep have been bought by Ridley Scott – so if you prefer your pain in shorter doses, there’s some good news for you. But I’ll take the book, thanks.

I’ll be chatting with Melanie Joosten in Melbourne’s New Wave on 2 September, also featuring Jessica Au, Raphael Brous and SJ Finn.

SJ Watson appears in The Thrill of It with Felix J Palma and Jennifer Mills on 2 September, and in The Morning Read (free event) on 3 September, with Judith Zander, Eleanor Catton, Li Er, Hwang Tong Gyu and Christopher Kremmer.