Clonmel Impressions Festival
Clonmel has a great history. Bianconi launched the first stagecoach company there. It is the birthplace of Laurence Sterne, the clergyman who became famous as the author of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, that grab-bag of whimsy, pseudo-intellectual discourse and ribald humour which turned the 18th-century world on its head.
Clonmel is also home to the Impressions Festival, which runs from the 19-22 October. Unlike many book festivals, Impressions is not another flogathon for popular novelists but an important forum for the discussion of both Irish and international literature.
In the past, Impressions has offered everyone from first-time poets to cult figures the opportunity to talk about their work. This year Impressions boasts a world-class line-up, including Mia Gallagher, Claire Kilroy, Andrew O'Hagan and A Long, Long Way author Sebastian Barry.
Giving the 2006 Sterne lecture is Haifa Zangana, a novelist, journalist and a survivor of Saddam Hussein's regime. A campaigner for the rights of Iraqi women and United Nations envoy, Haifa Zangana's lecture will offer festival-goers an account of life in one of the most brutal dictatorships of modern times. Book your tickets now.
black day for banville
Booknotes ventured forth to the Pavillion Theatre Dún Laoghaire this week for an audience with John Banville. The public interview was the first in a proposed series arranged by Hughes and Hughes booksellers and came on the eve of the publishing of Christine Falls, Banville's first detective fiction under the pen name Benjamin Black. Curious to see the notoriously irascible scribe in action,
Booknotes is delighted to report that Banville has lost none of his peculiarity since winning the Man Booker Prize for The Sea one year ago.
The interview assessed Banville's literary career with the author responding to questions with his usual combination of breathtaking arrogance and fearful modesty. He claimed to have written The Untouchable in order to show John Le Carre how a spy story ought to done, but then said he never expected The Sea to get published because he thought it very weak.
For a famous aesthete he made the surprising objection to the distinction between so-called "genre fiction" and "real literature", saying that there are only good books and bad books.
As for his own serious books, Banville still finds them very difficult to write, though not as challenging as earlier works like Ghosts, a book which he claimed became so complex it nearly killed him.
He found writing Christine Falls – which is based in 1950s Ireland and features a drunken investigator named Quirke – a learning experience, since he had never written a novel in so short a time.
He sees the Benjamin Black books, of which there will be at least one more, as an "exuberance" and a diversion from writing the remaining major books he wants to complete before Banville moves to a shuttered chateau and divides his time between wine and women.
what's in a name?
Booknotes loves a showdown between egomaniac novelists. A year ago John Updike opened the masterclass exercise in derision that was his review of Salman Rushdie's Shalimar the Clown with the question "Why did Salman Rushdie call one of his characters Maximilian Ophuls?"
This week Rushdie finally got the chance to reply. First he branded Terrorist, Updike's latest opus, "beyond awful" and suggested he "stay in his parochial neighbourhood and write about wife-swapping".
On the charge of odd naming he said, "Why not? Somewhere in Las Vegas there is probably a male prostitute called 'John Updike'." Booknotes wonders how long Rushdie waited to see that in print.
Ronan Browne is on leave