The Buchmesse is a fevered occasion: a lusty gathering of readers so in love with books that they have chosen to produce them for a living. In vast, overheated halls, they pitch and bid and sweat in an annual mating ritual that yields future offspring for the bookshelves of the world.
As a writer, I tend to observe crowds, not enter them. Yet I had come to promote my novel and could not linger at the margins. So, in I strode.
How strange it felt at first – to have pursued the silent work of writing and then to find myself shouting about it! However, there was a thrill in all this, in meeting strangers who had read my novel and been stirred by it, in trying to articulate the ideas that animated my work, in presenting myself and my book to a new audience.
Promotion can be jarring, too. After hundreds of hours alone with your computer screen, the book is published and you must leap from your cave, suddenly exposed, lights in your eyes after years in darkness.
Isn't such light what the writer seeks? Attention and an audience? If not, why communicate at all? Why seek a publisher? Why not just type away and delete the manuscript afterward?
But writers are paradoxical characters. They want to be heard, yet are often wary of talking aloud. Consider how many become recluses, composing for a public they prefer not to meet. I suspect that even more writers would live in hiding if they could afford to.
“How are you managing?” I asked another debut novelist at the fair. From her pallor, I realized she was suffering from the shock of attention, the expectation of performance. “Odd, isn't it? We are attracted to writing partly because we prefer not to thrust ourselves forward in public like this, to be the center of attention. Instead, we find that –” But our conversation was interrupted as we were rushed to our next speaking appointments.
Press interviews took up most of each day. They lasted about 30 minutes each, conducted one-after-another at the stand of my publisher, dtv, whose gracious press officers plied me with glasses of water (avoiding the sparkling kind, lest I burp into a microphone!) and handed me lozenges to soothe my raw throat.
I tried to engage with all the interviewers, studying them as they studied me, assessing their attitudes, noticing where they looked, whether they preferred to speak or to listen. Often, I received the same questions. I hated to repeat myself – it felt false. But it would be more false to change an honest answer just for variety.
The temptation is to create a public version of yourself, one that may be largely true or largely false but that is nevertheless a barrier between the strangers asking questions and your interior world. In public, you are expected to be “the writer.” In private, you may wonder who that person is quoted in the newspaper or speaking on television. He has your face, your hoarse voice – he is you, is he not?
Whenever I had a break, I hurried outside, inhaled fresh air, and wandered through the other halls where dozens of other nations – small and large, rich and poor, cheerful and cheerless – had their stands. How intriguing to have the globe reproduced in book stalls: the lonely, obscure nations that no one visited, with sad bowls of local candies failing to entice anyone; the authoritarian nations with showy stands but nothing much to read; the stylish democracies, the austere democracies, the noisy, passionate ones, too.
Soon my time for dallying was over. Back to the interviews, mouth open, speak!
They were tiring days in Frankfurt but delightful, too. If this public interest – no matter how odd it sometimes felt – could not excite me, there would be something amiss.
Before I left, someone warned me: “All the craziness here – you'll miss it when you get home!” She was nearly right. Briefly, I felt lonely as I readjusted to my peaceful, solitary life in London.
Yet I wasn't completely alone. My books awaited me here, my notepads, my computer keyboard, the new novel I am working on. My voice may have stayed in Frankfurt, but my writing was patiently waiting for me to return home.
© by Tom Rachman
Tom Rachman ist Autor des Romans "Die Unperfekten", der im Oktober 2010 in deutscher Erstausgabe bei dtv premium erschienen ist.
