Paraty International Literary Festival: Gringo Writers FLIP Out

Winning the Booker Prize, the Pulitzer of the Commonwealth, did nothing to prepare the British novelist for his reception at the Paraty International Literary Festival (FLIP, in its Portuguese acronym). “I’m not Keith Richards,” he protested. Though his objection came in jest, McEwan did express genuine wonder at the star-spotters who buttonholed him on the cobblestone streets of the host city. “This is like being in the Midsummer’s Night Dream,” he added.

Similar treatment was afforded to the likes of Jeffrey Eugenides, Siri Hustvedt, and Martin Amis. Last year, the Brazilian public lionized a scrawny, aging leftist historian with horn-rimmed glasses named Eric Hobsbawm. Hobsbawm is the author of such best sellers as The Age of Empire 1875-1914. Giggling, Irish author Colm Tóibín said: “I want to tell them that I’m just a writer.”

Joe Mariscal isn’t even a writer, but he got caught up in the torrent nonetheless. The Californian artist, who happened to be in Paraty on a summertime retreat, was accosted by a troupe of local school children who mistook him for a scribe. They hounded him for autographs. “I had some postcards of my sculptures. So I distributed those, and they went away happy,” he said.

A FLIP keynote session featuring Paul Auster and Brazilian musician-cum-writer Chico Buarque de Hollanda attracted a standing room-only crowd of nearly 700. Another thousand-or-so watched in a tent on a giant screen. Finally, “a multitude,” or so say the organizers, followed the readings and debate on an open-air screen thrown up on the main square, just across from the colonial cathedral.

If a bit dazed and confused by all the attention, the writers weren’t really complaining. “It is a little hothouse atmosphere,” said Auster. “But it is so sweet. Everyone is so friendly.”

Few writers are as obsessively reclusive as J.D. Salinger, but many truly seem to prefer privacy to glamour. One of Brazil’s leading 20th century poets, João Cabral de Melo Neto, summed up this attitude in an oft-cited observation about his friend and colleague Carlos Dummond de Andrade: “In person, he’d say little. But he’d talk forever on the telephone. The greater his distance from a person, the more charming he was. I think he didn’t like physical contact.” Writers who accept roles as public figures tend, like Xan Meo, the protagonist of Amis’ latest novel Yellow Dog, to live in “the quiet glow of quiet fame.”

“It is a funny thing as a writer to be treated [like a rock star],” said Tóibín. “The idea of celebrity is growing. Soon we’ll all be celebrities.”

“There’s a whole tradition of writers,” said Leo Braudy, professor of English at the University of Southern California, author of The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History, “who strive to be anonymous and unrecognized. Keats wanted his tombstone to read ‘here lies one whose name is writ in water.’ Faulkner wanted to be forgotten as the author of his works.” Braudy attributes these attitudes to “a romantic belief that the artist, in speaking for all humankind, shouldn’t stand out personally.”

Performers, especially musicians, often praise Brazilian audiences as particularly warm and enthusiastic. Hardly known for his stage presence, James Taylor received such a passionate reception at the 1985 Rock in Rio festival in Rio de Janeiro that he felt compelled to compose a commemorative song. “Can’t come down from the bandstand” is a line from Taylor’s composition Only a Dream in Rio.

In literary circles, Paraty is known as the hometown of Julia Mann, the Brazilian mother of German writer Thomas Mann, author of The Magic Mountain. And the city is not unaccustomed to celebrities. More than two dozen feature length films – starring the likes of William Hurt, Marcello Mastroianni, Sônia Braga and Meg Foster - have used the town’s preserved colonial architecture as a backdrop. Mick Jagger counts among sundry pop musicians who have shot videos in town.

Yet the reaction to the visiting writers seemed curious. Brazil isn’t a place where literature is revered as in, for example, neighboring Argentina. “Reading books is not a popular leisure pastime in Brazil,” stated a report by Euromonitor Intenational, a London-based market research company. “In comparison to other South American countries and the US and Canada, Brazil has significantly lower readership levels.” Illiteracy, functional illiteracy and poverty are often blamed for poor book sales in Brazil, but even after adjusting for such variables, Brazilian readership would seem low. Just one-third of the literate adults are habitual readers, according to the Brazilian Chamber of Books (CBL), a trade association.

“I seem to remember Brazil as the only country in the world with more publishing houses than bookstores,” said Angolan author José Eduardo Agualusa. He’s right, according to the website of the British Embassy in Brasília: with a landmass greater than that of the continental United States, the country boasts 3,713 publishing houses but only 3,200 bookstores. Many of those publishers must be small independents, however; just 530 companies publish five-or-more books a year or at least 10,000 units, according to the CBL.

Canadian writer Margaret Atwood offered a theory about the cult of celebrity at FLIP. If Brazil has so few readers “that probably means that those who do read are motivated. They’re probably beleaguered,” she said. “Readers can come here and meet other readers. Imagine that. There seems to be a lot of energy.”

McEwan was convinced that the energy would soon dissipate and that everything would return to normal at the strike of 12. “No country could live with this much pleasure without falling into the sea,” he said. “The human condition cannot take this much happiness.”