It’s rare to come face to face with an author you admire and go away feeling as empty as I did last night. Margaret Atwood read far less from The Year of The Flood than I would have wanted. Long passages of the translation into German were “played” with spunk by a fine young actress, Lisa Wagner. The author, by contrast, read out her passages slowly, knowingly. Her comment on the German reading: “I wrote that?!?” Interesting.
The two would have made for an arresting contrast there on the podium, but for the host, sitting stage center, self-important, blundering into stupid questions. Things got a little out of hand and I was thinking, ach, man, can’t you just go outside and play? Bah.
Ms Atwood in the café afterwards
Margaret Atwood three weeks ago on her book
“Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like paté.”
— Margaret Atwood
