In the eye of the beholder

Yesterday I received this strange and wonderful picture from my good friend Carmen in Madrid. I was able to catch up with her during my brief visit to the city in November and she told me about some of the work she has been doing, including for a recent exhibition in the Netherlands. Of course, talking is not the same as showing. So, without my knowing it, she produced this piece for me and put it in the post. It arrived just before my birthday.

Carmen's work is often quite biographical in a spontaneous kind-of-way. Many of her pictures are inspired by the individual for whom they are intended. Is this a good likeness of me, I wonder, representationally speaking? Well, my wife says yes, especially the fact that the clock is upside down. It reflects the fact that I often do things later than I'm supposed to, or not at all...

Whatever the truth, I really like this picture, which is enigmatically entitled Tiempo a destiempo. It grows on me day by day. Carmen says she may exhibit in New York some time soon. I hope so, because I think her stuff would go down a storm there. Either way, I'm very pleased to have got in ahead of the rush.

Regreso al Madrid

This past week I spent two delightful days doing press interviews in Madrid. My hosts at Alfaguara (chiefly in the persons of Rosa Junquera and her colleague Alejandro Aliaga) were wonderful, and looked after me like an old friend. It was also delightful to meet María Fernandez Soto, who translated Zoia’s Gold for Alfaguara a few years ago, as well as The Einstein Girl more recently. It turns out she is writing a novel herself, which may account for the beauty of her prose, which I have heard widely praised. As a writer, if you are lucky enough to have a good translator in a foreign tongue, it is a very desirable thing to keep them, not least because you will enjoy continuity of style and voice (which are theirs, after all, and no longer really yours). She told me about some of the particular challenges involved in turning English literary fiction into Spanish literary fiction, which I found quite fascinating. All the decisions about style, voice and tense that a writer makes have subtly different ramifications in different languages, so I am beginning to learn.

The effect on press coverage has been excellent. The interviews given to the press agencies in particular have been syndicated all over Spain and Latin America, and there have been features in the national press - occasionally accompanied by photographs of me looking tired (I was) and jowly. There have also been radio features all over the place, including this one on the national RTVE network. Although the item itself is in Spanish, the entire interview (with the utterly charming Eva Cruz) is also downloadable and is in English. You can hear both broadcast and interview here:

http://www.rtve.es/mediateca/audios/20091126/philip-sington-habla-su-ultima-novela-chica-einstein-asuntos-propios/637668.shtml

Down among the book stacks

Literary festivals, library events and reading programmes are a novelty for me, but I've been invited to a number of them since The Einstein Girl was published. In October I did a quick spot at the Calderdale Readers' and Writers' Festival in Halifax; and earlier this month I spoke at a similar event in Fulham Library, which is just a mile or two from home. I was a little apprehensive about both events, having little or no idea what I should talk about, but I've hit upon quite a good strategy which so far has produced lively results.

It is standard practice to do a quick reading from the latest book; so I start with that. Then I describe very briefly my writing career, the who, the what, the when. This takes five minutes. Then I throw open the floor to questions.

This is, I will admit, a little risky. People at first can be quite shy. There can be some long pauses before someone pipes up; so I warn the organisers beforehand so that they can step in with a question if need be. So far, though, that hasn't be necessary. Once the questions start, they don't stop. On both occasions so far I have been impressed (and a little humbled) at just how interested people are in the whole publishing business. Many, of course, are writing themselves. It seems if you are prepared to be open and candid about your own experience - the lows as well as the highs - the curiosity only seems to deepen. A few jokes don't hurt either.

Next week I am off to Madrid, where Santillana have lined up 14 press interviews to coincide with the launch of the Spanish edition. Years ago, when I covered southern Europe for a magazine, Madrid was almost my second home. I loved it there. But I discovered the other day, to my amazement, that my last visit was in 1994. I think it is going to feel quite strange going back, either because things have changed, or because they haven't. I can hardly wait.

Musical makeover

I have just added the new specially composed score to the trailer for The Einstein Girl. It will get its first outing for Spanish publishers Alfaguara, whom I am going out to visit next month, and then it will be adapted for the Vintage (UK) edition, which comes out in March 2010.

This score was written and performed by Philip Johnston, a concert pianist and Taekwondo instructor turned novelist who lives in Canberra, Australia. I liked the music I had on the old version of the trailer, but having something specially tailored to the video makes an altogether more striking impression; and Philip's score is, I think, absolutely captivating. The theme has been rolling around inside my head ever since I first heard it, and the arrangement is superb.

Take a look!

Between the covers

The cover artwork for the Vintage (B format) edition of The Einstein Girl has been finalised. Originally the design on the left was chosen - a decidedly noir reworking of the original artwork. When I was first shown it, some months ago, I rather liked it: in particular the bold colour and the faintly Georg Grosz lettering. However a number of the big retail buyers were less happy. They felt that this design conveyed too little of the period, while the mood said only crime. They were right. As a friend of mine later commented, it looked like the cover for a Raymond Chandler novel.

So it was back to the drawing board. A more identifiable period was the first requirement, but so was the need to convey both the literary and genre character of the book - and to hint at the other elements of the story besides the crime aspect that kicks it off. A pretty tall order, all told.

The result of the rethink was this (minus the strange green background tinge, which seems to have crept in from somewhere.) Everyone seemed to like this image (actually a composite of two archive photographs), although both my agent and I had some reservations about the title font. We thought the flowing lipstick red suggested too romantic a story, with a no more than a hint of menace. Vintage took this on board and altered the cover again.

The final result is on the right. For my money, the more formal black type and the slightly darkened background better represent the style and tone of the book. A more accurate rendering of the colours (without the green tinge) can be seen on Amazon, here: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Einstein-Girl-Philip-Sington/dp/0099535793/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1254865182&sr=1-2

From Dresden to Glasgow

The second half of last week was spent in Saxony, and in particular in the impressive city of Dresden with its recently rebuit Frauenkirche (see above). My eagerness for investigative endeavour was rather blunted by the temperatures, which peaked at 37C on Thursday. Friday brought huge thunderstorms and blinding downpours (quite alarming on the autobahn), and then everything became quiet and balmy again.

I returned to the UK to find a small fist of positive reviews for The Einstein Girl. John O’Connell in The Guardian said some very nice things both about the book and the way it was written; and there was a short but useful piece in The Herald (Glasgow). In the cyber world there were long and very flattering pieces on the EuroCrime and Fantast Book Critic web sites. The interesting thing there, is that these sites both cater for readers with a taste for different types of genre fiction (crime on the one hand and science fiction on the other). It would be good to discover that Einstein has genuine cross-genre appeal , reaching beyond readers of literary and/or historical fiction – which seemed to be the obvious markets for the book when it was being designed and printed. Time will tell if it has. It is still very early days.

The guardian review can be found here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/aug/22/einstein-girl-philip-sington

A bookless place (almost)

I had another meeting with a film company yesterday in which various preliminary plans were hatched and options discussed - mostly in connection with my last book, Zoia's Gold and a long short story I wrote a couple of years ago, called The Temporary Witness. They are very nice people with a lot of impressive credits to their name, but their lives are not being made easier by the banks, which now demand their creditor's private homes as collateral as well as up to 18% interest on working capital. All this while the banks themselves pay depositors and the Bank of England (a.k.a. the taxpayer) anywhere between nothing and 3% (at best). No wonder banking is suddenly hugely profitable again. But all those profits are coming straight out of the pockets of the enterprises, large and small, upon which the wider economic recovery depends - making that recovery weaker and slower. No wonder people are angry.
After the meeting I headed over to Oxford Street, with a view to signing some stock in a few book shops. Not so long ago, there were a number of major outlets there: a huge Borders, a very large Waterstones and even (this is going back a few years) a sizeable Dillons. But they have all gone now, driven away, no doubt, by vast rents and a lack of custom. What remains, at the western end, is one small Waterstones - which used to be a Books Etc. There at last I found three copies of The Einstein Girl tucked away on the shelves.

"The problem is: no one reads any more," someone said to me at the week-end. A walk down Oxford Street these days (you can't stroll, for fear of being trampled) is enough to have you believing that's true.