30 Novels, day 26: Call Me Humiliated
When my first novel, Icefields,
was nominated for the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize in 1995, I traveled to
Harare, Zimbabwe for the award ceremony. The nominated writers were treated to
a week of dinners and activities and field trips to nature preserves. One day
they sent us all out separately to various schools around the city to read to
the students. I was taken to an all-girls academy that was so British in look
and atmosphere that I thought I’d somehow been transported to England.
The auditorium where I was going to read was filled with at least a
hundred schoolgirls in uniform, and suddenly I was more nervous than I had been
for a long time in front of an audience. Could there be a tougher crowd to impress
than a roomful of teenaged girls?
I read the scene from my novel in which a young woman dies
tragically in a mountain-climbing accident. I think I got their attention with
that. They seemed to be ... well, riveted. This was going quite well, I
thought. Then it was question time, and one of the first questions was: “What
are some of your favourite books?”
I started listing a few of the books I loved, The Lord of the Rings, War and Peace,
Ulysses. This is really going to impress them, I thought. And then I added, “Oh, yes, and I can’t forget Moby-Dick.”
At the mention of that title, a quiet titter started somewhere in
the back of the auditorium and spread, until it rippled across the entire room
and swelled to full-fledged laughter. The laughter of a crowd of densely-packed, forcibly-detained
teenagers at some doofus who’d just inadvertently said a dirty word. I felt
myself flush crimson.
“Yeah,” I chuckled, struggling to recover some poise. “It’s a
pretty ridiculous title. But it’s a wonderful book. Trust me. You should read
it.”
I hope a few of them took my advice. And if you haven’t read it,
you should.
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