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Madrid Bookie: The intimate literary salon with big ambitions

Every month a growing group of book fans meets in a loft-style gallery in the Las Salesas district, on the edge of Madrid's trendy Chueca.

Published: 18 February 2020 15:16 CET
Madrid Bookie: The intimate literary salon with big ambitions
Pulitzer Prize winning Forrest Gander entertains the room. Photos: Celia Knight/Madrid Bookie.

The gathering is more immersive than a book club, less formal than a book signing and much more intimate than a literary festival.

Sitting among the guests are authors who have come to read from their latest work, discuss ideas with the guests and socialise over a glass of wine or a cold bottle of beer.

“The literary festival format can traditionally be a bit stuffy, but a more relaxed atmosphere allows spontaneity and magical discussions,” explains Andreas Loizou, the man behind the hugely successful Margate Bookie, a literary festival held every September in the seaside Kent town.

After moving to Madrid he realised that the Spanish capital was crying out for a similar event and teamed up with Vanessa Fabiano, an Italian-Swiss national living in Madrid and Giedre Pavalkyte, a Lithuanian living in Madrid, to put it together. 


The team behind Madrid Bookie: Co-founders Vanessa Fabiano (L), Giedre Pavalkyte and Andreas Loizou. Photo: Madrid Bookie

The Madrid Bookie isn't a literary festival per se, but a monthly social gathering of likeminded types – people who love to read and talk about books – to which one, or sometimes two, authors are invited to read from their work and then discuss.

Each event has so far been a sell-out and seen the gathering continue in true Madrileño fashion, by spilling into a neighbouring bar and continuing long after the event was scheduled to end.

“There's a wonderful sense of community built around reader and writer that breaks down the traditional barrier between author and reader. We have a very strict no-diva policy that sees everyone get together mingling in the bar afterwards.”

Events can become quite emotional and a long with a healthy dose of laughter they can also provoke tears.

At the first event, the room was brought to tears by Laura Garcia Lorca, who read a poem penned by her father (the brother of Federico Garcia Lorca) that she had found among his papers after his death. She revealed that her father, in view of his famous sibling, had never felt confident to show the world his own poetry but had left it behind for those closest to him to find.

“All there witnessed a very intimate moment, the first time the poem had ever been read it public and it was touching and beautiful,” said Loizou.

The most recent evening also had its share of raw emotion when Pulitzer Prize winning poet Forrest Gander read aloud from a collection he wrote about the grief of losing his wife and fellow poet, C.D. Wright.

The event also saw the first ever public reading from historian Giles Tremlett's soon to be published account of the International Brigades.

Other guests have included the Nigerian writer Nnamdi Ehirim discussing his ambitious debut novel Prince of Monkeys and poet Spencer Reese.

 “It's the kind of supportive space that invites the author to open up and take a risk,” explains Loizou. “Their audience is sitting down at their level in what is essentially a living room. It invites intimacy”.

The team behind Madrid Bookie met through Madrid's vibrant literacy scene, connecting first at a creative writing workshop and then teaming up with bookseller partners Desperate Literature, who offer books by the relevant authors for sale on the night.

More and more people are looking for social activities that have a focus, that are not just about meeting a group in a bar and drinking, but building a community of like-minded souls.

“We recognised a need for a focus point for high quality writers and give them an audience that was inquisitive and literary-savvy. There's a whole underground book club scene in Madrid with people wanting to meet and connect face to face and actually talk about things that are important to them,” insists Loizou.

“After the success of the Margate Bookie, I wanted to expand elsewhere and unexpectedly found in Madrid that there was a real buzz about the literary scene and a general revival in literature. We've just tapped into that community.”

Pavalkyte, who also runs the Discussing Books in English book club, has seen literary gatherings grow exponentially in Madrid. “We now have over 600 members, and many other English language book clubs are emerging in the city.”


Photo: Madrid Bookie

 The Madrid Bookie has started small, with events hosted by troupe an exclusive community for the world's most adventurous creative professionals, who host in their Space Next Door, a private apartment style event space on Calle de Fernando VI, but even bigger events are on the horizon.

“We've already planned a summer creative writing retreat in Sierra de Gredos, monthly events around Madrid and are talking about a Madrid showcase at the Hay Festival Segovia in September.”

The next event takes place on February 18th when co-founder of Madrid Bookie Vanessa Fabiano will interview Michael Scott Moore, an investigative journalist, novelist and avid surfer. Michael will discuss his latest book, The Desert and the Sea, a memoir about the 977 days he was held by Somali pirates.

For more information about Madrid Bookie follow them on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and for tickets CLICK HERE.

 

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HISTORY

‘Lost’ manuscript of pro-Nazi French author published 78 years later

A book by one of France's most celebrated and controversial literary figures arrives in bookstores this week, 78 years after the manuscript disappeared

Published: 4 May 2022 11:42 CEST
'Lost' manuscript of pro-Nazi French author published 78 years later

It is a rare thing when the story of a book’s publication is even more mysterious than the plot of the novel itself.

But that might be said of Guerre (War) by one of France’s most celebrated and controversial literary figures, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, which arrives in bookstores on Thursday, some 78 years after its manuscript disappeared.

Celine’s reputation has somehow survived the fact that he was one of France’s most eager collaborators with the Nazis.

Already a superstar thanks to his debut novel Journey to the End of the Night (1932), Celine became one of the most ardent anti-Semitic propagandists even before France’s occupation.

In June 1944, with the Allies advancing on Paris, the writer abandoned a pile of his manuscripts in his Montmartre apartment.

Celine feared rough treatment from authorities in liberated France, having spent the war carousing with the Gestapo, and giving up Jews and foreigners to the Nazi regime and publishing racist pamphlets about Jewish world conspiracies.

For decades, no one knew what happened to his papers, and he accused resistance fighters of burning them. But at some point in the 2000s, they ended up with retired journalist Jean-Pierre Thibaudat, who passed them – completely out of the blue – to Celine’s heirs last summer.

‘A miracle’
Despite the author’s history, reviews of the 150-page novel, published by Gallimard, have been unanimous in their praise.

“The end of a mystery, the discovery of a great text,” writes Le Point; a “miracle,” says Le Monde; “breathtaking,” gushes Journal du Dimanche.

Gallimard has yet to say whether the novel will be translated.

Like much of Celine’s work, Guerre is deeply autobiographical, recounting his experiences during World War I.

It opens with 20-year-old Brigadier Ferdinand finding himself miraculously alive after waking up on a Belgian battlefield, follows his treatment and hasty departure for England – all based on Celine’s real experiences.

His time across the Channel is the subject of another newly discovered novel, Londres (London), to be published this autumn.

If French reviewers seem reluctant to focus on Celine’s rampant World War II anti-Semitism, it is partly because his early writings (Guerre is thought to date from 1934) show little sign of it.

Journey to the End of the Night was a hit among progressives for its anti-war message, as well as a raw, slang-filled style that stuck two fingers up at bourgeois sensibilities.

Celine’s attitude to the Jews only revealed itself in 1937 with the publication of a pamphlet, Trifles for a Massacre, which set him on a new path of racial hatred and conspiracy-mongering.

He never back-tracked. After the war, he launched a campaign of Holocaust-denial and sought to muddy the waters around his own war-time exploits – allowing him to worm his way back into France without repercussions.

‘Divine surprise’
Many in the French literary scene seem keen to separate early and late Celine.

“These manuscripts come at the right time – they are a divine surprise – for Celine to become a writer again: the one who matters, from 1932 to 1936,” literary historian Philippe Roussin told AFP.

Other critics say the early Celine was just hiding his true feelings.

They highlight a quote that may explain the gap between his progressive novels and reactionary feelings: “Knowing what the reader wants, following fashions like a shopgirl, is the job of any writer who is very financially constrained,” Celine wrote to a friend.

Despite his descent into Nazism, he was one of the great chroniclers of the trauma of World War I and the malaise of the inter-war years.

An exhibition about the discovery of the manuscripts opens on Thursday at the Gallimard Gallery and includes the original, hand-written sheets of Guerre.

They end with a line that is typical of Celine: “I caught the war in my head. It is locked in my head.”

In the final years before his death in 1961, Celine endlessly bemoaned the loss of his manuscripts.

The exhibition has a quote from him on the wall: “They burned them, almost three manuscripts, the pest-purging vigilantes!”

This was one occasion – not the only one – where he was proved wrong.

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