The Franschhoek Literary Festival rolls out a packed programme of book talk this weekend. It is the best of our lit fests, its location in a pretty village boasting some excellent restaurants and the witty style of director, Jenny Hobbs, making it a fun event in a potentially cliquey and sometimes pompous milieu.
Hosting more than 50 authors and poets, including Zakes Mda, Peter Godwin, Barbara Trapido, Janice Galloway, Tim Couzens, Justin Cartwright, Ivan Vladislavic, Jonathan Jansen, Justice Malala, Marguerite Abouet and Jonny Steinberg, the FLF will be a three-day street party of writers, readers, booksellers, publishers - and Cape wine. As you might expect from a gathering of bookish types, there are bound to be moments of public acrimony, such as the rancor that greeted columnist David Bullard's attempts to joke his way out of racism accusations a few festivals ago, and the hostility brandished between authors Rian Malan and Antjie Krog last year.
But most of the chat will be good-humoured. Conversations on writing forms, current subjects and ideas for new books come easily to the readers as well as the writers attending lit fests, not least because famous clubs like Oprah's have made books everyone's business.
A favourite topic of conversation is the lit fest phenomenon itself, which is growing apace all over the world, with more than 200 held annually in the UK alone. What lies beyond the normal networking opportunities provided to bibliophiles by these popular get-togethers? Is the lit fest a sign of a newfound bibliomania, in which the book as well as the words are important to readers? Why else would department stores in the US suddenly be opening little nooks of books for sale? Is there a book to be written about the death of the book?
I doubt you'll see many e-book reading devices in Franschhoek. Keep your blasphemous Kindles for long-distance travel, the lit fest trend seems to say to those of us who love books and pray they'll somehow defy the digital odds. Yet we are constantly anxious about the future of the book, and these literary bashes make both authors and readers feel socially central again in an age when your Henry Jameses have been popularly dethroned by your Paris Hiltons.
Some say the spreading literary gatherings are just another form of celebrity culture - not that you'd pick the average author out in a crowd for anything but his/her sartorial ignorance. Few of us have had our teeth straightened or our accents corrected like Charlize Theron. We tend to dress dowdily, conveying the impression of having more important things to think about than fashion. Some of us can barely express ourselves verbally. Which is exactly the point, says Financial Times columnist Harry Eyres: "Part of the attraction is surely the very lack of technical polish, the sense that what you are getting is not so much a performance as what lies behind the performance, some glimpse of a true essence of humanity. We are fed a constant diet of glibness and apparent fluency; but it becomes harder and harder to find someone who really speaks their mind... "
While festivals of all sorts are growing worldwide ostensibly in celebration of music, wine or video games as well as books, they may in psycho-reality be replacing the lost centrality of mass religious ritual gatherings. Though mostly devoid of religion, we worshippers of books still have the instinct to gather religiously.
Given the solitude of writing and reading, both scribes and bookworms long to break out of this most solitary of pursuits into something communal, even if briefly. Bolstered by the aching need for community in a splintered, globalized world, the book fest seems to have made literary types more sociable.
But writing is by definition lonely. And ludicrously exacting. Says Spectator columnist Matthew Parris: "I can spend hours trying to get a paragraph right, swapping words around, searching for the right adjective, avoiding repetition, thinking of fresh or felicitous ways of expressing things. In the previous paragraph as first drafted, 'seem' or 'seemed' occurred three times and it took me a while to eliminate one instance and replace another with 'appeared'; I was going to say 'appeared three times' but, finding this would repeat the 'appeared' I'd just substituted for a 'seemed', plumped for 'occurred' in this second instance."
Computers have helped in all sorts of organizational ways, of course, control-F signaling that you've used a particular word repeatedly, and the automatic word count clocking up reassuringly at the bottom of the screen. But writing is only really fun when it's done. Then comes a burst of high-risk behavior with friends, followed by the headache of the next book or article.
We wordsmiths relentlessly question not only our place in the world but our fitness for the job. I have a little voice in my head that would drive me into one of those homes for the permanently bewildered if I didn't switch some of the time from assembling words to scrambling eggs in the practical business of my guest house. "Stop doubting yourself," my flailing ego whispers to me incessantly. "You can do this."
And indeed, the inner bullying has done the trick for me so far. As a fail-safe, though, I never end the day's input with a full-stop. This is because, if you can somehow drag yourself to your laptop while the little voice is hissing "Get back to work" and quickly finish the last sentence on the screen, no matter how insecure you're feeling, there is a good chance that you'll dodge the dreaded writer's block.
Not that anyone at the Franschhoek Literary Festival will be interested in our blockages. It's our insight, judgment, analysis and reflection they're looking for and will doubtless find, umming and ahhing, amid so much talent.