Book Fair(y) is a Collection of Good Stories

Author: Magdalena Vodopija

This is the year and the days when people often ask me how it was to work at the Fair(y) for all these decades, what I remember as the most important, which authors, which events have left a deep mark on the history of the Fair, how was I able to keep going for full 30 years…?

My answer to the last question is that I didn't try to succeed, I went with the flow, thinking what happens, happens. And it, indeed, happened. To the other questions regarding my memory of the last 30 years of the Fair, I laconically reply: I have a weak memory. Yes, I know, everybody – well, maybe not everybody, but most people – think that it is just a pose. Although it is not one that can be confirmed with a polygraph, it is the truth – I do remember things in a peculiar way: without the slightest regard to the facts. I have an inclination to reinterpretation, and as the years pass, those events become yet more exciting in my mind. 

I am fond of good stories and see life as a collection of not necessarily fairytalish, but good, perplexing, sometimes even harsh stories, with elements of tragicomedy. My favourite ones are those in which, as my friend would say, “our greatest debacles become our best anecdotes.” And the Book Fair(y) itself was abundant with ‘successes’ and ‘debacles’. Now that I look at it, it seems to me that those very ‘debacles’ are the ones that made it vivid, that caused neverending turbulences and chaos that followed the Fair in its creation; the ones that allowed for the most creative moments of our Book Fair(y) to happen.The books that are presented this year, at the 30th Book Fair(y) bear titles that would be more than fitting for some of the stories from my memories: In Praise of Failure, Book of Wandering, The Past at the Gate, Walls Carry Memories, Questioning Responsibility, The Innocent, Shot Into the Dark, Fragments of Chaos…What I remember the best is the atmosphere of chaos, that we called – in an attempt to both comfort and encourage ourselves – ‘creative turbulences’. Chaos was our companion, our modus vivendi, our way of surviving the preparations for all the thirty fairs. It has stayed invisible to the audience because it vanishes a few days before the opening. The authors who come to Pula see it as the ‘lively and unconventional atmosphere’ of the Book Fair(y), but to us it is the fuel that keeps us going.

I dived cheerfully in the flow of that chaos, for which we never know whether and how we will overcome, and pulled my crew into its swirls. Of course, I cannot count how many times I have attempted to do things another way, to create strategies and to restructure the Book Fair(y). Now I still sometimes try to do it, but I give up quickly because it is clear that the Book Fair(y) is created by a group of strong individuals, defiant creatives, and it cannot be derived from anything else but chaos, to be distilled through an imaginary funnel, in a moment that nobody can foresee, into programme sections, into the best what we can give: an intoxicating extract of all of our ideas and dreams. We have always worked the best under pressure: at times when there was no escape, when it seemed there was no time, space, or money left – well, the latter has always been lacking, and thanks for asking, it will always lack – to do something that we planned. At that point the legendary anagram coined by Mauricio Ferlin comes into play: “Mythical union keeps us warm.” That little union, community, the commune of ours, whose members more often than not have contrasting opinions, starts to function almost perfectly in the moments when anybody else would just give up. 

I could write plenty of stories about how we created not only unexpected programme concepts, but whole new festivals and fairs within the fair from the complete mess and without thoroughly developed ideas. From all the things that happened and passed through the Fair, today I feel that the craziest and most unbelievable story was the one about the creation of Kiklop. In the beginning, it was only the product of my imagination: I imagined an award that would be a fun, unpretentious, auto-ironic version of the famous Oscars that would have as many categories as it needed to cover all the segments of book creation and production. I dreamed about an award that would activate the entire publishing scene and become a fun game for publishers, authors, editors, translators, designers… that would take place at the end of the year, during the Book Fair(y) when everybody would come together, honour each other, and have the time of their lives. Already the first year that it took place, the Kiklop Award was far from what I had imagined. Despite all of our efforts, nobody considered it a game, and it was only fun for the ones that were awarded. Everybody else took it too seriously and strived for it immensely. But that is yet another story. While I scarcely mentioned the imagined award even to my closest colleagues, for some reason, even unknown to me, I explained it from beginning to the end – developing it, as one would say, on the spot – to Milana Vuković Runjić who conducted a thorough interview with me and announced Kiklop in a pompous fashion on the centrefold of at the time widely circulated and influential weekly magazine Globus. It will be remembered as one of my anthological blunders, inscribed into the intimate history of the Book Fair(y): most of my colleagues found about the award from the newspapers, and of course, they instantly realised what it meant to them. No, I didn’t even try to explain this move of mine, because – there was no explanation! I kept silent for a while, and then uttered a complete nonsense: “I got into one of my irrational states.” But that was only the beginning. The real misfortune was that I didn’t come up with this idea, let’s say, at the start of the year, when we had enough time for its realisation, but it aligned with the principle “In for a penny, in for a pound.” The idea came about when we had almost completely constructed the Fair, meaning that we had to ‘demolish’ it and ‘build it up’ once again. To be honest, for the development, not to mention the realization of the idea, there was no time or money. From that chaos that I myself made, the crew of the Fair, our little ‘mythical union’ managed to create Kiklop and launch it in a spectacular fashion: in the grand salon of the vintage, white ship Dalmacija, at the Pier Carbon, in the customs zone of the Pula harbour. More than 200 women and men of letters from all around Croatia arrived in Pula and welcomed the first Kiklop with ovations. That year among others we hosted Orhan Pamuk, Claudio Magris, Tess Gallagher, Luko Paljetak, Mirko Kovač, Dragutin Tadijanović, Arsen Dedić... The Book Fair(y) went along in a crazy rhythm – we pushed our way through the events and the audience and dedicated our time to the authors while at the same time finishing the last preparations for the award. And we succeeded – literally the night before the ‘big day’. At the very ceremony, nothing could be sensed of what we have gone through, apart from great enthusiasm. In the following years, we prepared Kiklop months ahead. Yet, the night at the ship Dalmacija has never happened again. 

Absolutely everything that makes the Book Fair(y) different from other numerous literary events we did in the exactly same manner. Fortunately, without such media attention. This way, one unusual festival Polis-Adriatic-Europe was born within the Fair, as it was in the case of what is known today as the Festival of Children’s Literature Monte Librić, or Histrokozmos, a ‘fair within the fair’ initiated only last year. The very same way, we created many other, less visible yet significant programmes, followed and realised numerous, ludic, ‘out of the box’ ideas of the most creative among us – Mauricio Ferlin. Actually, for all those thirty years, numerous crews created the Book Fair(y) in Istria – Pula Festival of Books and Authors in the same, creatively chaotic manner. 

“Is it time for a change?” they ask me this year when we celebrate our anniversary. 

If we could pose the same question to our founder Boško Obradović, I am sure that he would tell us, with a smile: “Let them be – from time to time, and one way or the other, the weirdos are doing the right thing.”Not to mention that the last time that I wished for things to change, the 25th Book Fair(y) had just finished. It was the winter of 2019. The following two years passed in… Oh, never mind.  Let our ‘best anecdotes’ be remembered. Without them, there are no good stories to tell.