Jonathan Raban at London Review bookshop, August 2003
Reading from Waxwings, writing about places
Ed. This piece was originally published at cityofsound.com on 28th August 2003.
I went to hear Jonathan Raban read from his new novel Waxwings, which I mentioned earlier, at the London Review Bookshop this evening. It was good. Here’s some notes.
Raban preceded the reading by slyly noting “how tiresome it is to be read to in bookstores”. Well, I must be lucky — I’ve only ever been to two: this and William Gibson in Manchester Waterstones in about ’95. Both were great.
Raban is physically smaller than I imagined, wearing his seemingly permanently affixed baseball cap. His teeth betray his status as an Englishman defiant in America — like mine, two craggy mountain ranges. He possesses a rich, warm, sonorous voice, betraying further evidence of his Englishness; a confident, erudite speaker, and yet punctuated with ums, ahs, and a halting hesitancy.
Raban described Waxwings as “a historical novel” set in a “bygone age” of 1999, 2000. An age not of innocence, but about the end of an era nonetheless. Set in an “imaginary city”, which is basically Seattle, in the midst of the dotcom bubble, it’s based around the intertwining stories of 4 immigrants. Read more at Amazon or The Guardian…
