Verne in Vigo - Maeve Friel

I love coming across literary sculptures, whether they are the slew of Paddington Bears which recently appeared in London, a dapper James Joyce leaning on his cane on Earl Street in Dublin or Don Quijote and Sancho Panza trotting through the Plaza España in Madrid.

This curious monument of a man sitting amid the tentacles of a giant octopus is also a literary monument. It is in Vigo, in Galicia in North-Western Spain - but what is it?

It is a homage to the French novelist Jules Verne, often described as the inventor of the genre of science fiction, and to the Galician references in his much-loved adventure Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. 

First of all, the sculpture reminds us of the terrifying chapter in which Captain Nemo and the crew of the submarine Nautilus are attacked by giant squid, as in the English translation, or more correctly by giant octopus (les poulpes, in French). Galicia, renowned for spectacular seafood, is particularly in thrall to the octopus and Pulpo a feira, octopus in the style of the fair,  is its signature dish - boiled in huge cauldrons by the pulpeiras, specialist octopus cooks, the tentacles snipped up with massive scissors and sprinkled with olive oil and pimentón.

But there is another chapter of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea which takes place right in the Ría de Vigo, the Bay of Vigo. This was the real life location of a major naval disaster in 1702 when English ships burnt and scuttled the French and Spanish fleets which were returning from the Caribbean laden with treasure from the New World. In the novel, Captain Nemo comes to Vigo to loot the ships´treasure.

Around the Nautilus for a half-mile radius, the waters seemed saturated with electric light. The sandy bottom was clear and bright. Dressed in diving suits, crewmen were busy clearing away half-rotted barrels and disemboweled trunks in the midst of the dingy hulks of ships. Out of these trunks and kegs spilled ingots of gold and silver, cascades of jewels, pieces of eight. The sand was heaped with them. Then, laden with these valuable spoils, the men returned to the Nautilus, dropped off their burdens inside, and went to resume this inexhaustible fishing for silver and gold.

I understood. This was the setting of that battle on October 22, 1702. Here, in this very place, those galleons carrying treasure to the Spanish government had gone to the bottom. Here, whenever he needed, Captain Nemo came to withdraw these millions to ballast his Nautilus. It was for him, for him alone, that America had yielded up its precious metals. He was the direct, sole heir to these treasures wrested from the Incas and those peoples conquered by Hernando Cortez!

Don´t miss the monument to M. Verne if you are visiting this less well known corner of Spain, a place redolent with stories of shipwrecks, smugglers, fishermen´s tales and foot-weary pilgrims, the furious music of bagpipes and an all-pervading smell of octopus and sizzling sardines.  And of course, I recommend that you read the book too!

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Diversity in Children´s Books - Maeve Friel

I am sure that everyone reading this is aware that Guardian Teen Books recently celebrated a week focussing on diversity in books for children.

By diversity, they mean “books by and about all kinds of people… boys, girls, all different colours, all different races and religions, all different sexualities and all different disabilities and anything else you can think of – so our books don’t leave anyone out.”

Benjamin Zephaniah whose Terror Kid is the Guardian Teen Book Club choice says:

“I love diversity. I love multiculturalism… It makes Britain´s music interesting. It makes our food interesting. It makes our literature interesting and it makes for a more interesting country …   To me it’s not about black, white, Asian; it’s about literature for everybody.”

And there you have it: the criterion must be the quality of the literature. I see little value in writing or publishing books to satisfy some sort of quota to reflect the percentages of ethnic or racial populations or other minorities.

The Guardian published a list of 50 books chosen to represent all manner of cultural diversity, from the amazing Amazing Grace by Mary Hoffman to Oranges in No Man´s Land by Elizabeth Laird.

Here are a few of my favourite books that are outstanding in every way and that also open windows on to different ways of seeing the world.

The Arrival, by Shaun Tan, is a wordless book about the experience of emigration/immigration, following the lonely journey of a man to a new country where everything is different and inexplicable. (He signed my copy when he spoke at a Children´s Books Ireland conference a few years ago and it is one of most treasured possessions.)

Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, is a graphic novel based on her experiences during the cultural and political upheaval of the Iranian revolution after the overthrown of the Shah.  This is a real eye-opener from the first pages showing tiny girls swathed in unfamiliar and unwanted veils in their school playground.

My Dad´s A Birdman, by David Almond, illustrated joyfully and colourfully by Polly Dunbar, is a terrific book about a young girl and her dad who is so overwhelmed with grief that he goes off the rails. It is suffused with love and tenderness and faith in the act of flying as Dad and daughter take part in a madcap and magical contest to sprout wings and fly across the river.  

Wonder by R.J. Palacio is the story of Auggie, a boy with a shocking facial disfigurement who is
starting 5^th grade after years of home schooling: imagine how he is dreading it -  “I won´t describe what I look like. Whatever you´re thinking, it´s probably worse.

I would like to add two more joyful books to the mix:

From Tangerine Books, a wonderful picture book, Larry and Friends,  by Ecuadorian illustrator Carla Torres in collaboration with Belgian/Venezuelan writer Nat Jasper celebrating the modern melting pot that is New York.

Larry, the New York dog, holds a party for all his amazing immigrant friends among them Magpa the pig from Poland who became a tightrope artist, Laila the Iranian entomologist, Edgar the Colombian alligator street musician, Ulises, the Greek cook and  a host of other talented and tolerant newcomers to the city – all apparently based on real people and how they met up.  

The book project was successfully funded by kickstarter – see more about it here.

As you can see, the illustrations are divine - this is Layla, the Iranian entomologist who works at the museum.

And finally, another great classic is The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats (1963), possibly one of the earliest American picture books to feature a young African-American hero – although this is never mentioned in the text. It simply tells the story of a young four year old boy discovering snow in the city for the first time. 

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Back Home - Maeve Friel

After nearly two years in Panamá, I am back in my own house in a tiny village in Alicante, Spain. (That´s my front door with the lovely iron door knocker which is very traditional in this area - it´s a gloved hand knocking at the door with an orange.) 

When I first went to Panamá, I knew little about it except that it had a canal and a hat (and the hats, it turned out, were actually from Ecuador). I quickly embarked on  a rapid immersion course of Panamanian ecology, political history and culture. My head was soon spinning with tales of Spanish conquistadors, Welsh and English pirates in the Caribbean, runaway slaves, pearl fishermen, the 49ers who crossed the isthmus to get to the California gold rush, the Chinese workers who built the railway.

 I read about the thousands of men who died of yellow fever and malaria during the first doomed attempt by the French to build the canal. I learned how President Truman engineered Panamá´s independence from Colombia in 1903 and the subsequent land grab so that the Americans could take over and complete the canal. I read Grahame Greene´s Getting to Know the General about his friendship with the dictator Trujillo who made the Americans return the canal to Panamanian governance. I visited the grave of ballerina Margot Fonteyn whose Panamanian playboy husband was shot and left paraplegic by a furious husband. I went to an exhibition about Paul Gauguin´s stay in Panamá when he worked as a labourer on the canal during the French era.  

Panama city was a city of huge contrasts, with soaring skyscrapers and an old and very beautiful colonial city emerging from years of neglect. 

I spent weekends walking in rainforests or visiting South Sea and Caribbean islands. We took the train through the jungle (from Pacific to Atlantic in an hour) and did a full canal transit (about eight hours).  

On the nights of the full moon, we joined the hundreds of drummers who gathered around the huge curutú tree in the City of Knowledge. I overcame my fear of heights and swam in a swimming-pool on the twenty-seventh floor of our apartment building. 

The biodiversity was amazing - blue morpho butterflies as big as saucers, a sloth which hung on the school playground fence,  flocks of pelicans on the roof of the fish market, gangs of bandit coatimundis raiding the bins,  a toucan in the mango tree and huge migrations of vultures which soared over the city in October and November making their way from Canada to Chile.  One week,  millions of luminous black and emerald butterflies crossed the isthmus, clouds of them fluttering over the heads of the joggers on the coastal strip - it was like  living in a Gabriel García Marquez novel.  

Surely, I thought, I can get a book out of all this. 

Last winter, I started a novel which is set in Panamá in the 1920s but I haven´t even got a decent first draft yet. However, since leaving the country,  I have discovered something very important. 

I need to do some very major surgery. I need to cut the hooptedoodle (the part that readers tend to skip, as Elmore Leonard called it). There is too much information.  I don´t need my reader to know as much as I now do about my beloved Panamá. 

Actually, what I most need to do, is close that door up there and ignore anyone knocking.

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The Composition - Maeve Friel

I am not a great football fan but I must admit that this World Cup business looks very different when you are in Latin America.
I visited an ethnic Kuna community in the San Blas islands just as the football got under way and  children were out in force,  many of them barefoot but wearing Brazilian shirts as they played makeshift games on the island´s airstrip (there is only one flight a day so the rest of the time, it becomes a play area!)
In Panama city, cars are decked out with Colombian or Venezuelan flags. Flat screen tvs have appeared in shopping malls and coffee shops, attracting audiences cheering for Uruguay or Mexico or Argentina or Chile.  There is widespread desire for the Cup to stay in Latin America.


As I am trying to track down and read children´s literature from Central and South America at the moment, I was delighted to come across this month a very powerful book by Chilean writer, Antonio Skármeta, The Composition (illustrated by Alfonso Ruano) which not only has a football crazy protagonist but also addresses what life is like for children living during a dictatorship.  And, heaven knows, so many Central and South American countries have suffered under dictatorships.

Skármeta spent many years during the Pinochet dictatorship in Germany - you may know him as the screenwriter of the film Il Postino which tells the story of the friendship between Chilean poet Pablo Neruda and his postman. You may be as surprised to learn as I was that the book is set entirely on an island in Chile, not in Italy. The film was great - the books sounds even better.

The Composition opens with Pedro´s disappointment that his parents have given him a plastic soccer ball for his birthday instead of a white leather ball with black patches, like the ones real soccer players use.

The streets are full of soldiers with machine guns.  Pedro´s parents are fearful and distressed. They huddle around the radio, listening to foreign radio stations, turned on at a very low volume. One day when he is playing soccer on the street, he sees soldiers arrest the father of one of his friends. When he asks his parents if he is for or against the government, his mother tells him that children are not for or against anything.

At school, an army officer announces a cash prize for the best composition on the children "What My Family Do At Night". What will Pedro do?
The writing is subtle and humorous and effectively shows how children are capable of understanding situations and making moral decisions.
It is only at the last page when Pedro´s father says "We´d better get a chess set then", that we learn that Pedro wrote in his composition that he plays soccer and does his homework and his parents sit on the sofa and play chess all evening.

From July, I will be a little less "scattered" - after almost two years in Panama, I am moving back home to Spain (with I hope frequent visits to England and Ireland). Now if I could only get a decent first draft of my book finished before I leave...

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The F word: Failure Maeve Friel

This weekend Children´s Books Ireland are holding their  24th annual conference at the Light House Cinema in Dublin with a glittering array of national and international speakers. It will kick off with the inaugural address of the new Irish Children´s Laureate, Laureate na nóg, Eoin Colfer. The conference has always been a stimulating and inspiring and fun highlight  of the year for writers, illustrators, booksellers, teachers, librarians and all lovers of children´s literature.

This year the chosen theme, the F word: Failure - is intriguing. The programme says they are inviting writers “to reflect on the times in their careers where things have fallen apart, deadlines went out the window and defeat was snatched from the jaws of victory.” What do you do when you are turned down by agent after agent? How do you get past the fear of failure?  How do you keep going if your books are no longer finding a publisher (perhaps after years of regular commissions)? And how do you find the true grit and determination to turn the failures into triumphs, to keep going when no one actually has asked you to write in the first place?  Will a book award pave the way automatically to a successful and lasting career? No doubt there will be many thoughtful discussions and a lot of laughs too. I am terribly sorry that I am so “scattered” that I will not be there.

At times when my work in progress gets stuck  or I am failing to meet a deadline, I sometimes look to the wisdom of other writers and the many lists of tips and advice out there. But the one I find the wisest and the most entertaining is Anne Lamont´s timeless advice in her book “Bird by Bird”:

Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he’d had three months to write, which was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said, “Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.”

Bird by bird – that´s the way to do it. Just write the next sentence and carry on until you have finished. 

UNESCO World Book and Copyright Day - Maeve Friel

Happy Book Day! No, I haven´t got my dates mixed up. 23rd April,  is the UNESCO World Book and Copyright Day, a worldwide celebration of the book, the publishing industry and the intellectual property rights of the author. (Britain and Ireland as always are out of step with the rest of the world!)

The date was chosen by UNESCO because both Miguel Cervantes (1547-1616) and William Shakespeare died on that day (although that is not strictly true because of the difference in the Gregorian and Julian Calendars).

In Spain, Cervantes Day has been celebrated since 1923 and Cervantes is treated with the same veneration and respect as Shakespeare.  In Cataluña, the day coincides with the feastday of their national saint, St. George or Sant Jordi, and there is a longstanding tradition there of people exchanging roses and books on 23rd April although this custom is widespread throughout Spain now. Many bookshops present you with a rose when you buy a book and nearly all stay open late. There are thousands of book related activities throughout the country.

If you were in Madrid today, you could celebrate the life of Cervantes by going to the Convento de las Trinitarias, an old convent in the Barrio de las Letras (The Arts Quarter), where the Academy hold a memorial Mass with an empty coffin on display. Cervantes chose to be buried here because the Trinitarian Monks had helped organise his release after he was kidnapped and enslaved by Algerian corsairs on his return from the Battle of Lepanto (where he lost an arm): unfortunately, the location of the grave has long been lost.

Or you could take the train out to the old university town of Alcalá de Henares where Cervantes was born, the son of a barber-surgeon and a minor impoverished aristocrat.  His home is now a casa-museo and is a fascinating glimpse into 16th century domestic architecture.

Or you could go farther afield to Argamasilla in Castilla La Mancha. This small town claims to be the home of Don Quixote, "the place whose name I do not wish to remember"  - (el) lugar de La Mancha de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme. It is now firmly on the literary tourist map, on the Ruta de Don Quijote, a fabulous landscape with its wide horizons, crumbling castles and dozens of white windmills on the crests of the hills.

Cervantes, always poor, always unfortunate in business and in love, was thrown into prison in Argamasilla.  It was here that he said he had the idea for Don Quijote, who may have been based on the local Duke Rodrigo de Pacheco, the duke of the long countenance, who suffered from mental illness. His ex voto portrait hangs in the local church (he´s the man in the ruff, bottom right hand corner):

Or you could simply take down a copy of Don Quixote, the Ingenious Hidalgo of La Mancha and browse. Often cited as the first modern European novel, and nominated again and again by writers as their favourite book, it is funny, touching, wise and full of beautiful language - and yes, there are boring bits too but you can skip them. There are literally hundreds of editions, including ones illustrated by Honoré Daumier, Gustave Doré, Salvador Dalí and Pablo Picasso.  In the whole literary canon, are there any profiles as recognisable as the long skinny lance-wielding hidalgo and his small round companion Sancho Panza?

Can I also recommend Don Quixote´s Delusions - Travels in Castilian Spain by Miranda France, an unusual travel book/memoir/literary biography. It will make you laugh out loud but is also a scholarly and insightful introduction to Don Quijote.

I have not been above borrowing a little from Cervantes. My books Tiger Lily - A Heroine in the Making, Tiger Lily - A Heroine with a Mission, Tiger Lily - A Heroine for All Seasons all feature a girl who, like Don Quijote, has also become a little mad from reading so many books and determines to become a heroine and escape from her home in the Middle of Nowhere in search of adventure.

"When Don Quijote went out into the world, that world turned into a mystery before his eyes. That is the legacy of the first European novel to the entire subsequent history of the novel." Milan Kundera

Seeing Ourselves in What We Read – Maeve Friel

I am a great lover of Latin American literature from Pablo Neruda to Gabriel García Marquez, Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, Junot Diaz and Julio Cortázar. 

But a few months ago, I realised that I knew no LA children´s lit writers.

So I set myself the task to read and blog about writers and illustrators of children´s books from each of the 21 countries of Latin America. Although I speak Spanish, I decided to begin with writers whose books have been translated into English. 

Reading Latin America, as I am calling my project, is turning out to be a vast undertaking.

So far, I have discovered Ana Maria Machado and Lygia Bojunga Nunes from Brazil, both winners of Hans Cristian Andersen and ALMA awards.

From Argentina, there is writer and illustrator Isol who won the 2013 ALMA (have a look out for her fold-out frieze picture book It is Very Useful to Have A Duck) and the poet Jorge Elias Luján (Doggy Slippers) who is an ALMA nominee this year. 

I have adored a funny charming memoir (When I Was a Boy, Neruda Called me Policarpo) by Chilean Poli Delano about growing up with family friend Pablo Neruda who was clearly mad as a hatter.  Edna Iturralde from Ecuador is a great and prolific writer whose Green Was My Valley is a powerful series of short stories about the indigenous peoples who live along the Amazon, the title story being a powerful wake-up call about the damage being done to the environment by oil companies.

From Cuba, I was quite shocked by the brief but hard-hitting Letters to My Mother by Teresa Cárdenas, in which an unhappy young girl writes to her dead mother about the racism and domestic abuse she suffers. 

Rigoberta Menchú who won the Nobel Peace Prize for her support of  indigenous peoples and whose father was killed in the prolonged guerrilla wars of Guatemala,  retells ancient folk tales and the creation myths of the Mayan people as told to her by her grandparents.  

Next on my agenda are Julia Alvarez (Dominican Republic) and Irene Vasco (Colombia).

I have been delighted to find out along the way about the International Youth Library in Munich (how did I not know about this?) and about www.outsideinworld.org.uk, an organisation dedicated to promoting and exploring world literature and children´s books in translation. GroundwoodBooks, in Toronto, is a fantastic publisher who publish high quality Latin American writers in translation and in bilingual editions.

Inevitably, my search for Latin American writers brought me up against the need to distinguish between Latin American and Latino.

    

There have been articles recently about the invisibility of Latino children in books published in the United States despite the fact that Latinos are a significant demographic there, and Christopher Myers has written in the New York Times about the Apartheid of Children´s Literature and the absence of black children in US books – of 2300 books last year, he says that only 93 featured black children.

When I wrote to Edna Iturralde about what she was reading as a child in Ecuador, she mentioned Huckleberry Finn, Treasure Island and the swashbuckling books of the Italian Emile Salgari – all books in translation, none of them with South American characters or settings, but ones which made her a reader and a writer.

I understand that there are very important issues here about The Market and what publishers think they can and cannot publish, but it got me to thinking about what I was reading as a young and voracious reader in Ireland.

I´m giving my age away here when I say that I was lapping up The Famous Five, Heidi, What Katy Did, Little Women, Treasure Island, The Bobbsey Twins, the legends of Greece and Rome, the 1001 Nights and The Secret Garden.

The only books that I remember that had an Irish setting were by Patricia Lynch, all turf cutter’s donkeys, leprechauns, washerwomen and gypsy fiddlers, which were more remote from my experience and far less appealing than the adventures of Just William or Huck Finn on the Mississippi.

The emergence of contemporary Irish children´s literature began in the 1980s with  Marita Conlon Mc Kenna´s famine-based  historical novel Under the Hawthorn Tree.

Since then there has been an unstoppable flow of Irish childrens´ writers and illustrators with huge global reach -  Drum Roll please for Oliver Jeffers, Eoin Colfer, PJ Lynch, Martin Waddell, Darren Shan, John Boyne, Marie-Louise Fitzpatrick, Derek Landy, Siobhán Parkinson, Chris Houghton, Celine Kiernan, Niamh Sharkey, Roddy Doyle and  Malachy Doyle. (Forgive me, any Scattered Irish Authors that I have omitted here -  you are too numerous to mention.)

They write about monsters, lost hats, worried little owls, annoyed crayons, faery detectives, dystopian worlds, German concentration camps, alcoholic mothers and frustrated would-be heroines.

Few, actually hardly any, of their books have an obviously Irish setting.

If you look at the formidable shortlist for the 2014 Children´sBooks Ireland awards  (the winners will be announced in May), you will see what I mean:

The Sleeping Baobab Tree by Paula Leyden

Warp The Reluctant Assassin by Eoin Colfer

Heart Shaped by Siobhán Parkinson

Hagwitch by Marie-Louise Fitzpatrick

Too Many Ponies by Sheena Wilkinson

Skulduggery Pleasant Last Stand of Dead Men by Derek Landy

Mysterious Traveller, illustrated by PJ Lynch

The Day the Crayons Quit illustrated by Oliver Jeffers

These are all wonderful books which will resonate with children in Ireland and all over the world. Only two of them are set in Ireland.

So I wonder if it is that important to see yourself mirrored in what you read? 

Should a writer feel a social responsibility to write about or to represent his/her national culture or ethnicity in a particular light?

I think not. I think we writers write the stories we want to tell. And our readers can be trusted to see themselves in a duck or a Victorian puppeteer or an African child or a disgruntled beige crayon.

What do you think?

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Maeve Friel 

the Magic of the Hay Cartagena Festival - Maeve Friel

Cartagena de Indias is a walled city on the Caribbean coast of Colombia, founded by Spanish conquistadors in 1533. I was thrilled to visit it recently to attend the Hay Cartagena Literary Festival. It is a magical and enchanting city, steeped in romance and brimming with literary and historical references.  It is also beautiful. Once squalid and rundown while a new high-rise city grew up further along the coast, old Cartagena has undergone a renaissance and is full of old colonial houses, secret courtyards,  leafy squares and cobbled streets of vibrantly painted houses with bougainvillea spilling from their wooden balconies.

It is the unnamed but clearly identifiable city where Gabriel Garcia Marquez set Love in the Time of Cholera.  In late 19^th century, Cartagena was gripped by cholera and the bourgeoisie tried to avoid being infected by cholera by enclosing themselves in the walled city.

You can sit on a park bench under the almond trees in the Plaza Fernández de Madrid and imagine the lovelorn Florentino Ariza sitting beside you reading poetry and hoping to catch a glimpse of Fermina Daza emerging from the handsome house opposite, the one with the overhanging balcony and the parrot door knocker beside the Alliance Francaise. (I missed the parrot door but saw many other distinctive ones. I´ve a bit of a thing about door furniture.)

Or you can stroll under the arches where Fiorentino and Fermina first met and where the hawkers still sell sweets to passersby. 

1.    The gorgeous Hotel Santa Clara (where the visiting Hay writers all stay), inspired another magical novel by Garcia Marquez Of Love and Other Demons. Once a convent, this is where Garcia Marquez, then an aspiring journalist, first heard about the discovery of a skeleton of a girl with over twenty metres of hair. 

Nowadays, rather than captive virgins and demure nuns,  there is a large Botero nude in the lush hotel gardens and a resident toucan flitting about.  

On the first evening of the festival, I had arranged to meet John Boyne for a drink in the hotel bar - he had earlier given a fabulous talk with Peter Florence. director of Hay,  about his new WW1 novel The Absolutist. The slightly surreal atmosphere of the place was enhanced when we heard plain chanting and a pair of incense bearing cowled monks appeared, a nightly ritual in honour of the hotel´s former existence as a monastery.

2.      

Everything about the city was an inspiration but add in the Hay Festival participants and you have a heady mix.

 

Irvine Welsh talked about Skagboys, a return twenty years later to his characters in Trainspotting (the most shoplifted book in the UK, apparently). He spoke about heroin addiction, Scottish independence, the breakdown of consensus in modern Britain and  his love of music. He told us that he creates a playlist for every character: he needs to know "where they stay, who they lay and what they play".
   

There were so many highlights: the Mexican actor Gael Garcia Bernal (Motorcycle Diaries, Y tu mama también) introducing his documentary about illegal immigrants to the USA); a thoughtful Joe Sacco, self-described cartoonist, with his new fold-out frieze about WW1 and getting some hostile questions about his book on Palestine and its "lack of balance"; Yoani Sanchez, the Cuban blogger; David Rieff, the journalist, talking to Colombian writer Hector Abad about remembrance in the context of war and conflict,  how memory is not sacred, is often faulty, and controversially declaring that there is no such thing as collective memory. Remembering is not a moral act - under some circumstances, it is better to forget. 

I loved  Rosie Boycott´s interview with the engaging Tom Hart Dyke, orchid fanatic, who spent eight horrendous months as a hostage of the FARC guerrillas in the Darién rainforest in Panamá. 

Strolling from venue to venue, there were many bookshops and cafes - Abaco,  my favourite,  was both  bookshop and café.

4    Leaving Abaco one night, I was delighted to meet Martin Murillo who has been wheeling his carreta literaria, his literary cart, through the streets of Cartagena for years, lending books for free. 

     

An early school leaver, Martin  used to sell bottled water but was sponsored to fulfil his dream and set up his literary cart by the organiser of a beauty contest and a journalist who were his water customers.(Doesn´t that sound like something Garcia Marquez would make up?) From the original two hundred volumes, his library now has thousands of books, all donated by publishers and individuals - every day he makes a new selection to include children´s books, novels, technical manuals, poetry, philosophy. Loans are free and without strings attached. He assumes people will be honest and return their books, even if it takes them years.  He now travels around Colombia visiting schools and libraries encouraging the love of reading. 

 
Another morning, we saw two men sitting on upturned paint tins, playing draughts on a painted square of wood with red and white bottle tops as pieces.

Day and night, there were colourful palenqueras, the descendants of slaves from Palenque, selling fruit from the trays they balanced on their head. This lady told me she started aged ten.

There were vultures on the roof tops, horse-drawn carriages and literary celebrities strolling on the sea wall in their new Panamá hats. 

There were children in a courtyard drawing armadillos and spider monkeys and, in a school that I visited, a flock of peacocks in the grounds to keep the snakes away.

 You couldn´t make it up.

Maeve Friel
I am currently living in Panamá. Please come and visit my website www.maevefriel.com or subscribe to my blog www.maevefriel.com/blog where I am mostly writing about my time in Panamá and about Latin American children´s literature. Or follow me on twitter @MaeveFriel or on Facebook.