Serving up a literary smorgasbord
NORMAN Mailer, Harold Pinter, Amos Oz and Saul Bellow -— just some of the legendary authors that Ramona Koval has featured in her new book.
NORMAN Mailer, Harold Pinter, Amos Oz and Saul Bellow -— just some of the legendary authors Ramona Koval has spoken with over the years for her ABC radio program, The Book‚ÄàShow.
In 2005, a selection of her best interviews were featured in a compilation, Tasting Life Twice. Five years on, Koval has updated the selection in a new edition, Speaking Volumes, which has just been published.
“These are a selection of the interviews that I have done over the past 15 years with writers who have interesting things to say to a world audience,” says Koval, a veteran of ABC Radio since the 1980s.
Was it hard to select the 28 authors to feature in the book? “I don’t have favourites — they are all interesting and memorable for different reasons,” she explains. “A lot of the most interesting writers of the past 50 years have been Jewish — people like Joseph Heller and Harold Pinter have been classic writers in their genre.”
Koval says that Amos Oz, Israel’s best-known writer with an international reputation, has wide appeal to Jewish and non-Jewish audiences.
“He is a very emotional and passionate writer,” she explains.
In Speaking Volumes, Koval quotes Oz as saying that when he writes as a journalist, it is usually to criticise Israel’s lawmakers.
“I’m normally telling the government to go to hell, and for some reason they never listen to me,” Oz notes.
Koval interviewed Harold Pinter at the Edinburgh International Book Festival not long after he had an operation for throat cancer.
“I wanted to talk about cancer as he had published his poems on the subject, but I was not sure when to bring it up,” she says.
“A lot of his early work had a very menacing atmosphere, and what’s more menacing than the threat of dying, so I wanted to ¬≠discuss it, but was not sure when to raise it.
“Just before we went on stage, Pinter asked me if I wanted to speak about the cancer. When I told him that I did, he said: ‘Well, can we get it out of the way at the start’.”
Koval says members of the audience were surprised that she tackled the cancer question first, although they did not realise that the request had come from Pinter himself.
For her interview with Saul Bellow, Koval went to the US where he was part of the professors program at Boston University.
“He was about 83 and very nice. We spoke a little bit of Yiddish together and he asked me for a date in the afterlife,” she recalls.
Each year from 2001 to 2009, Koval attended the Edinburgh International Book Festival to conduct interviews on stage, but this year she has been invited to the Times Cheltenham Festival of Literature in England, which is on next month.
She spends weeks researching each author that she interviews for her radio show and sessions at writers’ festivals.
“I read the author’s current book and all the interviews that have been published about the author.
“I read the reviews of the book, but usually after I have read the book as I don’t want to have somebody else’s impression of it,” she says.
“I also check YouTube to see if there are interviews that have been done. It’s important to be really well prepared. If you are not, it can be panic stations.”
As well as interviewing authors, Koval has put pen to paper herself, writing a novel, Samovar, and a cookbook, Jewish Cooking, Jewish Cooks, inspired by the traditional cuisine of her Holocaust-survivor parents.
Most of the recipes are derived from the Ashkenazi food of Europe, but some are also influenced by the Sephardi food of the Middle East and North Africa.
The book is peppered with anecdotes and tales about the importance of food in Jewish culture.
“I think the sales of the cookbook are fine, but it doesn’t have a television show to go with it,” she says with a laugh.
“I was at a Byron Bay Writers Festival recently and lots of people were interested in my book and the food, culture and the stories of different types of culinary traditions.”
Ramona Koval’s Speaking Volumes is published by Scribe. $35 (rrp).
DANNY GOCS
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