Even if you are an avid book lover, you would probably limit your trips to the weeklong Abu Dhabi International Book Fair to three days at most.
If you are bookseller, or indeed a journalist assigned to cover the event, then the Abu Dhabi National Exhibition Centre, which hosts the event, is home for the week.
Spending this amount of time at the fair, I begin to notice a few elements hidden from the occasional visitor. As it is for musicians, the Abu Dhabi stopover is part of an established literary route for many of the multilingual booksellers. They began the year in Doha, then on to to Cairo, Riyadh and New Delhi, with Jakarta next.
Those months on the road, not to mention the hours spent packing and unpacking boxes of books, creates a camaraderie between the publishers. As brothers in books, they man each other’s stand when needs require; they also take turns in going on the occasional coffee run.
Watching this all with quiet grief is Likhat Pandey. Standing in his small booth promoting the Nepalese Publishing Association, Pandey admits this year’s sales of guide books promoting the country’s hiking culture and folk tales anthologies were “very good”. Yet the recent earthquakes in his homeland robbed him of the joy a big sale day would bring.
“My usual partner who comes with me to the book fair was injured by the earthquake. His leg is broken. He will be back next year. When the earthquake happened I had just dropped off my son to school and was walking back to the car. I remember the earth shook and I was thrown off the ground, but even when I landed hard on the ground my eyes never left the school.
“My son was in the classroom doing his exams. Lucky the school building was strong and no one was hurt. What can you say? This was not our time to leave the world, but stay.”
Pandey’s week at the book fair was made extra tough considering he had only a creaky office chair in terms of creature comforts; other peers worked in lavish conditions courtesy of their cashed-up publishers, companies or host countries.
The Sheikh Zayed Book Award stand is literally the fair’s biggest and brightest: it almost resembles a hotel lobby with a dedicated receptionist, sofas, waiters serving an endless supply of chai and white cardboard walls that resemble marble.
It is no wonder journalists elected to interview the winning authors at the bookstand, rather than the more humble press centre.
The pavilion for this year’s country of honour, Iceland, was minimal. Unlike its Nordic neighbour Sweden – who last year went all out with an Ikea-designed wood and glass panel set-up – the spacious Icelandic stand was equally modern, yet less flashy, with white leather couches separated by a creamy coloured book shelves and crowned by a wooden pergola.
One of the country’s biggest literary exports, the crime novelist Yrsa Sigurðardóttir, welcomed the fact she was a long way from home.
“In Iceland the word for home and stupid are nearly the same,” she explains.
“We are encouraged in our culture to go out and explore and learn from other cultures.
“If we choose to only stay in our corner of the world, it will be viewed as something that’s quite stupid.”
Venture over to the other end of the fair – after passing a maze of publishers including representatives from Lebanon, Syria, India, Sudan and Turkey – and you will find the scattered stages where the author sessions are held. Speaking on a Sunday afternoon panel discussing the role of cultural publications on the region, the atmosphere can be best described as disorienting. With the stages being only a few metres away from some of the book stands, any attempt to fully tune in to the conversation was hampered by the occasional indignant burst of a few shoppers: “Dh75? Unacceptable. My offer is 40, yallah, let us finish this.”
The pent-up pressure from the week, the bad diet of takeaway Saj and doughnuts and the cabin fever from being cooped up in a place with no natural lighting or a clock, was released joyfully with a pair of live performances by Gnawa master Hassan Bossou and his ensemble on Monday and Tuesday at the discussion sofa. Bossou had the booksellers and public create an impromptu dance floor as we all grooved along to the big fat bass notes summoned from his gimbri – a three-stringed, skin-covered lute.
It was a precious, rare moment of respite for the booksellers that would hopefully, perhaps, make this Abu Dhabi trip stand out from a year spent in vacuous venues across the world.
Saeed Saeed is a senior features writer at The National.
