The lobby, hallways and mezzanine are empty when I get to the Delta Hotel. Airplanes could take off here. An old gentleman wanders by, unsure. I recognize him as Zakaria Tamer, the Syrian author of Breaking Knees, and hold out my hand, mention I reviewed his book for the Rover, and loved it. My bad Arabic deceives him and he switches to it, telling me animated stories of sex and cab drivers and good home-cooked meals. At least that’s what I understood.

Zakaria Tamer is here to receive the second annual Al Majidi Ibn Dhaher prize, named after a 17th century Arab poet from the Gulf region, and sponsored by the serious-sounding Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage. (They’re happy in the Gulf when culture has authority.)

Inside the Versailles room people mingle. Well, all ten of us. Festival director Linda Leith is happy to see Mr Tamer, until he launches into a complaint about being stranded at the airport for an hour with no one to pick him up. She holds her own and smiles big smiles. Crossed e-mails. Busy staff. It’s a big festival, don’tcha know. Two hours, two hours. And he hardly speaks English, let alone French. Then another fellow beside him has a complaint. Another Arab man with a complaint.  Leith smiles even more.

By the time Issa Boullata, former McGill professor and scholar, is introducing Tamer there are twenty of us in the room. Why not more? Where is the Syrians community? Why do we show up in droves when there is anger to spew and justices to be righted and enemies to be toppled – but not to listen to a writer speak of ourselves, our dark, untamed and hurting selves. This, we don’t want to hear.

And maybe I don’t want to hear it either, because I only understand the vocabulary and not the meaning. The words are all familiar and I sound them out in my head and I know later, maybe when falling asleep, they’ll come together and weave a kind of sense and only then will I really know what he was saying. But I realize tonight I have a huge capacity to just sit and listen to the Arabic language. I even stop trying to understand and just listen to its music. Someone told me they thought the Arabic language sounded violent and menacing and that just hearing it made her afraid. But for me, it just lulls.

Or maybe that’s just words that lull, that soothe and rock. Because next door Tariq Ali is reading from A Sultan in Palermo, the fourth in his Islam Quintet, and beside him Fred Reed, the presenter, seems to be falling asleep. His closed eyes are settled deep and his head moves in tiny waves back and forth, back and forth. Tariq Ali is a big man, big in the Arabic sense: kibir. Kibir as in grand, wise, important. He is lovely, his London accent is lovely, and his book seems lovely. Is his Islam Quintet a counterpoint nod to Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet? I don’t know. I read Durrell while living in Alexandria years ago and it had nothing to do with the city as I saw it. Durrell was all big ideas and Alexandria is all small confusions. Blue Met, however, has both: big ideas and small confusions.

Dame Antonia: Getting Easier All the Time

by Marianne Ackerman

It does get easier: that’s the news from veteran wordsmith A.S. (Antonia) Byatt, Grand Prize winner and guest of honour at this year’s Blue Met International literary festival. The British-born author of Possession and dozens of other books says she enjoys writing more these days and spends much less time at it than she once did.

“I did thirty, maybe forty drafts of my first novel because I just couldn’t seem to get it right,” she told a small gathering of journalists who turned out for her morning appearance. “Now I only write one draft. I wait until I’ve got it written in my head and then just watch it unfold.”

Gracious, articulate and fully prepared with interesting things to say on Blue Met’s ritual themes, Dame Antonia fielded questions in English and French, struggling sometimes to follow rapid-fire questions in her second language, but never at a loss for an answer.

On winning the Booker Prize (for Possession): “The Booker is a lottery. The jury changes every year and so winning just means you were lucky, the jury liked your book. It’s not like the Prix Goncourt, which is controlled by a powerful group of publishers.”

On the Orange Prize, awarded to the best female writer of the year: “It’s a sexist prize. I don’t see why women should have a separate prize. There was a move to establish a Black writer’s prize and it was stopped.”

On literary prizes in general: “They’re a good thing. They draw attention to writing and sell books.”

On Blue Met: “This prize is more important to me, as it celebrates a life’s work.”

On her greatest source of pride: “I’m proud that I survived all the problems I’ve had and have written so many books.”

The Canadian edition of her latest novel, The Children’s Book, will be launched at Blue Met as will the French translation of her debut novel, L’ombre du soleil.

11th  Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival continues through April 26, 2009,  at the DELTA CENTRE-VILLE Hotel at 777 University Street, Square-Victoria metro.