Spicy Sambal With Anchovies

I briefly mentioned Chua Kok Yee's new collection of short stories Without Anchovies the other day, and want to say more about it now. (I'm slow, I know...).

The last time I wrote about Kok Yee's writing was when News From Home was published, and I commented that he had a wonderfully quirky imagination but that his writing style needed to develop. I am frankly surprised (and very pleased) to see how far he has come in this short time. Here he writes the kind of clear, straightforward prose that allows the reader to ease right into a story, and his strong openings pull you into the story from the word go.

I'm a really jaded reader at the moment. I pick up fiction - get so far into it and toss it aside when it disappoints, but I enjoyed each and every one of these stories.  The best of them, I found fresh and surprising, and for that reason I'm not going to tell you too much about what happens in them.

The title piece Sambal without Anchovies, a well-told and moving story of family relationships, love and loss, and a family and nasi lemak business.
My favourite story of all was The Gift (which Kok Yee read at Seksan's last week) and I could have wept for the girl who scrimps and saves to buy her mother a gift ... only to have everything go most horribly wrong. Smoking Can Kill is extremely clever because here smoking does kill, but in the most bizarrely round-about way.

Kok Yee does horror very well - I loved Moving which was an unusual twist on the usual haunted house story, while An Untrue Love story has quite a conventional plot for a local horror story (remember - I grew up with New Thrill, Malaysia's trashy horror newspaper in the 1980's!) but works very well because of the unconventional voice of its narrator who fills in the gaps of what didn't happen with her alternative view of events. 

A Circus Interview was surreal and haunting, and reminded me of the stories of Etgar Keret.

I particularly enjoyed the stories where humour was blended with the horror Dead Cougar was a delight, and A Cemetery Story, a cheeky little take on the British Council's City Of Stories project, had me grinning.

Being able to create characters which are not only believable but who really intrigue us in so short a space is no mean feat. Mei who appears in both in Dinner and Cruel Mother is particularly well-realised and I'd be happy to spend more time in her company. The mother in Thieving Daughter is both demented and achingly lonely and we can't help but be fascinated by her. (It's actually quite strange that Kok Yee's female characters are often more convincing than the males!)

In some cases, I felt that while the concept of the story was simply excellent,  the execution could have been a rather better.

The outer frame of the story The Hippocratic Oath - the anesthetist in the operating theatre considering how she has the life of the patient in her hands - is very well realised with plenty of attention to detail, but the charcters in the inner story (the gangster and his wife) are comic-book stereotypes and we can't believe in them, or really feel his menace or her fear.

I wasn't terribly convinced by Embracing Your Shadow where a man is hanted by the memory of a woman he saw only once years before so that he is never able to make his marriage a success. It would actually be hard for any writer to make this seem possible, as we all know that in real life even the most physically appealing member of the opposite sex will generally cease to figure in our thoughts as soon as we move past them, and even the memories of old lovers fade in time. This woman does not seem to have much about her that distinguishes her from the mass for the reader, which makes the protagonist's obsession even harder to fathom.

There's a couple more things I'd like to pass on advice to Kok Yee (and other writers who might be reading this, of course!). Firstly beware of unnecessary POV shifts, as in Sambal Without Anchovies - there actually is no reason why the whole story couldn't have been told from a consistent viewpoint.  Secondly, there is no need to describe every character's physical appearance and clothes when we first encounter them - just select the one or two telling details that will make them stand out for us.  As readers we are perfectly capable of filling in the blanks when imagining our characters.

As for the production of the book, love the creamy paper and the cover fold-ins.  I'm not wild about the picture of the dead flowers which is greatly at odds with the title. (Mixed metaphors?) 

There are some proofreading errors in the book- many more than there should be - and predictably (because Malaysians always find these hard) the most problematic areas are: sequence of tenses (when to use past simple and when to use past prefect); and the confusion between will and would for real and unreal conditions.   But yes, I'm being picky as an ex-English teacher turned editor is, I think, allowed to be. The book needed another editing pass.

Kok Yee is a local writer very well-worth supporting and it will be really interesting to see his development. There are certainly plenty of anchovies in this spicy sambal.

The Merdeka Miracle

Three Malaysian writers, Robert Raymer, Tunku Halim and Lydia Teh have collaborated on a short story for the Malaysia Airlines in-flight magazine Going Places. The Merdeka Miracle was written to celebrate Malaysia's Independence Day and each writer took it in turns to contribute their paragraphs.

Shirley Ng of MPH was kind enough to send me scans of the pages which you can click up to size:

Making Ripples

I approach writing much as I would approach the acquiring of any new skill. Learn the basics, check out what the pros do, practise, get some feedback, then go back through the cycle again. Learn more, read some more, write some more, and try to have some fun along the way.

Frank O'Connor shortlisted author Shih-Li Kow talks to Daphne Lee in Starmag about writing her collection Ripples, and about how she writes and gets her ideas.

And I review the book here. The last line of the review has changed, and I intended it to read :

The best pieces in the collection display Kow as an intelligent and subtle short story writer, with a firm grip on her craft. She is an excellent prose stylist, and there’s a musicality in her writing which makes it seems effortless. Ripples confirms her as one of the best writers in the form in the country, and one feels that the book can stand proudly beside its competitors on the Frank O’Connor Short Story Prize shortlist.

Three for the Story Prize

The judges for The Story Prize (which honours collections of short fiction written in English and published in the US) has selected a shortlist of just 3 books out of the 73 submitted :

• Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri
• Demons in the Spring by Joe Meno
• Our Story Begins by Tobias Wolff

Lahiri, remember, leapfrogged all the opposition in the Frank O'Connor last year. Most of the stories in Woolf's book have been taken from previous collections, but as BookFox observes :

... when a version of the National Book Award winner was published thirty years previously, I don't think that hurts Wolff's chances.

Meno's book, the only small press publication of the three, sounds very much my kind of thing :

Each of theses 20 stories evokes a different and surprising world, where, for instance, victims held at gunpoint fall in love with their captors, freed zoo animals roam the streets, a wife turns into a cloud whenever her husband makes a romantic overture, miniature elephants become prized and acutely sensitive pets, and a tiny city grows inside a woman like a cancer. Yet, no matter how imaginative the situation, the stories remain grounded in real empathy and plausible detail.

Eric gets Tanya on the Couch!

Among the mighty good stuff on Eric Forbes Good Book Guide blog is this interview with award winning short story writer Tania Hershman who seems to have some very original scenarios in her fiction :

... a woman sets up a roadside cafe on the way to the South Pole, a grieving widow bakes science cakes, a girl is paralysed when it rains, another talks to her knees.

Tanya's debut collection, The White Road and Other Stories, was published by Salt Publishing in September. She has also set up a website devoted to reviewing short-story collections called The Short Review which I'm sure the fiction writers among you (and aficionados of the form) will enjoy reading. She is currently doing a blog book-tour (great way for authors to promote their work!) and Eric's blog is one of the stops along the way. There's plenty more interesting content on Eric's blog, much of which finds itself into copies of Quill. Eric and May Lee interview another short story writer, Claire Wigfall, who won the BBC National Short Story award.

From Refugee Baby to Award-Winning Author

Vietnamese-Australian author Nam Le has won the international Dylan Thomas Prize for young writers for his first collection of short stories. The award, worth £60,000 recognises the best young writer in the English-speaking world and ensures that the inspirational nature of Welsh poet Dylan Thomas' writing will live on.

Le arrived Australia as a baby with his refugee parents . He grew up in Melbourne and studied law at Melbourne University. At 25 he joined the famous Iowa Writers Workshop where he wrote the stories in The Boat. He now works in New York, where he is the fiction editor of the Harvard Review, and will take up the David T.K. Wong fellowship at the University of East Anglia next year to work on his second book.

The Sydney Morning Herald quotes Peter Florence, chairman of the judges, as saying of Le's work that it demonstrated :

... a rare brilliance that is breathtaking both in the scope of its subject matter and the quality of its writing. Nam tackles his own background and circumstances as well as that of others with a clear eye, focused intelligence and wonderful use of words.

While Ben Ball at Penguin Australia, commended the impressive shortlist for the prize, but remarked :

But Nam has another gear that takes him further into unexpected geographical or emotional territory. He has said that every sentence is an opportunity to lose a reader, so he can't let a semi-dud one by.

(I bolded that bit because I think that every writer who wants to suceed should engrave that on his/her heart!)

Here's Nam Le's website for The Boat, where you can read an extract and reviews, as well as more about the author.

Janet Tay reviewed the book some time back in Starmag. (The unedited version is here.) Eric blogged an email interview with the author here. Eric also wrote about the other shortlisted books.

Congrats to the author, and let's give a big cheer for the short story (which folks predicted was dying, not so long ago, but which just doesn't lie down and give up that easily!)

I've not yet read the book (I stared at it, it stared back at me in Kinokuniya when I was making tough choices) but hope to soon.

A Master Storyteller

It’s amazing to read about Hindu beliefs and iconography – narrated, as it were, from the inside – in the national language. It makes you realise how free of iconoclasm, and therefore how neutered and ‘circumcised’, the language has been over the decades.

If Uthaya were merely a spokesman for his race, this would not make him an interesting writer. What counts for more: His supple and surprising uses of plot and perspective, his sense of irony and the absurd, his occasionally breathtaking endings.

Amir Muhammad reviews Uthaya Sankar's collection of short fiction Rudra Avatara: Kumpulan Cerpen Bahasa Malaysia.

Daring Little Instruments

Short stories by nature are daring little instruments and almost always represent commensurate daring in their makers. For one thing, short stories want to give us something big but want to do it in precious little time and space. For another, they succeed by wilfully falsifying many of the observable qualities of the lived life they draw upon. They also leave out a lot of life and try to make us not worry about it. They often do funny things with time - things we know can't be done, really - but then make us go along with that. They persuade us that the human-being-like characters they show us can be significantly known on the strength of rather slight exposure; and they make us believe that entire lives can change on account of one little manufactured moment of clear-sightedness. You could say, based on this evidence, that the most fundamental character trait of short stories, other than their shortness, would seem to be audacity. More than even the sestina, short stories are the high-wire act of literature, the man keeping all those pretty plates up and spinning on skinny sticks.

An excellent piece by novelist Richard Ford on the art of the short story in the Guardian today, taken from The New Granta Book of the American Short Story which is due to be launched in the UK on Monday.

This I must have!

Small Gems

In the Guardian another excellent article about the short story, this time by Aida Edemariam.

She writes:

The British attitude to the short story - that it is somehow lesser, a practice space for the real thing, which is, of course, the novel; that you can perhaps start out writing a collection of stories, but you have somehow failed if you don't graduate to a minimum of 200 pages - has always baffled me.

Instead, she sees the short story as:

... a test of prose-writing in a way a novel often isn't, or isn't necessarily.

You can read the whole thing here.

And if you feel inspired to begin reading the best short fiction (and remember - you are what you read!), here's list of the best by short story writer Peter Ho Davies to get you started. Who else would you add to it?

And if you have a little time and a few ringgit to spare, you might like to pop into a branch of Payless Books which always seems to have multiple copies of the Best American Short Stories from down the years. (I've collected most of the set.) These books contain some of the best short story writing from the country that feels most at home in this genre. But the books would be worth buying for their introductory essays about the state of the short story alone.