An Antidote for Over-Ambitious Parents

Malaysian readers are going to find themselves in familiar territory with Nikita Lalwani's Booker longlisted Gifted.

The novel is partly based on the story of teenage prodigy Sufiah Yusof born to a Malaysian mother and Pakistani father who became something of a cause célèbre in this country when she went missing from her Oxford college before giving herself up to the authorities citing parental abuse and describing her home life as “living hell”.

Her father feared she had been abducted. But then an e-mail arrived from his missing daughter. In it, Yusof wrote that her parents had made her life a "living hell." She accused them of "15 years of physical and emotional abuse," including long study sessions in a house kept icy cold supposedly to improve her concentration.

Lalwani’s novel raises the question of how much can you push your kids academically?

Rumika is 10 years old 2 months 13 days 48 minutes and 4 seconds old when the novel opens. When she was just 5, her teacher came to the house to tell her parents that she was a gifted child, and that this gift should be nurtured.

Rumika's father, Mahesh, is a maths professor at Cardiff university, and knows that hard work is the immigrant's path to respect and recognition. He takes the idea of coaching his daughter on board and runs with it, imposing a strict regime on her that borders at times on abuse.

Rumika longs for normalcy, but as she is forced to study ever harder, her relationship with her cold and scornful father deteriorates even further and she also finds her isolation from her friends increasing. As she enters adolescence she has to carve some freedom for herself, but ends up doing things which are risky and stupid - shop lifting, calling emergency services just because she wants to speak to someone, and harming herself. She also, quite comically, becomes addicted to cumin and munches her way through vast quantities of it. The only period of respite is a trip to India with her mother, Shreene.

Lalwani does a very good job of depicting the sense of loneliness and dislocation in the family, and gets right inside her characters and exposes them. No matter how unlikable Mahesh is, we can understand his motivations and fears. Shreene is caught up in traditional notions of propriety and finds it difficult to navigate the compromises that must be made, not only to adapt to British society, but also to be able to understand and reach out to her daughter.

This might make for painful reading but there are also some wonderfully comic moments in the novel, my favourite - Shreene trying out a bikini wax after reading about it in a woman's magazine.

Rumika wins a place to Oxford, one of the youngest students ever allowed to do a degree course and the move gives her some of the freedom she has been waiting for. Lalwani builds up the sequence of events convincingly and Rumi’s actions come as no surprise. In fact we’re cheering for her as she asserts her independence in the final scenes of the book.

This is a novel that young adult readers, particularly those experiencing examination pressure themselves will enjoy very much indeed. It is also an excellent cautionary tale for overly ambitious parents who should be treated to a copy of it by their kids immediately!

(Many thanks to Kinokuniya for sponsoring my copy of the novel!)

Postscript (30/3/08) :

There's a sad footnote to Sufiah's story, which Rocky has put up on his blog. Kak Teh met her in happier times.

Brilliantly Comic, Hauntingly Sinister

Am finally and somewhat sadly at the end of Nicola Barker's Darkmans, which has kept me happy and occupied over the past ... how many weeks is it? I've lost track.

Despite being 838 pages long it never felt a long or arduous read, maybe because I was enjoying the joyfully meandering narration so much.

To talk about the plot of the novel is almost beside the point. (This idea that there's this "3 act arc" of Western story telling just doesn't work here.) Yes, there are story threads that run through, but they seem almost incidental, and not all are gathered neatly together at the end leaving the reader still caught in the mystery of who and how these folks in a modern Kent town become possessed (it seems) by characters from the past. When I was a kid I loved time-slip novels like Alan Garner's The Owl Service, and Phillipa Pearce's Tom's Midnight Garden, and always squeeze my eyes up tight to try to see a place as it was hundred of years ago, so this aspect of the novel greatly appealed to me.

The action doesn't (for the most part) move out of a tiny geographical area, the town of Ashford in Kent. When I've mentioned this to British friends over the past week or two, I've seen their eyes boggle in disbelief that anyone would want to set a novel there.

It's a nowhere sort of place, a transportation hub, serving the Eurostar service to continental Europe and torn up by roads. Whatever charm and history it had in the past has become pretty much obliterated in the interest of "development". But Ashford with its bypasses and Tesco's and substandard modern housing estates, is arguably the main character of the book, and the past comes back to haunt ... with a vengeance.

There's a relatively small human cast for a book this size, the interrelationships between those individuals are throughly explored.

Beede and Kane are a father and son with apartments in the same house while remaining essentially estranged from each other. Beede works in the hospital laundry and is fascinated by the past. Kane deals in prescription drugs, and is haunted by the attempted suicide of his mother many years before.

Then there's (let's see ... and do forgive the brackets, one tends to write in long run-on sentence with breathless asides after reading this) Kane's larger than life ex-girlfriend, Kelly Broad, (a girl of the sort we would have called, not very kindly, "a right little scrubber" in my day); Gaffar, a Kurdish refugee who comes to work for Kane and is terrified (to the point of fainting!) of salad leaves; Elen, Beede's chiropodist (who may or may not be a witch); Isadore, her husband, barely clinging to sanity at times; their son, Fleet, building a model of a cathedral from matchsticks. And several others including, the builder from hell, an art forger, and an incontinent spaniel with paralysed back legs.

Oh yes, and there's also a shadowy character from the past, a sort of lord of misrule, who appears to be playing some rather nasty practical jokes on the characters.

There's an awful lot of talk but in the sharp dialogue and in the asides of the completely garrulous narrator. (I kept thinking that it would be fun to see the novel written as a hypertext novel - it would be a fraction of its length without the detours!)

I came away from the book with more questions than answers. But I came away satisfied and I came away wanting more. (And disagreeing vehemently with Chairman of the Booker Prize committee, Howard Davies' snippy comment about how it could have been more tightly edited ... did he get what Barker was trying to do?).

I can't think of another novel that manages to be both brilliantly comic and hauntingly sinister at the same time. Darkman's also has its finger firmly on the (British) social pulse, while also being startlingly innovative in form and style.

So would I recommend it to Malaysian readers? Several other readers of this blog (Janet, Animah and Leon) have already read and enjoyed it. Definitely, if you are strong enough to lift a copy and can embrace exuberant messiness!

Should it have won the Booker? I wouldn't have been at all unhappy if it had. (Though I still think Animal's People and Mr. Pip will be more popular choices with a more general readership.)

Links to other reviews:

Matt Thorne in the Independent
Alex Clark in the Observer
Suart Kelly in Scotland on Sunday

Betrayal on a Greek Island

I'm constantly acquiring new books, and find there's always a pressure to read the newest, the latest ... particularly as I review. And since I also belong to a book club at least one book a month is decided for me!

Consequently, books that don't get read immediately tend to be get buried on my "to-be-read" shelf, a.k.a. "the shelf of good intentions". I was happy for the TBR Challenge to prod me into making a covenant with at least 12 of these books to read 'em before the year is up.

Sadly, I've only just finished my second-TBR of 2007. It's Pascali's Island by Barry Unsworth which has been patiently waiting its turn since I bought it via Amazon, prompted by catching the excellent film (starring Ben Kinsley, Helen Mirren, Charles Dance) for a second time on ASTRO.

The novel is set on a small Greek island in 1908. The Ottoman Empire is about to fall, but in this remote outpost a government informer pens his last report to the Sultan. Basil Pascali, an outsider of mixed-race, has loyally reported on the activities of the people of his community for twenty years, each month receiving a tiny stipend, but never a single response. As a writer he begins to take liberties with his reports, taking enormous pride in his ability to depict events with great clarity and flair.

When Englishman Anthony Bowles arrives on the island, he and Pascali become rivals for the affection of Lydia, a Viennese artist who has been living there for some time. Pascali suspects that Bowles may not be honest about his claim to be an archeologist (it takes a practiced confidence-trickster to recognise another of his kind, after all), so what is he doing there?

The atmospheric short novel is superbly plotted, there isn't a scene out of place. Nothing is as it seems and Pascali's Island keeps you guessing right up to the tragic ending as the characters become enmeshed in layers betrayal and deceit.

Literary fiction honestly doesn't come much better than this and I am actually surprised that the novel didn't win more recognition at the time.

It was shortlisted for the Booker in 1980, but was eclipsed by William Golding's win for Darkness Visible and Anthony Burgess' masterpiece Earthly Powers. I've read several other novels by Unsworth which I've greatly enjoyed and admired (Morality Play, Rum and Sugar, Losing Nelson, and Sacred Hunger, which finally did won Unsworth the Booker) but I like this by far the best. (I still have his latest novel A Ruby in her Navel to be read.)

Pascali's Island reminded me of several other novels I've greatly enjoyed : E.M. Forster's Passage to India, L.P. Hartley's The Go-Between, and the episode about the smugglers in Lermentov's A Hero of our Time ... all of them written much earlier.

Would I recommend it? Whole-heartedly ... for literary fiction lovers. (And I'm sure I will be rereading it.) Others will still enjoy the film - just watch out for repeats on ASTRO.

Weighing the Best of the Best

The Man Booker International Prize was set up to recognise one writer for his or her achievement in fiction and is awarded once every two years to a living author who has published fiction either originally in English or whose work is generally available in translation in the English language.

The winner of the inaugural Man Booker International Prize in 2005 was Ismail Kadaré.

The Judges List for the 2007 prize (which is awarded every second year) was announced at Massey College in Toronto on Thursday. The nominees are:

Chinua Achebe
Margaret Atwood
John Banville
Peter Carey
Don DeLillo
Carlos Fuentes
Doris Lessing
Ian McEwan
Harry Mulisch
Alice Munro
Michael Ondaatje
Amos Oz
Philip Roth
Salman Rushdie
Michel Tournier

Several of my most deeply loved authors are on this list (Atwood, Carey, Lessing, Ondaatje, de Lillo, Achebe), along with others I greatly respect (McEwan, Banville, Rushdie, Munro), others I haven't read yet but hope to (Fuentes, Oz) ... and a couple I've never heard of (Michel Tournier and Harry Mulisch) but who no doubt thoroughly deserve to be there.

(Much more information on all the writers and their works and is available on the Man Booker International website and also on the Guardian website.)

My feelings on seeing the list are mixed ... while I'm always glad to see great writers given the recognition they deserve, I hate the crassness of this winner and loser approach. And does the world actually need this award? Those of us who truly love reading know who the greats are already ... and how do you compare one in any meaningful way with another? You can't put their works on a scale and weight them as if they were trout caught in a fishing competition!

The judges, Nadime Gordimer, Colm Toibin and Professor Elaine Showalter have their work cut out for them but I know that whatever choice they make I will be disappointed.

But if I were in their shoes (and allowing for the great gaps of ignorance in my reading) ... I'd have to choose either Carey or Atwood ...

(*pause for deep thought*)

Carey ... Carey it is ...

Postscript:

Stuart Kelly writing in the Scotsman ( found via Literary Saloon) sees the award as being one for "resting on laurels", he says:

Rather than being a truly international survey of the best in contemporary fiction writing, this shortlist positively reeks of smug complacency and petty parochialism. How widely did the judges actually read? Did they even consider Ngugi wa'Thiong'o, Bernardo Atxaga, Mo Yan, Jan Kjærstad, Viktor Pelevin, Elias Khoury? What about recent Nobel Prize winners - Orhan Pamuk, Elfriede Jelinek, Imre Kertész, José Saramago, Gao Xingjian?

Literature in translation is difficult to persuade people to try; and the International Man Booker did present a real opportunity to widen horizons and promote the underappreciated - an opportunity it singularly failed to seize this year. Worse, it seems to me that at this present historical moment, the need for us to understand other cultures, engage in dynamic dialogue with them and foster genuine international communication is more pressing than eve

Mother's Milk

Mother's Milk by Edward St. Aubyn picks up characters from his earlier trilogy collectively titled Some Hope, something I didn't realise until after I'd finished it and began reading some of the reviews.

Mother's Milk stands alone perfectly well, but there did seem to be too heavy a burden of backstory (all that history of the loss of family fortunes!) for such a slim volume. Ahah, now I know why.

The pleasure of the book lies in its sharp depictions of family life as seen through the eyes of the members of the Melrose family, Patrick, his wife Mary and young sons Robert over four successive August holidays.

The first three holidays are spent in Provence, in the house where Patrick, grew up. But the house is soon to be transfered to a flaky new age charity and a charlatan of a shaman called Seamus Dourke, while Patrick is effectively disinherited. His mother, Eleanor, meanwhile, is on her last legs and in a nursing home. But inheritance is about more than property - it's also about venemous anger and sense of betrayal passed on from one generation to the next, and both parents realise that they must break the chain with their own children.

I wasn't interested so much in the midlife angst of London lawyer Patrick, which has him seeking solace in the bottle and in an affair with an old girlfriend. But I had more sympathy for Mary, so absorbed into motherhood and its demands that she has nothing of herself to give anyone else.

I loved the parts of the book narrated from the viewpoint of the boys. St. Aubyn writes childhood wonderfully, and the opening pages, where the precocious and terrifying observant Robert describes his birth is for me one of the best parts of the novel. (And you can read it here.)

The writing is wonderfully witty and sharply observed. There are some wonderfully grotesque small part characters from an utterly incomptent Nanny to rich cousin Henry who turns out to have more extreme views on foreign policy than Rumsfeld and Bush.

Another joy is the many memorably acerbic one-liners. (The blurb on the back has a quote from the Sunday Telegraph describing St. Aubyn's "mocking aphoristic style", which says it nicely.) He writes, for example, about obese passengers on the flight, who had:

... the apprehensive fat of people who had decided to become their own airbag systems in a dangerous world.

St. Aubyn is a writer with an intriguing past (upper class upbringing, raped by his father, became a heroin addict) which has fed into his fiction. Rachel Cooke's interview with him in the Observer is well worth a read.

You might also like to check out Michael Ardetti's fine review on the Independent website.

Would I recommend Mother's Milk? Yes. Literary fiction lovers will enjoy and appreciate it. But I think that many of the local readers of this blog would find more accessible Kiran Desai's or Hisham Matar's novels from the Booker shortlist.

Terror - Libyan Style

I don't feel that I so much read Hisham Matar's Booker shortlisted In the Country of Men as watched it.

The movie in my head was one of those moody art-house things full of meaningful glances which hinted at unspoken words, secrets whispered in corners, and long poignant silences. It was shot in black and white, and the scenes alternating between the claustrophobic dark of interiors and the searing brilliance of the sunlight which bleaches everything of its colour.

I felt so opressed by the weight of fear in this nailbitingly tense novel that I had to put it down for two whole days (although I had gobbled down the first half of it on the AirAsia flight back from Bali.)

It's set in Libya. It didn't have to be. It could be set in any police state where there is the inevitable anticiption of the knock on the door and the possibility of torture, imprisonment. And worse. One of the most disturbing scenes in the book is an account of the public hanging of a gentle art historian shown on state TV.

The story is told through the eyes of Sulaiman a nine year old boy who struggles to make sense of what is going on around him. His father, Baba, is one of the liberal intelligensia fighting for democratic reform. He is frequently absent from home, ostensibly on business trips but in reality on attempts to foment social change and a push for democracy among the student population.

His wife and son, meanwhile, are vulnerable and afraid at home. Suleiman's mother takes refuge in alcholol, procured illegally from the local baker. She tells Suleiman that it is her "medicine", and spends the evenings relating 1001 Nights and her own story of domestic tyranny - both tales in which women are treated as mere chattels. She was at 14 forced into marriage against her will because she had spoken to a boy in public.

The strain of witnessing so much that he does not understand carries Suleiman to breaking point.

He longs for an initiation into the world of men, principally so that he can protect his mother, whom he loves almost incestuously. But childhood innocence is lost as he discovers the power of siding with the enemy and bullying those weaker than himself. Violence and betrayal suck him in.

The Bookseller reports that the novel :

... is already characterised in book trade shorthand as "the Libyan Kite Runner" ...

but I found this novel very much stronger, and a great deal more disturbing, without The Kite Runner's easy answers and the blare of Hollywood sentimentality.

Like Hosseini's novel, In the Country of Men contains strong autobiographical elements. Matar fled with his family from Libya to Egypt where he attended English boarding school.

Would I recommend the novel? Yes. The writing is sensual, the storytelling compelling and powerful. It asks difficult questions about how relationships survive in an atmosphere of oppression and fear and I feel that it fully deserved its place on the Booker shortlist - I'm just glad that I wasn't one of the judges on that committee.

Read the first chapter of the novel here.

The Night Watch

Wasn't sure if I'd be reviewing Sarah Waters' The Night Watch for Starmag or not, which is why I didn't blog about it straight after I'd read it. As it happened, Andrew Ng did the job, and did it very well indeed. His review appeared in Friday's Star, and echo my feelings about the book. Unlike Andrew, I haven't read any of Waters' other books (yeah, I know, I know), so was coming to the author without preconceptions.

There was much that I did really like about the novel. I like the way that the story moves backward in time. It opens in 1947. The scars of war are still apparent in the bombed out streets. Waters' create a chain of characters each carrying guilty secrets. The promise that we going to learn the answers propels us through the story, although it is not in the end completely fulfilled. (But then, isn't life like that?)

I particularly like the structure of the book - the way it opens in the post war years and then moves backwards to tell the stories of different individuals I like the almost accidental way their lives intersect. Many of the scenes take place at night when emotions are rawest : each scene is like a searchlight illuminating momentarily important moments in the characters' lives.

Waters' recreaction of the London blitz is excellent and I think that this is the first time that fiction had taken me there.

Zadie for Orange

This year's Orange prize has been won by Zadie Smith for her novel On Beauty which also made the 2005 Booker shortlist.

I've now read 3 of the shortlisted novels (most recently Sarah Walters The Night Watch, which is still sitting in my head and I will tell you about anon), but Zadie is still on my to-be-read shelf, an enjoyable experience anticipated. (After a couple of have-to-reads.)

Picture (nicked from the Guardian) shows Zadie standing in front of a portrait of E.M. Forster: her novel is a contemporary reworking of Howard's End.

The State of the Novel

Robert McCrum in yesterday's Observer asks if the British novel has lost its way as money and celebrity and awards are thrown at it:

Out of a swamp of greed, ambition and creative writing crawled a new Gollum, the 'Booker novel', trailing the slime of self-promotion. This, typically, was a scarcely readable work of the imagination, devoid of narrative, character, plausible landscape or moral purpose, whose sole motivation was the desire to get on to that fabled shortlist. There was a boom in second-rate literary fiction, most of it now recycled into wallpaper and toilet tissue. Each year publishers began to bet ever more absurd sums on 'Booker novels' in the hopes of hitting the jackpot.

There's plenty of food for thought here, and McCrum gives an excellent history of the changing fortunes of the novel in Britain over time.

Now maybe I just haven't read enough beyond award lists recently (and even trying to keep up with the longlists and shortlists is a nightmare for this not terribly fast reader) ... but I've thoroughly enjoyed the contemporary fiction I've picked up recently and it's seemed to me that the novel is in pretty good shape.

I wonder which novels McCrum is thinking of when he talks of "scarcely readable works". His list of 20 all-time great Booker winners is very telling - John Banville's The Sea is so pointedly absent, as is Yann Martell's The Life of Pi ...

On the other side of the Atlantic, debate about the best American novel of the last 25 years (see my previous post on this) hots up with an online discussion between prominent authors and critics on the New York Times website about the books that made the list and about the state of US fiction in general.

There's quite a few more titles here for Animah's list too!

(Illustration nicked from the British Council's website)

Related Post

The Novel is Dead, Long Live the Novel (18/9/05)

Award Fatigue

Ho hum. I'm not a very good litblogger because I suffer from Literary Award fatigue. There are just so many longlists, shortlists, winners, that one can blog about ... but that's a shameful admission because these lists serve as useful reading guides for anyone who wants to be a bit more adventurous in their reading and get out of the sticking-with-familiar-writers-rut.

But if there seem to be more such lists around than there used to be - there probably are. Apparently even the Booker committee hadn't used to announce it's longlist (and now that they do I feel oliged to buy and read the whole bloody lot and severe bookguilt if I miss any out). It's probably true for the other awards as well. And of course, there are more awards these days.

Anyway. The shortlist for the Dublin-based 2006 IMPAC prize was announced a few days ago. It's a very interesting literary prize since it is open to authors of any nationality and written in any language, provided they have been published in English translation, and thus casts its net a lot more widely than other literary awards. The longlist is actually nominated by libraries across the world, and you may remember that I picked up a controversy about the librarians in some countries (inc. Malaysia) nominating a title by a national writer rather than for the best book of the year.

Thankfully librarians from elsewhere seem to have been clearer on the concept and less kiasu: the original longlist of 132 books has now been whittled down to a shortlist of just 10 titles. And the nominations are:

• Graceland by Chris Abani
• Maps for Lost Lovers by Nadeem Aslam
• Havoc, In Its Third Year by Ronan Bennett
• The Closed Circle by Jonathan Coe
• An Altered Light by Jens Christian Grondahl - translated from the Danish by Anne Born
• The Swallows of Kabul by Yasmina Khadra - translated from the French by John Cullen
• Breaking the Tongue by Vyvyane Loh
• Don't Move by Margaret Mazzantini - translated from the Italian by John Cullen
• The Master by Colm Tóibín
• The Logogryph by Thomas Wharton

The Master by Colm Toibin was nominated by no less than 17 libraries across the world, so I'd put my money on that horse if I were a betting person.

The winner will be announced on July 14 2006.

While I'm on the subject of shortlists and the best of world literature, let me apologise for not linking to this piece on the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize shortlist which was announced back in March. This prize is entirely for works in translation - and that's all to the good since we often just don't hear about the best books from the rest of the world.

This award will be presented on the 2nd May.

Enough awards for one day, though I can think of several others I should have blogged about. With any luck you won't even notice which they are ...

Some Further Thoughts on Banville's The Sea

Just to add a little coda.

Yes, again I feel that it it hard to do justice to such a complex novel with such a niggardly word limit. I wanted to write more about the characters, especially about Max the narrator whom I did not warm to at all. (Presumably we are meant to feel like this about him, Banville is much too skilled a writer to think otherwise, but then it begs the question - why?) I also must confess that although I felt that he wrote beautifully about his wife's illness (i was close to tears at times, particularly at the achingly sad scene in the kitchen after her diagnosis, and the description of her bleak photographs of the suffering of other patients in the hospital), the other thread of plot - the events of that fatefully childhood summer, never quite ring true.

Are most Malaysian readers going to enjoy this novel? I don't think so. I think many folks looking for a pacier, more accessible read will judge it to be slow and depressing. (I found it beautifully written and thought-provoking. But then I'm odd!)

But if you are a fiction writer or aspire to be one, then you should take a look under the bonnet and see how the engine works, and then see what you can take for yourself.

Most fiction writers are pretty clunky when it comes to handling time past and drawing on a character's memories: cue the heavy-handed flashback - a couple of pages about what happened five years ago with every little detail and line of dialogue realled intact and then back to the present in time for tea.

Our thought processes are much much messier than that! Just watch where your mind goes for any length of time and you have to agree. (Try to meditate and empty your mind and just see those little monkeys of thoughts scampering about!)

Many writers (most notably Joyce in Ulysses) adopted a 'stream-of-consciouness' style, which can place considerable demands on the reader. Banville's prose flows effortlessly from past to deeper past to present and back to pasts again without hiatus, excavating layers of memory and holding them up to the light. It's beautifully done, and I think so far no writer has done it better, although I hunger now to read that other great book about memory Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. (Was this an influence on Banville's prose?)