Going West

Produced for the New Zealand Book Council, isn't this one of the best adverts for the joy of books ever?

The excerpt being read is from Maurice Gee's Going West. Gee is recognised as one of New Zealand's greatest novelists and you can find out much more about him and his books here.

Lydia Chai on New Zealand Writing

Lydia Chai very kindly agreed to guestblog a post for us :

October is New Zealand Book Month. Like Sharon Bakar, I have become an unlikely champion of my adopted country's literature. The only difference is that Sharon is a Brit living in Malaysia whereas I am a Malaysian living in New Zealand; and while Sharon promotes Malaysian books through her widely read blog, my sphere of influence extends to only a very small circle of friends in Auckland. A few New Zealand friends have mentioned to me that it is unusual for an immigrant like myself - Asian, no less - to have such an interest in New Zealand literature. One friend remarked that I put her to shame because it never before occurred to her to read New Zealand writers - a result of the 'tall poppy syndrome', she said. The tall poppy syndrome, for those of you who thankfully do not know it, is supposedly a social phenomenon particular to New Zealand and Australia, whereby the locals think it necessary to cut down to size their fellow men and women who succeed internationally. As a result, according to my friend, New Zealanders are more likely to pick up hipper novels by the likes of Julian Barnes or Jodi Picoult than ones by Lloyd Jones or Charlotte Grimshaw. Pity, that; as New Zealand boasts a lot of talented writers. Perhaps the fact that New Zealand Book Month exists at all is evidence that the tall poppy syndrome still persists and must be counteracted. Being a recent immigrant, I read New Zealand authors to make myself feel more at home here (another way I go about this proverbial nesting is by planting a vegetable garden to feel more connected to the land, literally letting it nourish me), since I learn more about a nation's psyche from its literature than from its history books. I learned, for instance, that New Zealand's literary identity was not always so unique and assured. Writers from earlier generations tended to borrow their voice from the English tradition. It was only relatively recently that writers had begun shedding their hang-ups about living in a country so remote from the rest of the world, and developed their own voice. The notion of 'looking back' interests me, for I am always 'looking back' to my tanahair: the distance provides a tension that is useful in my creative life. Moreover, I find it comforting that New Zealand writers have found a way to articulate the New Zealand experience without overly exoticizing their home - I'm hopeful that Malaysian writing will similarly evolve. It always thrills me to read a piece by a Malaysian author that has obviously been written with Malaysian readers in mind. Likewise with a piece of New Zealand writing. Tall poppy syndrome or no, New Zealand does heavily support its writers, as can be seen from its various annual literary festivals, heavily funded residencies and monetary awards. I do so love living in a country that highly values its writers. Here are my favourite blogs on the New Zealand literary scene: Books In The City (maintained by Auckland City Libraries' staff) Book Notes (the New Zealand Book Council's quarterly magazine) Trendy But Casual (author Paula Morris' blog) Chinglish (writer Renee Liang's blog; she organises the local poetry slams) The Elam Fine Arts Library blog Lydia Chai is a Malaysian artist residing in Auckland.

Regional Commonwealth Prizes Announced

The regional winners of the Commonwealth Prize have been announced, but are not yet up on the official website. (Will append them as soon as.)

Sadly, our Preeta didn't get the Best First Book Prize for the South East Asia and the South Pacific region - that went instead to New Zealand's Mo Zhi Hong (left) for Shanghai Shark :

... the story of young boy's rite of passage as he enters into the bustling, cosmopolitan street life of the contemporary Chinese cities of Dalian and Shanghai, under the tutelage of his uncle, a professional pickpocket.

Mo was born in Singapore, but grew up in Taiwan, China, Canada, the US and New Zealand. he worked as a software developer in New York, and later as an English teacher in north-east China, before returning to New Zealand. He lives in Aukland.

You can hear an interview with him here.

The region's best novel prize went to Australian Christos Tsiolkas who won against some very stiff opposition. His novel The Slap :

... begins with a four-year-old child being slapped at a barbecue in Melbourne's northern suburbs by someone who is not a family member. The uproar that follows is seen from the points of view of eight distinctly drawn characters and puts family loyalty, friendships and social ethics into a fierce crucible.

Jhumpa Lahiri won the Europe and South Asia Heat Best Book Award with Unaccustomed Earth, her collection of stories which has been sweeping all before it, and was praised by the judges for its :

...lyrical, meticulously crafted prose, with the moving and memorable treatment of the diasporic experience coupled with her significant achievement in extending the form of the short story

Mohammed Hanif won in the first book category for his novel A Case of Exploding Mangoes :

... a darkly comic tour de force which takes as its starting point the plane crash which killed Pakistan's military dictator General Zia ul Haq. Praised for its "amazingly detailed and plausible portrayal of historical events", as well as its "great political insight and stylistic virtuosity" ...

This is the first time a Pakistani has been a regional winner.

The overall winners of the Commonwealth Writers Prize will be announced in mid-May.

Blokes Bribed to Books with Beer

Luring blokes to read books with free beer * is a new one to me!

The organisers of New Zealand Book Month have announced a special evening of activities aimed at fathers and their sons to encourage blokes to pick up books .

Timed to coincide with Father's Day and entitled A Word in his Ear, the aim of the event at Auckland Town Hall is to promote reading as a "manly" activity :

in an evening of male bonding over sports, adventure and literature.

Abebooks meanwhile has a very good list of Kiwi fiction.

(*Found via Literary Saloon)
(Pic shows Speight's beer which is brewed in New Zealand, but of course I have eno idea what brand of beer will be served.)

Revising the Past

Now imagine this. (Highly hypothetical situation for all my blog readers I think!) You are a critically acclaimed author with several successful books under your belt. Your work is just going from strength to strength. The trouble is that when you look back at your earliest published work, it now seems ... somehow lacking. You've learned so much along the way. You've grown as a person, and as a writer, and looking back now you can see the flaws in your earlier work.

Do you get tempted to go back and revise?

A couple of recent articles in The Age raise this very question. First of all, Jane Sullivan wrote that Peter Carey set the cat among the pigeons by saying on a TV bookshow that he intends to go back and line edit his early stories. His fellow authors on the show, Paul Auster and Ian McEwan were apparently shocked :

It was almost as if Carey had uttered a heresy. Yet, what he was proposing didn't seem so awful. He explained that the idea had come to him when he was preparing a reading in New York a few years ago. He was going to read the story he was most proud of, American Dreams. But when he began to look at the sentences, he thought they were "really appalling". He could not bear to read them aloud in the company of other writers such as Joyce Carol Oates*, so he sat down and line-edited the story.

And presumably just didn't want to stop at just that one!

Now it seems that this year's Miles Franklin winner Steven Carroll is revisiting his earlier fiction starting with his 1994 novel, Momoko, which was republished last year as The Lovers' Room. Later this month Twilight in Venice is due to be launched - this is a rewriting of his 1998 novel, The Lovesong of Lucy McBride.

Carroll explains :

With Momoko I underwrote the book and I knew I did. I rushed it ... With Lucy McBride I was determined not to underwrite the book and I overwrote it. I knocked out about 50,000 words, I threw out about five or six characters and it all concentrates on three characters and Twilight is a much shorter book. It's only about 55,000 words. I wrote a lot of new material too. ... If you can, if you've still got enthusiasm, what's the harm with going back and making something work a little bit better than it did initially. ... the earlier ones were apprenticeship books, I was still learning my trade.

There's another intriguing antipodean example of an author rewriting the novels of his youth. The other day I mentioned New Zealand's Witi Ihimaera, as a novelist deserving much wider attention. He decided to revise works that had for decades been considered classics of New Zealand literature.

The reason?

I was a colonised person when I wrote those books. It’s been a whole process of personal decolonisation that I’ve had to go through to do this. Part of that decolonisation is to get out of my family. Trying to create for myself a sense of independence; a sense of political independence and a sense of sovereignty that allows me to see with my own eyes and with my own judgment the sorts of things my grandmothers were trying to tell me. ‘What you see is not what it’s all about.’ ... I was born brown with a white soul. Over the years I’ve had to find that brown soul again. And thank God, I’ve done it.

Comparing the before and after versions of the revised works of course will, as Sullivan points out, give PhD students a great deal of fun!

So are such revisions, understandable and even desirable? Or do you agree with Joyce Carol Oates :

... that is folly for the vindictive elder to try to set right the product of youth with the doubtful wisdom of experience.

Jones' Homage to Dickens

“Characters migrate” reads the epithet by Umberto Eco at the beginning of Mr. Pip, the novel by New Zealander Lloyd Jones which pays homage to the way can profoundly enrich and change our lives.

The coming-of age story is narrated by Mathilda, whom we first meet as a thirteen-year old, living on the South Pacific island of Bougainville. It is the early 1990’s and the islanders find themselves caught-up in a bloody civil war between the forces of the government of Papua New Guinea and rebels, which include the men and boys of Mathilda’s village

The island’s white occupants have fled, all except for the eccentric and down-at-heel Mr. Watts who volunteers to keep the school open. Dubbed Pop-Eye by the children, Watts has long been considered a figure-of fun by the children who regularly witness the spectacle of him wearing a clown’s red nose, and pulling behind him a cart on which stands his utterly mad, yet regal wife, Grace.

On the second day of school, Jones begins to read to the children from Charles Dickens’ classic novel Great Expectations. And although the book was written a hundred and fifty years before and by someone living a world away, and some of the words give them difficulty, the children find that Watts has given them “a piece of the world” that they can escape to.

Although Mathilda, in particular, finds a friend in Pip, she finds that her love of the book brings her increasingly into conflict with her proud mother, Dolores, who feels her own authority and moral certainty undermined. Afraid that her daughter is being seduced by the white world to which she has already lost her husband, she steals and hides the book. This act imperils all the villagers when government troops come looking for a certain Mr. Pip whose name they have seen written in the sand. When they do not find him, cruel retribution swiftly follows.

Dickens’ novel, meanwhile, is painstakingly reconstructed by the children from fragments of memory with Watts’ help.

Perhaps the most persuasive attestation to the power of story-telling comes later in the novel when Watts plays a latter-day Scherazade to calms a group of drugged and dangerous rebel soldiers. He offers them the story of his life which he weaves from Dickens novel, his own history, and the magical stories about the meaning of things that the islanders have told him. The scene in which Watts and Grace write their own histories on the wall of the spare-room, so that their baby will have a choice of which cultural elements to make her own, is extremely moving, and reminds us that when our own culture comes into contact with another, each of us has the power to decide what parts of it we will accept as our own and which reject.

Like Dickens’ character Pip, Mathilda is forced by circumstances to reinvent herself. Years later, now an Australian citizen, and post-graduate student of literature specializing in “Dickens’ Orphans”, she makes a journey to New Zealand to uncover the truth about Watts, the man who so deeply influenced her life.

Lloyd Jones doesn’t put a foot wrong in this luminous novel, and it is not surprising that it has won this year’s Commonwealth prize.

Uncommon Commonwealth Winners

The overall winners of the Commonwealth Writers Prize have been announced.

The award for best overall book has been won by New Zealander Lloyd Jones for Mister Pip. The Sydney Morning Herald reports that Jones, is the first Kiwi to take the award since 1989, when Janet Frame won with her novel, The Carpathians.

Mister Pip tells the story of a teacher who educates a small village's children by reading them Charles Dickens' Great Expectations. ... After the book is destroyed in rebel fighting, he encourages them to retell the story from remembered fragments.

The Hon Justice Nicholas Hasluck speaking on behalf of the Pan-Commonwealth judging panel at the award ceremony in Jamaica commented that:

This mesmerising story shows how books can change lives in utterly surprising ways.

The winner for the best first book went to Canadian writer D Y Béchard for Vandal Love:

... an epic family tale, poetic and gritty, magical and yet believable, replete with misfits and boxers, giants and runts.

The novel, which took Bechard eight years to write, traces generations of a French-Canadian family through the 20th century as they move across North America in search of a place to belong.

The French-Canadian family background is fascinating. (And don't we always love the gossipy bits, whether or not they have anything to do with the writing!) His father was a bank robber with more than 50 heists to his credit, while his American mother was into the occult and conducted seances.

Not surprisingly, a memoir is also in the works!

Smither on Style

“The secret of style is to be so absorbed in the subject matter that you disappear into the poem. Like Keats says, ‘You should become the leaves of the tree’. It’s not John Keats writing a poem about a tree, it’s about John Keats becoming a tree and feeling like a tree.”

New Zealand poet and author, Elizabeth Smither, is interviewed in StarMag today by my friend Kadek Krishna Adidharma.

She talks how the small provincial city where she lives provides the material for her writing and how the wilderness lives in her writing despite her outward appearance of conformity. She says that writers must train their poetry muscle, and it's necessary to focus one's energies as one gets older.

I thought this was also a good opportunity to post up a photo (snapped while we were having lunch at delicious during the literary festival) of Kadek Kris who wrote the article. He writes for the Jakarta post, and we first met at the Ubud Readers' and Writers' Festival last year.