Double Preeta

I picked up two magazines today which both contain articles I've written on Preeta Samarasan. And both also have a plenty more great book related stuff to read.

Preeta is cover girl of MPH's Quill magazine (free to cardholders, RM8 to others, at branches of MPH) with a gorgeous portrait photo taken by top New York-based photographer Miriam Berkley who talks about her work and about what makes a great author photo inside.

The piece on Preeta here is an e-mail interview in which I ask her about the starting point of her novel, how far the family in the novel is based on her own (perish the thought!), how doing an MFA helped her and whether writing from outside the country gives her more freedom to write honestly. Do go pick up a copy to find out the answers! Preeta herself writes a very interesting piece - No More Dirty Laundry : In Defence of Fiction.

In other pieces I enjoyed, Chet writes about her "torrid affair with digital books" (!) ; Lydia gives poor, mistreated books a voice; Amir Muhammad (who seems to have the scary ability of getting everywhere these days!) reviews Adibah Amin's Glimpses; Daphne Lee writes about one of my favourite Scottish folk heroes Tam Lin; Yang May Ooi talks about her encounters with British food and Saradha Narayanan talks about hanging up her stethoscope to become an author.

The other magazine is Off the Edge and my piece about Preeta here is a review of Evening is the Whole Day. I am so happy that Jason Tan gave me the space I needed.

There are the usual thought-provoking articles about politics and the arts, and the more literary things include another episode in the life of Kam's Datuk, and the second extract from Kee Thuan Chye's The Swordfish and Then the Concubine, as well as reviews of two recent publications from The Edge Publications, Shape of a Pocket by Jacqueline Anne Surin, and Tipping Points : Viewpoints on the Reasons for and Impact of the March 8 Election Earthquake. Benjamin McKay reviews Shanon Shah's play Air Con.

Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah is the cover boy here, and the subject of a very lengthy interview with Jason. I wonder if he will still be able to mount a challenge for the presidency of UMNO and really hope so.

* (The piece is not online at the moment - but may be later.)

Preeta's Rightful Share

I want to tell you about my friend Kandan. Full name Kandan A/L Palanivel. Twenty years old. Handsome bastard. Of course we men don’t stare at each other and think who’s handsome, who’s ugly, of course not. I’m just saying only. If you had seen him, you also would have said the same thing. We all—me and Kandan and one whole group of fellers—used to lepak at one bhaiyyi coffee shop near KL Sentral there, and even the stylish college girls, the ones from rich-rich families, talking with hell of an American slang and all, used to come and sit with us on Saturday afternoons. Giggling, blinking their big eyes at him like he was God. Even if I strip naked also nobody will look at me like that, I tell you. Fooyoh, terror lah that feller, six feet tall, big shoulders, hair like a TV model, and dunno from where he got brown eyes, almost like mat salleh like that. Next to him Hrithik Roshan also will lose. But he was just a simple boy from Rawang, laborer’s son, never gone anywhere. Cannot even speak English properly.

Okay, go and read the rest of Preeta Samarasan's short story A Rightful Share at online magazine Guernica.

May 13, Revisited

While I was away, that hugely significant anniversary - the fourtieth of May 13th, 1969 - came around. I liked author Preeta Samarasan's response (which she posted on Facebook) so much that I repost it here, with her permission.

I meant to write this note yesterday, on the actual anniversary, but. But.

I'll repost the link to The Nut Graph's brief commemorative piece here, because it's the only mention of May 13th I've seen on Facebook so far.

I didn't live through May 13th 1969; my parents and one of my siblings did. It's not so distant that the country is close to running out of survivors who remember it, and yet I think the question of what it has come to signify to my generation (and younger generations) is the more interesting one. Because, let's face it, in the grand scheme of things -- and oh how Grand that Scheme can be -- May 13th was no Rwanda, no Sri Lanka, no Palestine. Even the most liberal estimates put the total dead at about 2000. Of course I'm not belittling any of those lives lost, or the terrors of those few weeks; when you lose someone you love it doesn't matter if they were one of 2000 or one of six million. But what I *am* trying to say is that for most of us, the true impact of May 13th lies in the ways its memory has been preserved (or not), and not in the actual event itself. Which are, as I see it:

1) As a threat: If we don't toe the line, accept certain inequalities, and shut up about Sensitive Issues, it could "happen" again (always the omission of agency, as though these unfortunate things just stir themselves up, like bad weather);

2) As an unpleasant episode that has been gracefully laid to rest: Thank goodness we've moved on, look what perfect racial harmony we live in now, all of us getting along so nicely; surely we don't have to dwell on that terrible aberration.

These are the official, sanctioned ways to remember May 13th, but resistance to them isn't as common or obvious as one might expect. In Edinburgh last year, I was interviewed by a journalist who demanded to know why I'd written a novel "set in the past as usual." Why this obsession with the past, she kept asking, why not draw inspiration from my present life? I started to explain myself to her: I said I chose to include that chapter about May 13th because so few people discuss it meaningfully; because there are only these prescribed ways to talk about it; because, as a nation, we've never really digested it.

But she cut me off with a proclamation that has left me thinking about her for months: "The thing is," she said, "I'm not interested in the past. Frankly, it's boring. I've moved on."

It could almost be our new national motto: *Malaysia. We've moved on.* We've insulated ourselves inside city-sized malls, to which we drive in SUVs that replicate the temperatures of a Scandinavian spring. So the economy is a little wobbly these days, but we can still afford the Japanese buffets stocked with airflown seafood; we can still queue up for novelty cupcakes and donuts. Yes, we bemoan the government's latest iniquities, the arrests, the covered-up crimes, the wrestling matches in parliament. There's enough to entertain us right here, right now. Why talk about the past? It takes a lot of effort, for unclear rewards, to connect May 13th 1969 with anything that's happening today. And yet I can't shake the conviction that so much of what our nation is began on that day (or in the weeks leading up to it, because the truth is that it didn't just "happen" spontaneously). It was our watershed, and until we acknowledge that, *I* can't move on, and am equal parts impressed and offended by anyone who claims to have done so.

Preeta for Orange!

A big cheer for our Preeta once again, because now she's on the longlist of another of the most prestigious international literary awards - the Orange Prize! (I notice this year the word Broadband seems to have been dropped from the name - just as well really.)

Here's the 20 strong list :

• Debra Adelaide - The Household Guide to Dying
• Gaynor Arnold - Girl in a Blue Dress
• Lissa Evans - Their Finest Hour and a Half
• Bernardine Evaristo - Blonde Roots
• Ellen Feldman - Scottsboro
• Laura Fish - Strange Music
• V.V. Ganeshananthan - Love Marriage
• Allegra Goodman - Intuition
• Samantha Harvey - The Wilderness
• Samantha Hunt - The Invention of Everything Else
• Michelle de Kretser - The Lost Dog
• Deirdre Madden - Molly Fox’s Birthday
• Toni Morrison - A Mercy
• Gina Ochsner - The Russian Dreambook of Colour and Flight
• Marilynne Robinson - Home
• Preeta Samarasan - Evening is the Whole Day
• Kamila Shamsie - Burnt Shadows
• Curtis Sittenfeld - American Wife
• Miriam Toews - The Flying Troutmans
• Ann Weisgarber - The Personal History of Rachel DuPree

You can find out more about each of these titles on the Orange Prize website.

Okay, the stats : American authors predominate (9/20) ; 6/20 are first novels (including, of course, Preeta's); four authors have been previously longlisted, and two of those reached the shortlist. Random House has more authors on the list than any other publisher (7/20).

Toni Morrison's is clearly the name spoken in most hushed tones ... but the British press is focusing on perhaps the most unlikely heroine of the list - Birmingham social worker Gail Arnor whose novel - a fictionalised account of the about the aftermath of Dicken's death - proves once again the dynamism of the tiny Tyndall Street Press. Some surprising names not on the list inc Helen Garner and Zoe Heller.

And the most common theme seems to be exile and migration.

Tomorrow, I bet, the bitching will start about how dare there be a woman-only literary prize, as it does every year. No-one has got around to starting up the Banana Bonanza for Blokes yet to shut these people up.

The shortlist will be announced on 21st April and the shortlist for the Orange Award for New Writers on 7th April. The winners of both awards will be announced at a ceremony on the 3rd June.

Fingers crossed for Preeta once again.

Preeta on Commonwealth Shortlist!

The Commonwealth Writers Prize shortlists for the South-East Asia/South Pacific region have been announced, and Preeta's nominated for Best First Book Award!!!!!!

We send our biggest congrats and loudest Malaysia Boleh shouts!

The list :

Best Book Award: South East Asia and the South Pacific :

• Between the Assassinations -Aravind Adiga (India/Australia)
  
• The Spare Room -Helen Garner (Australia)
  
• The Good Parents - Joan London (Australia)
  
• Forbidden Cities -Paula Morris (New Zealand)
• The Slap -Christos Tsiolkas (Australia)
• Breath -Tim Winton (Australia)
  

Best First Book Award: South East Asia and the South Pacific :

• The White Tiger - Aravind Adiga (Australia)
• The Boat - Nam Le (Australia)
• The Year of the Shanghai Shark -Mo Zhi Hong (NZ)
• Misconduct -Bridget Van der Zijpp (NZ)
• Evening is the Whole Day - Preeta Samarasan (Malaysia)
• The Shallow End Clouds of Magellan - Ashley Sievwright (Australia)

But you'll note that she's up against some stiff competition. The White Tiger was the 2008 Booker Prize winner, and Nam Le's The Boat won the Dylan Thomas Prize.

More about the prize and the finalists in other regions later ... just wanted to hit you with this news first.

The Writer's Story

Preeta is in this month's Marie Claire, local edition, interviewed by Shanti Ganesan. (Click up pages to full size) :

Salil's Article Made Accessible!

Last month I told you about Salil Tripathy's essay on the political imagination and literature of Malaysia and Singapore being published in Indian journal Biblio. The piece was behind subscription so I don't think many (if any) of you read it. You can now find a (in his words) shorter, tighter version of it at Global Asia. Please do go take a look because it would be great if we could stir up some discussion on it!

Left on the Shelf

Kate Figues in the Guardian lists the books that deserved to be greater commercial successes this year - among them Evening is the Whole Day. Nicholas Pearson, Preeta's publisher says of it:

We had huge in-house support and encouraging praise from other writers, the sort of noise that persuades a hopeful publisher that we might do that most difficult thing: get a first novel out of the blocks and into the readers' hands, where it belongs. Reviews were good but not extensive. Sales were poor. None of this dissuades me from the belief that we have the makings of a great writing career here.

Let's hope this gives the book a bit more of a boost.

Alone with an Eggplant

A recommendation from Preeta :

If you're looking for more good nonfiction to read, consider this collection of essays called Alone In The Kitchen With An Eggplant-- I'll come clean and confess that a good friend edited it and that another has an essay in the book, but I still wouldn't be telling you to read it if I thought you wouldn't love it. It has essays by Murakami, Ann Patchett, plus a bunch of other lesser-known but equally talented writers, all on the subject of cooking and eating alone -- in the end it is more a book about solitude than about food, though food provides the perfect lens through which to study solitude. It isn't a cookbook (though there are a couple of recipes here and there) -- the essays are thought-provoking and literary and many of them manage to be fun as well.

And I do think many of your readers would enjoy the book. If you want more background information or a brief description of the book, you can find it at Jenni's lovely website .

*Sigh* I've done a lot of cooking and eating alone in my life, so I have to read this. (Delia - thanks for being my savior!)

Preeta also pointed me in the direction of an excellent website she thinks you will enjoy : Fiction Writers Review run by :

... a community of emerging writers dedicated to reviewing, recommending, and discussing quality fiction—how it works and why it matters

There are reviews, essays, interviews and a blog.

More Preeta

Now it's Sheila Singam's turn to interview Preeta Samarasan and wax lyrical over Evening is the Whole Day in Options magazine of The Edge. The piece isn't online and I'm grateful to Shirley of MPH for scanning it. (Click on pics to enlarge.)

Nice to see I wasn't the only one who gushed!

Preeta on PopTeeVee

So here's Preeta Samarasan, author of Evening is the Whole Day, chatting to Fahmi Fadzil on PopteeVee!

Our Authors Sparkle on the Christmas Tree

I have decided to completely rewrite this post to foreground the happy news that came in since my first attempt at it!

You know that Christmas is near when the Best of Year lists start to appear, and a selection of writers and politicians recommend the best reads of the year at the Guardian here, here and here.

Preeta Samarasan's Evening is the Whole Day is nominated as one of the best books of the year in the Guardian list by novelist Ann Tyler! Then on the Times Literary Supplement's Books of the Year List, no other than Ali Smith chooses it, saying of the novel :

Preeta Samarasan’s debut novel, Evening Is the Whole Day (Fourth Estate), was largely ignored this year both by the press and the longlist/shortlist makers. I found it a good, strong, spirit-spiked story about caste and unfairness, as furious, controlled, cool and urgent as Aravind Adiga’s White Tiger, and an introduction to a writer whose talent with narrative structure combines elegance and potency.

Another end of year list of best books of 2008, this time from Bookmarks Magazine via Amazon's Kindle site, and there is Tan Twan Eng's The Gift of Rain!!!

Congrats to both!!

Caught Live by Amir

I couldn't get to the readings Bernice organised at No Black Tie last Sunday so am thrilled to bits that Amir Muhammad took the trouble to video some of the performances. Those who haven't been able to get to the live events in KL or who live further afield (or overseas!) should enjoy these little tastes of Malaysian lit :



Bernice reads from her mini-book of short stories Lost in KL.



Preeta reads the (one and only) sex scene from Evening is the Whole Day.


Danny Lim reads for his Malaysian Book of the Undead.

Postscript :

You can see more videos of the event (of Shamini Flint,Dina Zaman and Fahmi Fadzil reading Sufian Abas) on Facebook. Gazillion thanks, Amir!

When is a Novel like a Durian?

It's really nice to see Preeta Samarasan interviewed by Masami Mustaza in today's Malay Mail ... but what an embarrassment that the headline in the print version screams :

Cameron Highlands Native has a Story to Tell

though it looks as though the online version (which will be up in a few hours) has put things right.

A related question. (Warning - Rant coming up.) Is Malaysia the only country where journalists interviewing authors feel they really don't need to read the book beforehand? I hear this over and over from authors, both local and visiting from overseas. Sometimes there is a legitimate excuse (your editor only gave you a day's notice beforehand - and yes, this has happened to me) but mostly it's a lack of professionalism in the industry as a whole.

Talking of the Malay Mail, I missed blogging about Mr. Raman's very interesting column Why I Read Fiction.

Ever heard a novel compared to a durian before? The comparison though is wonderfully apt :

I have come full circle and read mostly fiction now. Oh, there are the bummers, of course, and often all that pandering, stereotyping, clichés and bad writing gets to me such that I sometimes seriously want to tell the author never to write again. Still, I persist. It is like going through a basket of durians: you are pushed on by a memory of a really good fruit you once ate; you want to rediscover it, you want to feel again that creamy texture, you want to experience that divine bitter sweet taste once more. So, you are willing to go through an entire basket, through a lot of poor ones, average ones, okay ones, good ones before you finally get to that great one. Yes!

Malaysian Participation

This year, a panel discussion of particular interest was Malaysians Making History, where début novelists Preeta Samarasan (Evening Is the Whole Day, a novel about an Indian immigrant family in Ipoh in the 1980s) and Chiew-Siah Tei (Little Hut of Leaping Fishes, the first in a trilogy about a Mandarin who feels torn during East-West confrontations in China) sat on either side of award-winning Malaysian writer, Faisal Tehrani (who writes atypical and award-winning novels in Malay, such as Bila Tuhan Berbicara, which he highlighted at this festival).

The panel was a small representation of the fast-growing breed of local writers successfully making it on local, regional, and international levels.

To Samarasan ... the local writing scene “is just evolving ... The fact that Tash Aw (Malaysia-born, London-based author of international best-seller, The Harmony Silk Factory and locally famous for getting a multi-million ringgit advance for his debut novel) did it ... people are beginning to see that they can become writers as well.”

Tan May Lee writes about thius year's Ubud Writers and Readers Festival in Starmag today and in particular about the six Malaysian authors who did us proud.

(Photos of Preeta by May Lee.)

Personal Meets the Historical, Authors Meet Audience

We were in celebratory mood at Readings@Seksan on Saturday. We had three authors fresh from the Ubud Readers and Writers Festival, a gaggle of poets (right collective noun?) launching their first collection, great music from Singer songwriter Reza Salleh, books to give away thanks to the kindness of Pansing and MPH, lovely cakes baked by Just Heavenly! (Chet's idea) and an audience of beautiful people. (Far right is fantasy writer Glenda Larke, whom I must persuade to come and read for us soon!).

Shamini Flint has won a three book publishing deal with Little Brown for her crime thrillers but today she read to us from two of her children's books The Seeds of Time (which she launched in Ubud) and Ten about a football mad girl witnessing the break-up of her parent's marriage.

Singer-songwriter Reza Salleh gave us a set of songs before the interval which added wonderfully to the festive atmosphere.

The after a break for chat and delicious cake, with much bookselling going on thanks to MPH and authors who brought their own books along, we had our lucky drawer for brand new books with 11 lucky winners!

Preeta Samarasan read from Evening is the Whole Day. The last time she appeared at Seksan's was before the book was published - this time, many of us had read the book and could enjoy her reading from it even more. I was a bit naughty and asked Preeta to read from her most controversial chapter, with Truth and Rumour dancing in the streets on May 13th. It was a section that made me gasp when I first read it because it says the kinds of things folks are afraid to say out loud in Malaysia.

The personal also echoed the historical in the extract Man Asia Prize longlisted Chiew-Siah Tei read from Little Hut of Leaping Fishes where Mingxi's wife dies in childbirth and the reform movement is also still born. Although set in China, this novel illustrates the forces that drove many Chinese (including Chiew-Siah's ancestors) to the Malay peninsula. We really look forward to the next two novels in her trilogy.

Can I just shout from the rooftop how wonderful it was to have these authors here and to celebrate their successes? YAY!!

Lansell didn't make it to this Readings but don't worry, I will not let him off so easily.

Nothing happens without our lovely supportive audience. I was so surprised to see Kadek Kris, one of the organisers of the Ubud Writers Festival. You can see Bernice in the white shirt in the background with her two beautiful daughters, and Na'a Murad (actor and Jit's little brother).

Apologies to the folks I stared through glassy eyed ... I am a bit incoherant sometimes when I'm worrying about everything it's possible to worry about. Jane Sunshine, why didn't I give you a big hug?

Many thanks to Seksan for use of his beautiful space and to my friends who keep me calm and help me set up everything quickly and efficently and then quietly clear up afterwards - Chet, leon, Eugene, Saabdev - very many thanks. Thanks too to Eric and MPH.

Malaysian History is Hybrid

There’s that quote by John Berger that everyone keeps bringing up nowadays, and that Arundhati Roy used as an epigraph: “Never again will a single story be told as though it’s the only one.” ... Malaysian history is so hybrid, so vexed, so different depending on whom you ask, that to me the *only* way to reveal that history is through individual lives. A Malaysian Indian family will have experienced a different Malaysian history than a Malay family or a Malaysian Chinese family. ... Anyway, that’s the whole purpose of fiction: to tell the big story through small stories. And that’s what I love about it. The whole thing, all of fiction since the beginning of time, has been an effort to show that History is about real people.

Anne Stameskin interviews Preeta Samarasan for Fiction Writers Review.

Don't forget to catch Preeta at MPH"s Breakfast Club tomorrow (Sat) at MPH Bangsar Village II at 11a.m., and at Seksan's at 3.30 p.m.). Full details here.

Bali Photos (1)

Here are some of my photos from Ubud. More to come. Sorry they are not great.

Am also trying to snaffle a few from friends who took pics on my behalf when my camera went walkies for two days.

Egyptian novelist, and one of the most respected writers in the Arab world, Bahaa Taher, was one of the big names at the festival. Bahaa won the Booker Prize for Arabic fiction earlier this year. (Do read Maya Jaggi's article about him in the Guardian.)

Chinese author Lijia Zhang worked for 10 years in a factory producing intercontinental ballistic missiles is Nanjing before becoming a journalist and writer. Her first book carries the ironic title Socialism is Great! (Read an extract on the New York Times website.) I have great hopes to coax this lady to KL!

Our Preeta paying gazillions of rupiah for a book.

Chiew-Siah with Chris Hanley (one of the founders of the Byron Bay Festival in Australia) who moderated the session called A Long Way From Home.

Shamini Flint launched her latest novel for children, The Seeds of Time about two children's quest to save the planet. All I remember of the event was the extremely potent cocktail made from local hooch. (If the picture is wobbly, you know the reason!).

Busy Preeta

Preeta Samarasan will be back in KL following the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival and will have a very busy schedule.

On 24th October she will be on NTV7's The Breakfast Show which begins at 8 a.m. and then at 7.30pm there's An Evening with Preeta at MPH 1 Utama. (This is a by invitation event for MPH members plus media friends.)

You can also catch her on Saturday 25th October at MPH's Breakfast Club (11.30-1) and then at Seksan's at 3.30* (Other guests lined up are Sharmini Flint and singer-songwriter Reza Salleh so it's going to be a great event!! Yay!)

At the MPH and Seksan events you can enjoy a 25% discount off Evening is the Whole Day and get free postcards.

The following day she's at the Lit Addicts' Meet at MPH Mid Valley with SH Lim 2.30 - 3.30pm, and then at Borders @ The Curve (where you also get a free Starbucks beverage voucher with every purchase of Evening is the Whole Day from 1 - 26 Oct 08).

And on Tues 28 October she has a LiteFM radio interview with PK and Sara.

Busy busy busy!!!

Postscript :

I am so excited to tell you that I've just heard that Chiew-Siah Tei will be joining Preeta at both the Breakfast Club and Seksan's on 25th!!! It's going to be a great literary Saturday!

*Seksan Gallery, 67 Jalan Tempinis Satu, Lucky Garden, Bangsar, 59100 Kuala Lumpur

Preeta Samarasan Interview part 2

Continued from yesterday ...

Your former writing teacher Peter Ho Davies has compared your writing to Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy in the blurb he wrote for the novel. How far did you absorb the influences of these, and indeed other favourite authors?

It would be disingenuous and ungrateful for any postcolonial writer worth his or her salt to deny Rushdie’s influence. Rushdie gave us the permission to speak (though he would probably not phrase it that way himself: I suppose you could say he showed us that we could give ourselves permission to speak), and he gave us the language with which to speak. His impact on postcolonial writing in English is immense. I’ve been inspired by him on many levels: by the energy of his language, by his elevation of Indian English into poetry, by his use of magical realism to depict events and emotions too large for conventional Western realism. I think of Arundhati Roy as someone who inherited these ideas and made them her own instead of simply imitating Rushdie, and I tried my best to do the same: to absorb their influence, digest it, and come up with something entirely my own. But no, the comparison doesn’t bother me in the slightest; I’m flattered, really, because I’ve always seen them as major influences. Other major influences of which I was very conscious while working on this novel: Waterland by Graham Swift (from which I took one of the novel’s epigraphs); Bleak House by Charles Dickens.

The writing is gorgeous with every sentence so perfectly crafted and images on every page that are fresh and surprising. Was this a writing style that was particularly hard won?

Thank you -- what lovely praise! A writer, as Thomas Mann said, is one for whom writing is more difficult than it is for others. Writing this book was the hardest thing I have done in my life so far. I did a massive amount of revision, because in the beginning my learning curve was so steep that by the time I got to the middle of the book I would hate everything I’d written. This happened four or five times. My standards were getting higher and I was learning so much about myself as a writer, about my voice, my priorities, etc. I had revised the first half or so an uncountable number of times before I even applied to MFA courses. Then I revised the first few chapters four or five times in the MFA program. Once the novel was sold I revised the entire thing twice with my editor at Houghton-Mifflin -- these were major, major revisions, the first of which involved cutting more than half of what I’d written. Then I worked with a copyeditor on smaller scale revisions. The novel was sold in the summer of 2006, and I just finished my last revisions with the copyeditor late last year (2007). So yes, it’s been a long, hard road.

Did you find it hard to let go of your manuscript in the end?

At the very end, no, it wasn’t difficult to let go, because I felt ready and the book felt ready. I felt like I’d been pregnant for eight years. Get this thing out of me!

The story moves incrementally back in time for the most part, slowly revealing the motivations and back stories of your characters – how did you decide that this was the way that you wanted to tell your story?

I experimented with so many structures before it finally hit me: the reader needed to already know what was going to happen in the end, so that the weight of that ending would imbue everything that came before. There’s a certain inevitability that film scenes or photographs from the historical past exude, that the present can never quite match. The simplest way to give my narrative that kind of gravity -- to make the whole thing past instead of present -- was not through frequent and coyly oblique flash forwards (oh, how annoying they were!), but by moving backwards from the end. The further back the narrative goes, the more significance every little detail gains, so that by the time we reach the end (which is really the beginning), I don’t have to do much to expose the sadness inherent in that hopeful beginning. When I read Graham Swift’s Waterland, the idea of moving backwards began to seem inevitable. As he says (and I paraphrase), we’re always asking why, why, why; as human beings, we’re always wondering how far back in time we would’ve had to go to “fix” this or that present problem. I wanted my novel to enact that obsessive backtracking literally.

How did you decide on the rather god-like omniscient narrative voice?

I have always had a thing for that grand nineteenth-century voice. I like sweeping stories and authoritative narrators; in this, I’m a bit old-fashioned because that god-like narrator has fallen out of favour, particularly in America. But the stories I love best have big, bold narrators who refuse to explain how they know what they do (the narrator of Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda, for example: logically speaking, he should not know nine tenths of what he does!). As a writer, I love the power and freedom that that narrative voice gives me.


What has the path to publication been like for you?

Ah, another significant benefit of MFA programs: agents come to visit the good ones, because they are constantly scouting for new talent. My agent came to visit in my first year of the course, and I signed with her well before I graduated. Compared to the writing itself, the path to publication has been surprisingly easy. The novel was sold within a few days of my completing a reasonable draft, the summer after I graduated with my MFA. My agent sent it out to only three publishers in the US, and two of them offered to buy it. After the revisions were done, it sold very fast in other countries -- much faster than any of us had expected.

One comment made recently by Silverfish Books proprietor Raman Krishnan is that all the Malaysian novelists who are becoming successful on the world stage (such as Tan Twan Eng, Tash Aw, Rani Manicka) are writing from outside the country. Does being outside of things here in some sense free you up to write more honestly, and do you think you could have written the same book if you had stayed here?

It’s too easy to say, Of course, of course one has to leave to be a writer, of course people who never leave don’t see the same things about their country. But I actually believe the reality is slightly different. I think writers are people who identify as outsiders whether or not they have the opportunity to leave physically. Frequently, they identify as outsiders from childhood, though they are not always sure why -- sometimes it’s simply a matter of temperament. Perhaps those who feel they’re outsiders are more likely to leave, and that’s why so many writers -- not just Malaysian writers -- have been expatriates at some point. But they don’t have to leave to feel like outsiders. Conversely, plenty of people leave but never give up their unquestioning patriotism: Nothing like Malaysia lah! So, to answer the rest of your questions: I think I would have still written, and I think I would have made many of the same observations about Malaysia if I hadn’t left. But one thing would probably been different: I don’t think I would’ve been brave enough to say these things as loudly as I’m saying them now. Like most Malaysians, I had lots of unexamined fears when I lived in the country. Fears of the government, fears of What People Will Think -- between those two, it’s hard to say which is the greater set of fears! I think of my expatriate status as a luxury that allows me to say what I want without these fears.

You are the first Malaysian novelist that I have read who actually ventures into the events of May 13 1969, and it has been little discussed even in non-fiction. (Lloyd Fernando’s 1993 novel Green is the Colour being a notable exception.) Why did you decide to place your characters right in the heat of the fighting? Did writing about that incident take particular courage?

Writing that doesn’t take courage is not worth doing. Serious fiction (and nonfiction!) should take on the hard subjects -- whether they are hard for emotional or political reasons, or both. Which is not to say that other novelists have not chosen other hard subjects -- there are plenty of hard subjects in Malaysia, more than enough to go around! In my case, this novel is so much about race that to leave out May 13th would’ve seemed like a glaring omission. I also wanted to include May 13th precisely because it has been little discussed in Malaysia, and I think it’s the job of writers to talk about the things people don’t want to talk about. Race defines everything in Malaysia, and yet, ridiculously, it is a “sensitive” subject. Historically, writers have been the consciences and voices of their nations -- that may sound presumptuous, but I really believe it very strongly -- so if you’re going to abdicate that responsibility, you may as well do something else for a living. As to why I put my characters right in the heat of the fighting -- the only way to get into it, to immerse the reader fully in the event, was to put some of my characters there. They needed to experience it directly, not just hear about it.

Why did you decide to handle this part of the book in such an abstract way – with the personified Truth and Rumour dancing in the streets?

This is the very best sort of question -- something I hadn’t even thought about myself until you asked it! Now that I have to articulate it, I think it has everything to do with Rushdie’s explanation of magical realism, which I’ve referenced above. I wish I could find the essay in which he talks about this, but the basic idea is that some events and emotions are so huge that they don’t seem to be governed by the laws of realism. The best magical realism captures what the incident feels like in a way that a “realistic” portrayal could never have captured it. In that part of the book I’m resorting both to magical realism and to allegory, because I also want to get across the idea that Truth and Rumour have taken on lives of their own, become actual characters. And I think this is still true in Malaysia today. We are still a nation mesmerized by Rumour’s sexy moves. “Eh, people say....” “I heard somewhere....” “It seems....” And then, bit by bit, the “people say” is dropped and the rumour becomes true. If I had ten sen for every time I heard a rumour presented as if it were truth, I’d be able to buy myself a mansion in KL with just that money.

Malaysian novelists based overseas have sometimes been accused of “exoticising” this country for a Western readership. You seem to have deliberately gone the other way. Was this a deliberate decision?

I had an interesting discussion on exoticism the other day with another Malaysian storyteller (Amir Muhammad). He pointed out that “exotic,” in its original definition, simply meant strange. And to highlight the strangeness of our culture -- that isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and some of the best books consciously try to be strange. But I think now when we complain about “exotic” writing we often mean writing that isn’t strange anymore -- writing that merely trots out the same tired clichés about Asia. I’m not referring to any recent Malaysian novel; this is a general observation. On the surface such writing may appear to be pointing out unusual details, yet the choice of details, and the very way in which they are pointed out, is formulaic. The problem with this kind of writing is often that it self-consciously sets out to teach people about a particular culture, which is simply not the job of literature. The narrator takes you by the hand and explains everything; nothing is allowed to remain strange. So, to extrapolate from what Amir said, the writer is not exoticising but de-exoticising. I suppose what I’ve tried to do -- and yes, I have thought about this in great depth because it’s a question on which I have very strong feelings -- is to maintain the real strangeness of the place that is Malaysia. Which lies not in the images any Tourism Board advertisement can show you, but in the things we do not want to talk about. If on occasion -- for example, when it comes to ideas about class -- this strangeness makes us similar to other cultures instead of different from them -- well, all the better, because Western readers don’t expect similarities and are invariably excited to discover them.

I was delighted to see that you have used a lot of local words, particularly Tamil expressions, and you neither provide a direct translation nor italicize them. Why did you decide to do it this way?

Well, I was delighted that my publishers never even questioned that decision. I didn’t know what to expect, but from the beginning I wanted to weave the local words into the narrative in the natural way we do in Malaysia. We don’t translate, and we certainly don’t pause to note the non-Englishness of the word, which I think is the effect italicization has: ATTENTION! PLEASE NOTE FOREIGN WORD HERE! To us it’s all one language, our language, and I really wanted to preserve that. The way we talk -- our hybrid vocabulary, our loose syntax, our breathless lack of punctuation -- embodies our collective character in ways I think most people reading this interview will understand. If I’m going to presume to speak for Malaysians, I should try as far as possible to remain faithful to the way they would say these things themselves.

The obvious reaction is: But won’t this make it harder for your Western readers? Perhaps a little, though I think in many cases the gist of what’s being said is clear from the context, or the specific detail is not so important that a non-Malaysian reader will lose track of the story if they don’t grasp the detail. It’s a price I was willing to pay, because it’s also somewhat of a political choice. Other postcolonial writers have said this far better than I can (I’m thinking, in particular, of Jamaica Kincaid), but what I would say to any Western reader who complains is: the West is not the centre of the universe. Fifty, even thirty years ago, we were all taught to believe it was. Schoolchildren studying literature in the colonies had to navigate Cockney speech patterns, imagine for themselves what toad-in-the-hole might taste like, picture moors and bogs and fens and determine the emotional significance of each of these landscapes. Now we get to tell our own stories, and this requires your dealing with my rubber estates and char kuay teow and cursing in Tamil. In the long run, this will be good for all of us. A little cultural immersion never did anyone any harm.

It might seem too early to ask this, but what’s next?

I’m working on another novel, set mostly in Cameron Highlands. I’m not sure I can say more than that at this point! I’m very much at the groping-in-the-dark stage and I fear saying too much will paralyse me. So far it seems as if this one will not take me so many years -- I’m keeping my fingers crossed. I’m also writing short stories and revising old ones. A couple of my stories will be published in the next few months in literary journals in the US. In the past I’ve considered putting together a collection, so we’ll see if that happens.