Russian Writer Takes on KL?

Found this very interesting piece on Russian journalist and author, Dmitri Kosyrev, in Badan Warisan Malaysia's latest newsletter. His latest novel, a thriller set in 1931 actually opens in the building where the heritage society has its headquarters, and in other locations KLites will know well uincluding the Coliseum cafe and Bok House. (Click the page up to full size to read.)

Am quite tickled to read that Kosyrev writes for his Russian audience under the pen name Master Chen :

... the first Chinese pen-name in Russia ...

And it would be rather nice to see this and previous novels (Amalia and the White Apparition, Amalia and the Generalissimo) translated into English and Malay, so I hope those discussions with "a local publisher" go well.

1984 Revisited

This week marks the 60th anniversary of one of the twentieth century's most important books - George Orwell's 1984.

In The Independent Andrew Johnson talks to other authors, including Robert Harris, Philip Pullman and Terry Pratchett, about it and about other reads that are particularly important to them.

(What are your memories of it? It's one of the books I've revisited several times since I first read it when I was at school in the '70's.)

Paul Owen on The Guardian blog points out that the plot was ... erm borrowed ... from Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, published in English in 1924, and which Orwell himself reviewed.

But maybe it's all right in the end. Johnson concludes :

... it is extremely doubtful Zamyatin's book would have come to fill the unique place Orwell's work now occupies. Nineteen Eighty-Four is an almanac of all the political ideas no "right-thinking" person would ever want their government to countenance, and the word Orwellian has come to signify a badge of shame intended to shut down any movement in that direction – with an imperfect record of success.