Killing Mockingbirds

 At last - Umapagan Ampikaipakan's bookclub on BFM 98.9 chat with Amir Muhammad and myself is online as a podcast.  Here we are talking about  Harper Lee's novel To Kill a Mockingbird  (which, if you haven't ever read, well shame on you!) :




There are some other podcasts up from previous week's shows including this one  entitled History of the World he talks about books which deal with how it all began :




And here he talks about books which deal with road trips including Neil Gaiman's American Gods classic road novel On the Road by Jack Keroac and and one of my favourite books, Steinbeck's Travels With Charley :





All the books featured should be available from MPH. (The idea is that you should be able to go into the store and find them with a little promotional sticker on.  I don't know how this is actually is working out in practice.)

Uma is also working hard to popularise books in the New Straits Times on Wednesdays with his Well-Lit section.  The newspaper has had next to no literary coverage for years 9and even when it did, indigestible and inaccessible for the average reader) so this is something to be applauded and supported.

Their looking for their third book ambassador and he should be Indian?  It really should be Uma!

Don't forget that Uma will be appearing at Readings@Seksan on Saturday.

Twitterature!

There it lies, cunningly clad in those horizontal bands of orange, and white, and orange. Penguin-ed. As if to dupe us to its credence, or credibility, or creed. The sheer audacity of that ampersand between their two names. The heart-wrenching horror of truncating centuries of sublime and (almost) metrical composition into something that is less than one long, deep, audible exhalation. The premise sounds downright appalling. The idea of condensing 60 of literature’s greatest works into little nuggets of twitterese — short statements bound by a 140-character limit — sounds like the perfect 4am activity. It is a pursuit that usually follows the consumption of copious amounts of alcohol and the statement: “You know what would be really fun?” And it is fun. But more than that, it is also clever.

Umapagan Ampikaipakan reviews a book that sounds a must-read in The New Straits Times : Twitterature: The World’s Greatest Books Retold Through Twitter by Alexander Aciman and Emmett Rensin.

It looks like fun! :

From Hamlet: WTF IS POLONIUS DOING BEHIND THE CURTAIN???

From Dante's Inferno: I'm havin a midlife crisis. Lost in the woods. Shoulda brought my iPhone.

From Oedipus: PARTY IN THEBES!!! Nobody cares I killed that old dude, plus this woman is all over me. Total MILF.

From Paradise Lost: OH MY GOD I'M IN HELL.

Uma Gets Romantic with Books

Stuck for what to buy your love for Valentine's Day?  Of course I'm going to say "A book".  So did Umapagan Ampikaipakan on his book show on BFM 89.9.  The titles he suggested :

South of the Border, West of the Sun by Haruki Murakami
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The History of Love by Nichola Krauss
Outlander by Diana Gabaldon

Here's why :



(More suggestions for Valentine reading, archived on this blog.)

Also on BFM this week -  Shazmin Shamsuddin  interviewed Chinese Stories in Times of Change author David T. K. Wong, so if you missed the talk the other day at CHAI, you should enjoy this.

David's Dose of Realism

David T.K. Wong's talk at CHAI House on Saturday was aimed at all those in the audience with authorly aspirations, and came in the form of an extended warning with each point backed up with some well researched examples from the lives of authors. (It was such a well put together talk that I am trying to persuade David to put it into the public domain - perhaps as an article or blog post.)

It can be summarised thus : don't become a writer because you think it will make you rich, famous or immortal - in most cases it won't do any of those things. You have to write because you love it. In his own case :
... writing really enraptured me. it was a kind of madness, I suppose.
it was in the Q&A that followed the talk that David really opened up and talked about himself. The question I was dying to ask, and hadn't (despite having had lunch with him a couple of times) was why he had decided to set up the extraordinarily generous award that carries his name.

He said that he first thought that he would like to write in university.  He got himself a room and a typewriter, and he had the money to support himself.  After a year though, he says, he was starving to death and no-one wanted what he had written.  he had only sold one short story :

Being practical, and Chinese, I thought I'd do something else and make enough money.

So for 35 years he did other things and when he had made enough money, he went back to writing.  He thought to himself  "There must be other peole who are like I was 35 years ago and couldn't keep body and soul together, and if there's a little bit of hope that they can make it as writers, they should have a year to test their determination.

He sees the fellowship as :

... paying back something to society. Life's treated me decently. 

But there is a deeper reason:

Most of the problems with the world are at an individual level, and due to an inability to communicate. We don't connect. How do you improve things? As an individual, you can't do much. I beleive in literature is a tool to help human understanding.

Furthermore :

Money's no damn good unless you spend it! You can't take it with you.

He also said that one of the reasons he prefers the short story to the novel is :

I'm ancient and I don't know when I'm going to die, and I'd rather not leave something half-completed.

But I think that was a tongue-in-cheek reply because he is currently working on a novel!

I had brought along copies of his latest collection of short stories (thanks to Mei Li at Marshall Cavendish who brought over a box full for me) Chinese Stories in Times of Change and David signed copies.

It was a very pleasant afternoon spent with friends and I particularly thank Jo Kukathas for giving us the beautiful space.  I hope to arrange more author events there, so if there are any authors out there who would like to talk about any aspect of writing or publishing, please do let me know and I will see what I can arrange.

All the lovely photos were taken by Umapagan Ampikaipakan, so Uma, many thanks for that,

The Ardent Heart

I knew J.D. Salinger. But he did not know me. I could not call him up whenever I felt like it. No one could. Because I knew J.D. Salinger like you knew him, the way he wanted to be known, through his work.

Umapagan Ampikaipakan mourns the passing of a favourite author in The New Straits Times, and he remembers how he read Catcher in the Rye at 13 :

I did not know J.D. Salinger then. All I knew was what some kid told me at school. He told me that John Lennon was dead, that someone had killed him, and that he done so after reading this particular book. ... For weeks afterwards, I would pore over the 192 pages of my tattered red and white Penguin edition, scanning through its minuscule 10-point font, for hidden messages, for secret codes. For something, anything, that would inspire murder. I read it forwards. I read it backwards. Needless to say, I discovered very little.

I remember reading the novel when I wasn't much older (probably 15 - in those days I had a very long bus journey to school and that was my perfect reading time). It was the quintessential teenage novel, the one that you had to read. 

But it was only last year that I came across his short fiction in Nine Stories (a tatty copy that Dina Zaman wanted "rehomed") and would consider myself haunted by the stories (particularly the autobiographical For Esme With Love and Squalor) and hungry for more.

Much of his short fiction though remains unpublished and there is also the hope (probably unfounded)  that there may be some unpublished works in his safe that  could at last see light of day. I hope so.

Do read Adam Gopnik's moving piece about Salinger in The New Yorker. As he quite rightly says  :

Writing, real writing, is done not from some seat of fussy moral judgment but with the eye and ear and heart; no American writer will ever have a more alert ear, a more attentive eye, or a more ardent heart than his.

(Pic from The New Yorker)

Travels Through Books

Umapagan talks about books that make you wish you were there on his latest radio show on BFM89.9.  Books featured at Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood, Ryszard Kapuscinski 's The Shadow of the Sun, A Year in Provence and Paul Theroux's The Great Railway Bazaar.   There are links to the books on MPH's website.

Our Local Oprah Announces a Book Club!

Umapagan Ampikaipakan talks about detective fiction on his BFM89.9 and talks about Shamini Flint's Inspector Singh series, Qio Xiaolong's Inspector Chen novels, Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policeman's Union, Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy. All the books are available from MPH and will be in the shops with special stickers on them.

Uma also announces  a new book club - you have a month to read Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, and I am going to be one of the guests discussing it with Uma.  Now to re-re-read it!

More of Uma's shows are archived here if you want to play catch up, and they are full of great recommendations if you are not sure what to read. (And I must say that I am really happy about the way BFM keep their programmes accessible in this way so that those of us who forget to tune in at the right time can enjoy the talks later.)

Santa Uma

Is Umapagan Ampikaipakan Malaysia's answer to Oprah?

Meant to blog earlier about his excellent book broadcasts on BFM89.9, but since we are in the mood for all things jungle bells, I think you will enjoy this recording where he talks about his choice of Christmas books and lists some excellent seasonal reads you are bound to enjoy :



And here you can find plenty of other good stuff archived.

Readings at a New Seksan's

Our Saturday's Readings@Seksan was quite a different event because of the location - Seksan's beautiful new place 48, Jalan Tenggirri - part personal gallery, part guesthouse ... and completed only the day before, so our event was its christening.

Seksan's spaces are magical, and all the more so for their apparent simplicity and use of recycled and salvaged materials. We were gawping at the distressed wooden doors (from an old school building?), the bare brickwork, the lampshade made of cat food tins (and the others of yoghurt bottles and plastic cake trays), the landscaping with wild plants, and marvelling at how relaxed and happy and creative the place makes you feel.

The guesthouse will be open soon for bookings, and I reckon it would be a perfect place for a writing retreat.

I was a bit worried about our audience finding us, but we really did have a bumper crowd on Saturday. If I had any problem at all it was in trying to decide how we should use the space around the pool - terraces, patios and dining area. Which way should we face, where should the audience be? There was sun and rain to factor in too, because we got extremes of both that afternoon. I'm not sure I got it right.

Anyway, here are the stars of the afternoon :

Seksan himself requested that Tan May Lee read first, because he so wanted to hear the story about the Muslim lesbian women. The piece which appears in the Body2Body collection is sizzling hot and beautifully written and she read a very moving passage from it.

May Lee, incidentally, works for MPH and is the editor of Quill magazine, and she was kind enough to bring along some free copies for us.


Ellen Whyte read us an extract from her new book Katz Tales : Living Under the Velvet Paw - a great story which very nicely illustrates the duplicitous ways of cats. I think all cat lovers in the audience could really relate to it. (More about Ellen coming up in another post!)


I've blogged about Haslina Usman's mission to make sure that the works of her late father, former laureate Usman Awang, are not forgotten and I was so happy to have her at Readings. she roped me into reading the English version of a poem of his very powerful poem (Bunga Popi) about poppies :

From blood, from pus that
rots in the soil
from skeletons that have lost
their lives
the result of war maniacs
who kill love,
the red flowers bloom beautifully,
requesting to be adored.

(More about the poem here.) I also read an extract from the very dramatic last chapter of Scattered Bones (the English translation of Tulang2 Berserahkan) while Haslina read a piece from Turunnya Sebuah Bendera (The Flag Comes Down?).

Next year Haslina is organising a restaging of her father's classic play Uda dan Dara (described as the Malay Romeo and Juliet) and I hope to invite her back then.

This young lady is Afi Momo - a science student by day and a poet every other minute. She made her debut at the 4th KL Poetry Slam and has performed in various events around KL and also in Singapore at the Lit Up Festival. She has published her own chapbook Paper Raper, and read us five poems from it. my favourite was entitled how to be A Pair of High Heels.

Her friends came along to support her and to pass out some copies of a group poetry zine. I was most impressed by their work and plan to invite the other members of Kata.Mata to appear next month.


Here's children's author Rebecca Loke with her son Ethan, who inspired her new book Great-Grandma's Hair Loss Remedy. Ethan read for his mum and was quite superb. (And hair or no hair, I reckon this young man is going to be breaking some hearts before long!)


Julya Oui is a freelance scriptwriter who also writes short stories, novels and poetry. she's been publsihed in various anthologies and magazines, and has a short horror story collection out soon. She also blogs here.

She read us a short horror story and the weather decided to provide the sound effects, giving us peels of thunder and flashes of lightning to accompany the words. (This of course gave new meaning to the expression, flash fiction!).

She also read us a piece from her story Friends Of Everyone which is in the Body2Body collection.

Finally, Moja Amin and Izza Izelan (both education students at University Teknologi MARA) took to the mic to give us a taste of a play that the group they belong to (Ethos! Society) have in production. It was a short dialogue debating the nature of love.

You can read more about the play here, and I was quite amazed to discover that one of my beautiful nieces, Wan Nadrah Yusoff, plays one of the leads. Small world. (And I have no excuse not to go to see it now!)

Before and after the event and during the break there was a lot of selling going on - we had a veritable arty pasar malam.

Yvonne Foong had recruited a whole team of young friends to help her sell tee-shirts, Steven V-L Lee's beautiful photographic books which he had donated, tee -shirts, her own book, and cupcakes. All to raise funds for the operation to save her sight.

Umapagan Ampikaipakan donated a whole pile of new books that people could help themselves to for free.

Thanks a lot to everyone who came and everyone who read. Biggest thanks too to Seksan for letting us launch the wonderful space. Thanks to Haslina for baking us a very special kueh lapis! Thanks too to Saras for helping to clear up. And again to Shahril Nizam for the blog poster.

I thank Tommy Ng for all the photos above except for the one of Haslina and myself which I stole from Azwan's Facebook page. (Do check out the rest here.) There are more lovely photos of the event showing more of the audience and the venue on on Leon Wing's and Yvonne's Foong's Facebook pages too.

Uma's Favourite First Lines

A few days back The American Book Review featured a list of the 100 Best First Lines from Novels, and I tweeted it forward fairly unthinkingly. My fellow Twitter addict and New Straits Times columnist, Umapagan, caught it and mulled it over, and now has come up with a list of titles which he feels to be glaring omissions to the list :

I was looking for a quiet place to die.

The Brooklyn Follies, by Paul Auster

I was twelve years old the first time I walked on water.

Mr. Vertigo, by Paul Auster

There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife.

The Graveyard Book, by Neil Gaiman

In a distant and secondhand set of dimension, in an astral plane that was never meant to fly, the curling starmists waver and part...

The Color of Magic, by Terry Pratchett

"They say it came first from Africa, carried in the screams of the enslaved; that it was the death bane of Tainos, uttered just as one world perished and another began; that it was a demon drawn into Creation through the nightmare door that was cracked open in the Antilles."


The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz

A secret’s worth depends on the people from whom it must be kept.

The Shadow of the Wind, by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

In the shade of the house, in the sunshine on the river bank by the boats, in the shade of the sallow wood and the fig tree, Siddhartha, the handsome Brahmin’s son, grew up with his friend Govinda.

Siddharta, by Hermann Hesse

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral Arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.

The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams

It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.

Love in the Time of Cholera, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

... and hands down, what I feel to be, the most perfectly crafted opening sentence in modern literature...

In later years, holding forth to an interviewer or to an audience of aging fans at a comic book convention, Sam Clay liked to declare, apropos of his and Joe Kavalier’s greatest creation, that back when he was a boy, sealed and hog-tied inside the airtight vessel known as Brooklyn, New York, he had been haunted by dreams of Harry Houdini.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, by Michael Chabon

Uma. :)

You can find more posts about first lines here. And please do suggest any others you feel are missing!

Uma and the Whale

Herman Melville's magnum opus, much like its namesake -- that tireless, relentless, white whale -- is considered by many to be unconquerable. To readers the world over, Moby-Dick is often their Moby-Dick. That one unattainable goal; constantly teasing, tormenting, mocking. What would be their crowning glory in an otherwise successful life of reading.

Umapagan Ampikaipakan in today's New Straits Times pays homage to Melville's novel and talks about our enduring fascination for whales.

Tweeting Burgess

I told you that one of the most enjoyable sessions at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation's recent symposium at the Istana hotel was the Twitter interlude provided by Amir Muhammad and Umapagan Ampikaipakan.

Here are their thoughts on Burgess' The Malayan Trilogy in 15 tweets each (click to full size) - and note how both of them feel the novel has great contemporary relevance for Malaysians.

The Multi-Talented and Environmentally Conscious at Seksan's

Saturday's Readings@Seksan was fun, and featured a lot of very talented people.

Shanthini Venugopal was telling me a very funny story as we cleared up after a previous event, and I told her it was too good to waste - write it down.

She did, and the story about how she lost her car in a shopping mall carpark was so hilarious I had to invite her to read it. She has such a finely tuned sense of the comic, such an ability to laugh at hersewlf, and an absolute love of hyperbole. I hope we will be hearing more from her.

Shanthini is a singer, actor, and director and founder of The Jumping JellyBeans theatre company for children ... among much else.

I encountered met Umapagan Ambikaipakan through his column in the New Straits Times when he opened up debate about The Great Malaysian Novel and we discovered a shared love of books. Uma was covering the American elections for the newspaper and caught the emotion of event very well indeed in the pieces he read for us.

Apparently he has written a novel, though he wasn't ready to share any of it with us yet, but we will be inviting him back soon ...

Now, this fellow is Brian Gomez who went missing in action last Readings. He read from his first, self-published novel. Devils' Place is one of the most exciting works of local fiction I've picked up recently.

It's funny, pacey, unpretentious, keenly observed, totally irreverent (how many more adjectives can I pile on here?) and features a large multiracial cast of characters in a complex and frequently farcical plot all of which he manages confidently.

If further evidence of Brian's talent is needed, please go and watch Lingam : The Musical on his blog. (Non-Malaysians will need some background to the affair.) I was laughing so much I almost choked.

Peter Hassan Brown and Markiza played us out of the first half, beautifully, with a song about a poor old polar bear coming to Malaysia and trying to find refuge from the heat in the air-conditioning.

Then we shared birthday cake and mandarin oranges, and many books were signed and sold. Yvonne Foong, who needs to raise funds once more for her medical treatment, was there selling her book and her latest Heart4Hope tee shirts. (You can read Yvonne's account here.)

Iain Buchanan showed us the original paintings for Fatimah's Kampung and read just one strand of the story - about the tiger. He talked about how dire the situation is for the planet, and how he hopes to spread the message more widely through this book than he managed to do as a university lecturer.

I made the mistake of saying the book was "almost too good for kids" but 84 year-old Gwen Smith leapt up and took me to task there and then. "Children deserve the best," she said. My words were eaten immediately without the benefit of chilli sauce.

(Daphne also picks me up on it here! Oooops.)

Here's Amir grinning away as only one who has already sold the first two print-runs of his latest book to a bookshop chain! (Malaysian Politicians Say the Darndest Things Vol. 2 will have a very sticky lauch on Valentine's Day and you are all invited.)

The book is a second compilation of politicians' quotes - many of them chuckle-worthy, all of them telling, and the excellent illustrations are by Fahmi Reza. (You can pre-order the book here.)


Saiful Nizam bin Shukor is a very hard-working young writer, working in the fantasy genre and hungry to get his work out into the world. He read us the very dramatic ending of one of his (as yet unpublished novels).

The multi-talented Saiful works as a freelance writer, scriptwriter, singer and is also a practicing medium!

After a couple more songs from Peter and Markiza we probably finished a bit later than we should have, but it was a very enjoyable event. I thanks sincerely all those who came and cheered writers on and bought their books, and all those who read or performed for out entertainment.

I thank Seksan for his magical space.

Also those friends who helped clean up. And whoever brought the pineapple tarts and crisps.

I hope to organise the event again on February 28th when among others we will have Marina Mahathir reading. Watch this space anyway for details!

Postscript :

Sufian's photos of the event are amazing!

Uma Gets an E-Book Reader

"Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns driven time and again, off course, once he had plundered the hallowed heights of Troy...." Homer just felt out of place; trapped in circuit and screen, wrapped in anodised aluminium. The text just seemed to prattle. It felt atopic, not in its substance, but in its presentation. It felt like it was just floating above the surface. It lacked texture. It lacked opacity. It lacked the flatness of print.

The device itself felt unfamiliar in my hands; its frigid metal made my fingers numb. I had only been using it for a few days and I already missed the warmth of paper. I missed its yellowish tinge, its redolence.

If this is indeed the future of literature, then allow me to state my objections. You see, the pleasure of text goes beyond its mere consumption. The pleasure of text exists in its experience. The pleasure of text lies in its linearity. Already I miss that sense of accomplishment of having one side thicken as the other side thins. I miss being able to feel that gradual progression in my hands.

I miss the weight of it all. Ulysses should feel heavier than Jonathan Livingston Seagull. To carry Proust around in your pocket steals from its stature. For it should be as toilsome a task to lift it as it is to read it.

I miss the paper cuts.

Umapagan Ampikaipakan in the New Straits Times (and one of the most enthusiastic and clued up readers I know) succumbs to curiosity and buys himself an e-book reader, but reckons physical books will actually undergo a resurgence :

Because after swimming for so long in online data streams, we will need to seek out the the stationary words that only a page can offer. We will need to disconnect. To go offline. And the book will forever be our haven.

I think that is very true!

Uma's Obsession

One after my own heart, Umapagan Ampikaipakan admits to a shameless book addiction in today's New Straits Times. Uma, you may remember from some time back is on the trail of the Great Malaysian Novel and believes he may be a step closer :

Recently, I found such joy in Preeta Samarasan’s Evening is the Whole Day. A novel I had hastily purchased, at Heathrow Airport, while rushing to my departure gate. I knew nothing about it except that it had a pretty cover — orange and yellow and green and turquoise — I could not help but want it. It was only later, once I had settled comfortably into my seat, safely buckled in, when I realised that it was, in fact, written by a Malaysian.

Now I don’t know about you, but each time I pick up something by a Malaysian author, I am both excited and apprehensive. I hope for the best but expect the worst. Because when you ’ve had your heart broken as many a time as I have, you eventually learn to be a little cautious.

A caution that proved to be entirely unnecessary when it came to Samarasan’s effort. I finished it in one sitting.

Her rich and beautiful prose had me enthralled for most of the 13 hours that it took for me to get home.

But what, he asks, about the great Malaysian novelist?

I was looking at the biographies of some of our authors who have recently received wide and critical acclaim only to discover that they live in France, Glasgow, London and Cape Town. I began to wonder why they seemed to be everywhere else. To be anywhere but here.

Maybe it’s because what they do is so under-appreciated over here.

Maybe it’s because they had to leave the suffocating surroundings of their youth to be able to produce something so deep and unclouded.

Because for the grass to be greener on this side, you have to be on that side.

Then again, maybe it’s because we feel more Malaysian when we are abroad. We feel special. We feel unique. We feel one of a kind. So much so, that we gain more of ourselves when we are overseas than we ever do when we are at home.

Maybe it’s true what Theroux says, that “enlightenment will always involve the poetry of departures”.

I gave this matter some thought too, a while back.

The Great Malaysian Novel?

Columnist Umapagan Ampikaipakan asks a very interesting question in the Star today: where's the Great Malaysian Novel?

Such a novel would be, he says:

Epic in nature, but not in proportion, it would be universally regarded as required reading. It would be a source of inspiration, an ideal to strive towards.

I'm not too sure what he means by "source of inspiration" and he doesn't elaborate ... the three books he picks out are all deeply critical about Malayan/Malaysian society as well as extremely well-written and entertaining. (Inspiring then, in a sense because authors shouldn't be afraid to be critical? I would say that this is a very good idea to strive towards!)

These books would be high on my own list of greatest reads about Malaysia too: Anthony Burgess The Long Day Wanes: A Malayan Trilogy; Henri Faulconnier's Malaisie (translated into English as The Soul of Malaya), and a novel which isn't a novel but travel and social commentary, Rehman Rashid's A Malaysian Journey.

The idea of a Great (Fill in the Name of Your Country) Novel actually has it's origins in the US where it has become something of a national preoccupation. Remember the search for the Great American Novel in the New York Times last year? The Brits have, probably wisely, never given the notion of the Great British Novel much thought, although the Observer sportingly drew up a list of the best novels of the last 25 years. (In India Sashi Tharoor saved everyone the bother of even thinking of another one!)So what would the Great American Novel look like? (Then by extention we might be able to identify its Malaysian cousin.) Critic A.O. Scott wrote in the New York Times (article now archived on the International Herald Tribune site):

The hippogriff, a monstrous hybrid of griffin and horse, is often taken as the very symbol of fantastical impossibility, a unicorn's unicorn. But the Great American Novel, while also a hybrid (crossbred of romance and reportage, high philosophy and low gossip, wishful thinking and hard-nosed skepticism), may be more like the yeti or the Loch Ness monster. It is a creature that quite a few people - not all of them certifiably crazy - claim to have seen.

And he says, there were also American critics who didn't hold much with the idea of elevating one or two books over the rest and calling them the greatest:

There were those who sighed that they could not possibly select one book to place at the summit of an edifice with so many potential building blocks, and those who railed against the very idea of such a monument. More common was the worry that our innocent inquiry, by feeding the deplorable modern mania for ranking, would distract from the serious business of literature and, worse, subject it to damaging trivialization. To consecrate one work as the best would be to risk the implication that no one need bother with the rest. The determination of literary merit, it was suggested, should properly be a matter of reasoned judgment and persuasive argument, not mass opinionizing.

But here's some food for thought when we talk about the literature we want and are hungry for. How supportive are we of the writers who are brave enough to put their words out there?

If you read Rehman's foreword to his latest edition of A Malaysian Journey, you will see how he was initially turned away by publisher after publisher who deemed his material too controversial. In the end he was forced to self-publish.

Burgess' Malayan Trilogy has endured decades of neglect in Malaysia, been sidelined by postcolonial literary types in academia who decried it an orientalist text, perpetuating myths about the country, and more recently became a "restricted" book thanks to some bureaucrat deciding that copies shouldn't be allowed into the country.

How many readers have read Faulconnier's book ... or even have heard of it's existence? (Hands up guys!) How many copies of it could you round up if you went around the bookshops? (Silverfish has it though, I bought a replacement copy the other day.)

As I've said before, it is time to pay more attention to Malaysia's literary heritage, much of which is out or print, hard to get copies of, or goes untranslated.

And I'd like to ask Mr Umapagan a question: why didn't your article didn't give a single mention to Malaysian authors who have won considerable recognition overseas and at home in the last few years? Have they slipped below your radar, or do you really think that they don't make the grade?

Because I reckon that however you measure it, the Great Malaysian Novel might not be as far away as you think.

Postscript:

Raman points out:

The Great Malaysian novel (or the great Malaysian anything) is going to happen when somebody does it, not when somebody talks about it ...