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.)

Review KL Noir Yellow

Inventive insights into the city

By SHARON BAKAR

An enjoyable collection of short stories that provide a different view of Kuala Lumpur.
Local publisher Fixi’s popular KL Noir series is completed this month with the release of this fourth and final volume. In Yellow, we are promised stories that are “sick and twisted”, and a journey through “the dark underbelly of Kuala Lumpur”. And this is pretty much what we get.
The nature of the genre means that we know that things are always going to end badly, but we are grateful to writers who take the trouble to create convincing characters and believable scenarios along the way. The best stories in the collection also show us the city we think we know in a new light, and reflect the cultural zeitgeist.
When seemingly ordinary folk turn to violent crime in fiction, it takes skill on the part of the writer to make the transformation convincing. Two stories in particular manage this challenge very well.
Selvi in Subashini Navaratanam’s Girl Power feels rage and frustration at the lot of women in traditional Tamil society, and fights against social restriction. She comes to increasingly identify with the dark goddess Kali after accidentally glimpsing a statue during a temple visit as a child. This is an intelligent and heartfelt piece with a strong narrative voice and the journey into obsession is entirely credible.
In Sharmilla Ganesan’s French Fries For Aunty Kamalan, a devout Hindu discovers from a website that her favourite French fries from a fast-food restaurant chain are actually fried in beef-fat to make them more delicious. This is of course completely against the tenets of her faith. We really feel for Kamalan as she is torn between desire for the forbidden food, haunted by the jingles and the TV ads, and her self-disgust. The story also nicely parallels the spate of scare stories about products on the market containing “porcine” DNA.
Several of the stories play with the idea of the duality of man, with good and evil co-existing within an individual. Zufar Ismail’s cop on the trail of a serial killer in Breaking Point makes a terrifying discovery about himself, and the voice of the wearied cop is particularly convincing. Catalina Rebuyan’s The Kill Wishis an almost metaphysical tale of a hired assassin who comes across a victim who is so completely good that he must rethink his mission.
Appearances, as we learn, are deceptive. An old man suffering from dementia in a care home must be harmless, right? But when in Chin Ai May’s Never Forget A Face, a retired cop thinks he recognises an old adversary among the other inmates, his instinct for self-preservation takes over. And the contrast between innocence and evil is nowhere stronger than in Trap by Choong Jay Vee, a chilling tale of a cosplayer attending an anime convention at KLCC dressed as Lolita.
As we might expect in a collection of this nature, there’s plenty of blood and gore. The opening of Sek Han Foo’s The Disgraced is stomach-churningly violent, while Happy Family by Claudia Skyler Foong ends up with almost as many corpses as a Shakespearian tragedy.
But there are more understated pieces too, the most powerful of which is Paul Gnanaselvam’s The Ride. A poor boy from one of the roughest neighbourhoods feels a need to keep up appearances in front of his wealthier classmates, and is overjoyed when one offers him a daily lift in his chauffeured car. There’s real horror in the implied ending, which is surely drawn from newspaper accounts of unexplained deaths in the lift shafts of the notorious San Peng flats.
Sukhbir Cheema’s story The Lost Pilgrim also uses setting very well and gets across the difficulty of creating any sense of connection in the city.
The one piece of reportage in the book is an account by Martin Vengadesan of the rise of the legendary gang leader Botak Chin in the 1970s. Nicknamed “the Robin Hood of Sentul”, Chin was both charismatic and wily, and his sharing of the spoils with the wider community ensured his survival for a long time. It’s a shame that the piece feels a lot flatter than the fictional efforts that surround it.
However, while there is much good writing in the book, there are still plenty of rough edges. There are the problems with the nuts and bolts of short story construction that seem to dog most local collections; stories start too slowly and not far enough in, scene transitions are not smooth in places, and back story often seems dropped in whereas clues should have been planted much earlier.
Sometimes the flaws co-exist with the strengths. Timothy Nakayama’s Ambrosia takes us into the sharply realised world of the celebrity chef, but the darker elements in the story just don’t convince. Similarly, inContrail, Leroy Luar creates an atmospheric setting for his story of urban exploration set in the old budget terminal, but the encounter with the protagonist’s ex-girlfriend and the back story about their relationship is clumsily drawn.
Overall, though, this is a very enjoyable collection, and the sheer inventiveness of the writers ensure that the tales never feel derivative or predictable.

So where have you gone, bibliobibuli?

I apologise for not having kept up this blog. I know quite a number of you were disappointed.

A number of things happened. I was going through a bit of a rough patch and hit a bump in the road as far as reading is concerned. I simply couldn't read for a while. I came back to reading via short fiction and have been enjoying many writers I've discovered Robert Olen Butler, Ron Rash, T.C. Boyle, Cynthia Ozick. I also got pulled back to reading by Tan Twan Eng's gorgeous The Garden of Evening Mists, which I read slowly, a chapter a day, really savouring it. Now I'm reading more than ever and thoroughly enjoying myself again.

I think that one of the pleasures and problems with being a blogger about books is that you keep getting manuscripts and books passed to you. I ended up feeling guilty about those I wasn't enjoying and they ate into my reading time.

Perhaps there is such a thing as "blogger burnout". Several things came together. I found it hard to summon up as much enthusiasm and time and energy as I had formerly - especially as I was so busy with my classes. I realised that the blog which had started off as being something I kept for me to think through certain issues was being kept more for other people than for me. I got a bit upset when Facebook came along and everyone started commenting there rather than on the blog, even if I asked them not to. The party had clearly moved elsewhere, something that I've now come to accept.

I also watched with horrified fascination as the comments on this blog got taken up with personal agendas and ding-dongs. I never wanted to censor the comments on the blog, but I should have reigned some of the excesses.

I felt too that there were always too many thing to blog and not enough time to put them up.

The worst thing that happened though was most of the pictures suddenly disappearing from the blog after I started using Google+ and accidentally pulled the plug on them. (I thought "What are these pictures doing here when I haven't posted them?") So I have to slowly replace them or get rid of the gaps where the pictures used to be.

Then too, I felt the blog had become a bit of a  mish-mash with all sorts of content about book,s writing, publishing, live events, reviews, mixed up.

So my solution - yes I'm on Facebook and Twitter. I have also started using Scoop.it - and am "curating" (silly word!) literary-related content across a number of boards which you can follow if you are interested in literary news.

I will keep this blog here because the archives are important and keep it for reviews and opinion pieces rather than every day news.

The Carpet Bombing of Readings from Readings 2

It's quite distressing that our our second book   has been hit heavily by negative remarks and 1-star reviews on Amazon.

As you might know, the book Readings from Readings 2: New Writing from Malaysia, Singapore and Beyond edited by myself and Bernice Chauly was published in November last year and launched (with the help of the very supportive Tan Twan Eng no less!) at the Georgetown Literary Festival in Penang. The book is a collection of writing by Malaysian writers and expat writers living in Malaysia and grew out of the monthly literary event I organise.

My friend, publisher Amir Muhammad, helped me to get it onto Amazon.com via his account. It was a great feeling being able to make Malaysian writing visible on an international platform. I didn’t expect to sell hundreds of copies – really this was a symbolic act, as the main market for the book is obviously the local one and it is doing well in the bookshops here.

The first negative reviews hit in the space of just a day or two over New Year, and there were more a few weeks later. The lies have been many and varied: the book was poorly edited and proofread (you have only to hold it in your hands and flick through the pages to see how wrong that is); that it fell apart; that the line spacing was wrong; that every other word was an obscenity (there's not even one swear word); that I was some kind of a Muslim fundamentalist; that I was not sympathetic about the Boston bombing, (hello, this book came out last year!); that I was some kind of bleeding-hearts liberal pursing an agenda (yeah I have an agenda all right - to do something for Malaysian writers). And so on and so on, the creativity of my particular troll never letting up.

Incidentally, only 6 books have been sold on Amazon so far and the e-book isn't out yet, so of course these "reviewers" have not even seen a copy of the book.

Initially, I had no idea where the reviews were coming from and why they were being posted. I was very shaken by the attack – and worse, felt that somehow I had let my writers down. I contacted Amazon’s Customer Service department and they took a look at the page but responded that the reviews did not contravene the Terms of Service so they could do nothing.

A few days ago I added a couple of quotes from local newspapers and perhaps it was this that has triggered the latest spate of comments.

I tried to track down some of the Amazon “reviewers”. Most of them are the usual “gun-for-hire”, posting 5 star ratings while saying nothing much about the book. In most cases there was so little information in their profiles that they were untraceable, but in 3 cases I managed to find out who they were via Google.

The first reviewer I tracked went by the nick Funmom91 (alias Victoria Heckstall). She turned out to be a single mother in the US who makes most of her money from writing for-pay blog posts and reviews (as well as a little prostitution on the side judging from the police reports I unearthed!). We had a brief conversation on Twitter and minutes after, she took her "review" down.

Another “review” was posted by a Sri Lankan who goes by the nick Dilmaxa and who was solicited via Fiverr.com. When I threatened him with legal action he admitted that he had accepted payment for a 1-star review and took it down (screenshot of his "confession" below).

The third was from a woman called Brandi Thornsberry, also in the US – her email “confession” is reproduced below:

From: Brandi
To: sharonbakar@yahoo.com
Sent: Friday, March 8, 2013 10:04 AM
Subject: RE: Your review on Amazon

Let me Start off by Saying I am sorry. Yes I was paid for this review. It was not my own words. I was paid to simply cut and paste this review. I didn't like it one bit but since I didn't clarify I wouldn't post negative reviews (which has now been changed) I had no choice but to follow it. I have since deleted the review. I will deal with the consequences on my end, that's my fault.

I am a writer myself, I do know how much time and effort goes into it. I am sorry I treated another writer like this, specially when it wasn't honest. I had placed that gig on my job in hopes to help people promote their own products. That was the first time I ever received a request of that nature.

I understand the damage has been done and their it not much that I can do to change your feeling about me, just know that I am actually an honest person, I am a freelance writer and I will not EVER take a job of that nature again. I have edited my job and put in bold letters that I will not place negative reviews again.

If there is anything I can do to make it up to you, please let me know. Thank you for hearing me out and I am sorry if I ruined your day over someone acting petty and be following in line.

-Brandi

In a further email conversation with her, she told me that she didn’t know who had commissioned the review as she gets the review work from a middle man. I am not sure if this is true.

I am angry at Amazon which does not seem to be supporting the authors and publishers who use its services. The use of fake reviews is so widespread that the whole system is rotten. I knew about fake 5-star reviews, but I had no idea that 1-star reviews could also be bought.

Note that one point that both Brandi and Dilmaxa make - they were given the text of the reviews! There is one single voice behind all the viciousness. One person paying dozens of people. Spending a great deal of money (even if the fee is just US$5 a pop) in order to distress and defame. I am sure this is a personal vendetta – against me, and perhaps also against one particular writer in the book who has been singled out for abuse. (It looks as if the troll knows him personally.)  This individual might have had his/her work was rejected when I made my selection for the book. He/she also knows how to purchase reviews quickly and easily without incriminating himself/herself. It could be that they acquired this familiarity by buying "shills" (5-star reviews) from sites like Fiverr.com.And it's likely that their behavior elsewhere has been erratic and abusive.

How much hatred must that individual have inside them? And to be this obsessive - aren't they mentally ill?

I have written a second report for Amazon, and am waiting for their reply. I am weighing my options as far as legal action is concerned. (I have access to the lawyer downstairs who has plenty of advice to give!)

But what disturbs me most about this attack is that it is possible at all.

It's just too easy for folks who want to make a little money online to set themselves up as sock-puppets with multiple Amazon accounts and bogus identities.

Almost nothing has been written online about this phenomena referred to as "carpet-bombing" in this Forbes article, and more than anything I would like to think that by making my experience public I am in a small way encouraging this huge company (that clearly aims to take over every aspect of our reading life) to become more accountable and to change its policy re fake reviews.

Update 25/5/13 :

The last rash of 1-star reviews have been taken down by Amazon.com.  Am very grateful for that.  Will still be pushing for more of the reviews to be removed.

Update 17/8/13:

Interesting footnote. I noticed the other day that there was a rash of 1-star reviews on the first book on GoodReads.  All of them were posted on the same day (March 13), within minutes of each other, under different names, but they were written in the same style as the Amazon reviews.  The location for all the reviews was given as exactly the same area of  Auckland, which may finally have pinpointed our troll!  I know exactly who it is now, but having the proof in my hand so I can take legal action is a tiny bit trickier - though I'm working on it.

More 1-star reviews were added to Amazon.com and later got cleaned off.  Amazon seem to now be taking notice.  Maybe the Forbes review article and the comments had an effect?

Update 11/11/14:

Many more fake accounts opened on GoodReads, which makes it oh too easy to post multiple 1-star reviews.  How many hours did this poor idiot waste opening them and making them look credible?   (They get cleaned off, then he wastes a few more hours putting more up. I'm sure this will keep going on.)

I know who who my bully is (because he doesn't even bother to cover his tracks anymore, now sending hate-mail directly to my inbox).  The writing and publishing community and journalists in Malaysia know who it is.    I have his address and I have a lawyer in Auckland who is happy to move ahead with the case.

Because the person you are hurting most is yourself, John Ling ... Please get yourself some psychiatric help before all that hatred implodes.


*Picture credit : (top) Penang Global Tourism

The Last Runaway

My review of The Last Runaway by Tracy Chevalier appeared in The Star today.  This is the original version which reads a bit better!

Tracy Chevalier, best known for The Girl with a Pearl Earring which became an international best-seller and a Hollywood film, sets the seventh of her historical novels in her native America.  The Last Runaway, set in the 1850’s, takes a look at the country, pre-Civil War. It deals with the legacy of slavery, and in particular what came to be known as The Underground Railway, an escape route set up to help slaves make their way to Canada.  The “railway” comprised of safe houses or “depots” where runaways could find shelter and food.  Although, as Chevalier notes on her website, the numbers of slaves escaping this way was not great, the very fact that the “railway” existed at all must have threatened slave owners and appeared to undermine the whole economy.

After a broken engagement, Quaker Honor Bright decides to follow her sister who is leaving for America and a new life.  Grace is betrothed to Adam Cox, who left Britain earlier to set up shop in a village in Ohio.   The voyage across the Atlantic is so horrendous that Hope realizes that she would not be able to ever face it again to return to England.   

Sadly, Grace does not make it to Ohio, but contracts yellow fever on the journey and dies.  Honor is thus thrown onto the kindness of strangers.  When she reaches Wellington in Ohio, she is taken in by the plain spoken milliner, Belle Mills, who becomes her only real friend. Honor wins her respect because of her skill with a needle, and Belle soon puts her to work helping to decorate hats and make bonnets.

Adam Cox comes to collect her a few days later.  He is living with his recently widowed sister-in-law, the dour Abigail, and the living arrangements prove to be awkward. Honor realises that the only option open to her is to marry, and she accepts the proposal of Jack Haymaker, whose family own a thriving farm nearby.

Honor must learn to adapt to her new environment.  Everything is different in her adopted country from the landscape with its large open fields and forbidding woods, and the weather with its extremes of summer heat and winter cold, to the monotonous corn-based diet.   But the most difficult adjustment she must make is to fit in with the small-minded local community and the family into which she has married.   Things only get worse as she becomes aware of the plight of runaway slaves passing through Ohio (which is a free state) on their way to Canada and their freedom.  

Hope realises that Belle is involved in the “railway” early on in the novel, but she finds herself personally involved when a fugitive slave appears in the yard one day.  Soon she is hiding food and directing slaves to the next town where they can find safety.    

Even though Quakers are against slavery on principle, since they believe every human being carries the same light within them, her husband and his family forbid her from helping any more runaway slaves. The passage of the Fugitive Law means that there are dire penalties for harbouring them, something the Haymakers know only too well. 

Honour is left in no doubt that her if she obeys her conscience she is imperiling those she lives amongst.  Furthermore, she risks being ostracized from the Quaker community and losing all rights to her own child if she persists. Compounding the moral dilemma is the fact that Quakers are not supposed to tell lies, but Honor realises that sometimes lies, or at least evasions, are sometimes needed to prevent greater injustice.   These dilemmas are at the heart of the story, and Honor realises that there just are no easy answers.

Complicating matters more are Honor’s feelings towards Donavan, Belle’s brother who is a bounty hunter looking for slaves.  The sexual tension is palpable, and their scenes together are some of the most compelling in the book.  It’s a pity that Jack Haymaker is so colourless in comparison. 

In Honor Bright, Chevalier creates a heroine who grows and evolves to take charge of her own destiny.  Ironically, she is as much a runaway in a metaphorical sense as the slaves that she helps. 

The book is very thoroughly researched yet the historical background never weighs down the narrative.  Indeed, The Last Runaway is a page-turning piece of fiction, and its great strength is in the very real sense of   period and place that Chevalier creates, particularly in the domestic details. Particularly enjoyable are her descriptions of the traditional art of quilt making which serves as a motif throughout the book.

Twan Eng at Kinokuniya

I’m thrilled to bits when author Tan Twan Eng asks me to moderate his meet-the author session at Kinokuniya on April 8^th.   The bookstore is in any case Tan’s home away from home when he is back in KL.   I joke with him about which is greater, the amount earned in royalties from his novels or the amount he has spent here over the years.  He laughs and agrees it’s probably the latter, and knowing his voracious reading habit, I can well believe him.

Penang-born Tan’s first novel The Gift of Rain has been a success in every meaning of the word – critically acclaimed, it was also longlisted for the Man Booker which is one of the world’s most important literary prizes, and it has also been a very popular novel with readers on both sides of the Atlantic. (A barometer of this is reader ratings on Amazon where it has never fallen below 4.5.)  The popularity of the book in the US though, took Tan completely by surprise, he says.

 It took Tan three years to write his second novel The Garden of Evening Mists which is set in Malaya during the communist insurgency.   It tells the story of lawyer Yun Ling Teoh, who though scarred by her wartime experiences in a Japanese camp, nonetheless decides to fulfill her promise to her dead sister to build a Japanese garden.  She becomes the apprentice of a man who was once gardener to the Emperor of Japan, and who has built his garden in Cameron Highlands.

There’s actually a phenomenon known as “second novel syndrome” where writers get terrific performance anxiety about writing a follow-up to a successful novel.  Was this the case with Tan?

 He agrees: “When you write a first novel you give everything that you have, basically you dry the well, and there’s nothing left for the second novel. Every book, I’m starting to suspect, will get harder and harder to write and it’s not something I’m looking forward to.”

The great American Don DeLillo once said a first novel comes to the writer as a gift and he doesn't necessarily know how he wrote it:  it's the second novel that teaches him how to write.   Tan feels (and I’d completely agree) that his writing is much more controlled in this second novel, the plot more carefully shaped,  and while the descriptions  of place are still gorgeous (especially those of the garden)  they draw attention to themselves far less .   

Tan confesses that he has become more interested in gardening in recent years and the idea for the novel came from when he actually met someone who had been gardener of the Emperor of Japan at a social gathering in Johannesburg.  Although they couldn’t really communicate because of the language barrier, the very job title provided the spark of inspiration, and Tan says “I had various elements floating around already and this tied them all together”. 

Tan confesses that he has become more interested in gardening in recent years.  Because he wanted to work with a Japanese garden this meant that the setting for the novel would have to be one of Malaya’s hill resorts, and only Cameron highlands was sufficiently developed at the time the book is set.  He was also fascinated, he says by the myth of Jim Thompson, the Thai silk baron who went missing in Cameron highlands in 1967. (Indeed Thompson makes a cameo appearance in the book.)

Some of the scenes in the novel are so vividly realized, it is like stepping back into the Malaya of that era. Tan described how he researched the novel – drawing on contemporary accounts and on old photographs.  He said that one of the toughest jobs in writing a novel is to decide how much research should go in to the novel, and he found that he had to cut out a lot of his material for fear of boring his reader. 

I wondered how hard it was for Tan to write from the perspective of a woman.   He says that it is difficult because women in the 40s and 50s because they were subject to greater restrictions did not have as much liberty to move around as the men.   Tan also said that he found himself looking at women – how they sat, and trying to puzzle out the contents of their handbags!    

I pointed out to Tan that in both books he is very generous with plot.  There was so much incident packed into The Gift of Rain that I wasn’t sure how to classify the novel when I first read it – literary fiction or thriller?  I asked him how important he feels storytelling is to him.  He feels that there is a swingback in literary fiction with writers giving storytelling more importance, because “People getting tired of too much self-indulgence from a writer.” “You might have a lot of things to say but you really have to capture the reader’s attention and without story it’s difficult to get the reader turning the pages.”

 For me the part of the book I found the most moving was the stunning love story of the historian, Tatsuji, who had been a kamikaze pilot.  This part of the novel grew from the Tan’s short story Somewhere Above the Clouds (published in the Asian Literary Review in 2007).

I point out that while Tan never follows his characters into the bedroom but he has some ingenious ways to suggest the quality of their love making. Sex scenes can be notoriously difficult to write and there is of course the annual Bad Sex Award which must scare writers. “If you don’t do it well, it becomes laughable … like the act itself. “ Tan agrees. “I always skip the sex scenes in books. So when I’m writing I have no interest in describing it as well unless it’s really relevant – and most of the time it’s not. You’re more interested in showing the effect.”

There was very active participation from the audience at Kinokuniya – many of whom are fascinated to find out how an author works. 

Tan worked previously as a lawyer in KL, and we wanted to know what there is about the job that still influences him.  He says that one fall out is that he places great importance on clarity(as all lawyers must). If writing is not clear, the author is really cheating the reader. 

His work ethic shows the influence of his former career.  He treats writing as a job, makes sure he dresses neatly in a shirt before he begins because, he believes if you’re sloppy, then your thinking becomes sloppy. And he works more or less 9-5.  He confesses though that the internet is a bit distraction and says he often has to switch off his wi-fi.

But perhaps the best bit of advice for all of us who would one day like to be sitting signing out own books in Kinokuniya – is to just get the work done!

Writing a Novel in 24 Hours

Writing a whole novel in 24 hours seems like an impossible task, let alone when there are 29 co-authors in 4 different parts of the world!  But this is exactly what we did on Leap Year Day, February 29th, thanks to Grey Yeoh of the British Council who brought together a whole bunch of us, including Gina Yap, Zedeck Siew, Saras Manickam, Daphne Lee and myself, to interact with writers in three other cities across the globe.  This is the result :

LEAP
A novel by 29 writers from 4 cities written in 24 hours around the world.

February 29th, 2012.  In Kuala Lumpur, it's Sara's birthday, a day she dreads, even though it only comes around once every four years.  In Delhi, Tanya makes a dash for the airport and the carefree lifestyle that she has always dreamed of.  In London, Dave wakes up from a bad dream to find his life in fragments that he must piece together before the day is out.  In Vancouver, Win's day goes from bad to worse, as she struggles to face up to her past.

On the leap day of 29th of February, Spread the Word brought together four teams of writers from across the globe to write a collaborative novel. Spanning Delhi, Kuala Lumpur, London and Vancouver, four characters connect, disconnect, and follow their own journeys of discovery. There was a whole lot of hilarity and hard work, and much coffee and chocolate was consumed. We would love you to enjoy the fruits of the writers' labours.Download the book as a pdf. The all-singing, all-dancing e-book can be downloaded here .To read the ePub file on your Mac or PC, you'll need Adobe's Digital Editions application, available to download free from http://www.adobe.com/products/digitaleditions/

And Now We Are Seven

A common stereotype of literary gatherings is that they are pretentious affairs: elderly professors in tweed and monocles smoking pipes as they discuss old classics that no one has picked up in a hundred years. ... This, however, was not the case at the celebration of Readings’ seventh anniversary, which took place at the Seksan Gallery in Bangsar, Kuala Lumpur, earlier this month. There was a lot of laughter, cheer and chatter in the air as a crowd of around 40 people comprising writers and writing enthusiasts alike, all came together for an evening of cake, socialising and literature.

Terence Toh writes about the 7th birthday celebrations for Readings@Seksan. I really appreciate the coverage since we really have something good going with these events.  The next is on February 25th.  More news soon.

Retelling Tales

This review of appeared in The Star last week.

Folktales hold a mirror up to our inner lives and provide us with a shared frame of reference, so it’s small wonder that many modern authors (among them Angela Carter in The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories and Adèle Geras who writes the introduction to this book) have been inspired to update these traditional stories.

In Malaysian Tales Retold and emixed, Daphne Lee pulls together a selection of some of Malaysia’s finest fiction writers (as well as Singapore’s O Thiam Chin) to share their versions of traditional stories. What results is a collection of very fresh new fiction with its roots in the oral past, but exploring contemporary concerns.

The writing is most effective when the writers give their legendary characters a human voice, exploring their motivations and preoccupations. Endless Night by Daphne Lee gives a voice to the legendary character Puteri Gunung Ledang and transforms her into a “wholly magical entity” in a piece which is both lyrical and sensual. Preeta Samarasan’s retelling of Si Tanggang captures the depth of a mother’s heartbreak and makes it entirely plausible that this wronged woman could utter the terrible curse that would turn her own child to stone. Samarasan also transforms the Langkawi legend of Mahsuri, a woman accused of adultery and summarily executed, into a moving contemporary love story of a young woman much wronged, both by her absentee husband, and by her delinquent brother who claims to have killed his sister for the family honour. The writer uses the piece to ask important questions about sexuality in Malaysia – an issue, she says, which is quite inseparable from race and religion.

In several other stories in the collection, the female protagonist emerges as stronger and wiser than in the original version and violent confrontation is replaced with wit and diplomacy. This is certainly the case in Karina Bahrin’s A Little Warm Death where the legend of Puteri Sa’adong is given a contemporary twist as jet-setting wife Sadie manages to finally persuade her reluctant stay-at-home husband to accompany her on her travels. And in Trick or Tree M SHANmugalingam reinterprets the Sang Kancil legend and gives it a cheeky twist: Kamariah the idealistic little mousedeer joins forces with her traditional foe, the crocodile Bakar Buaya to fight the loggers who threaten forest.

It is remarkable how well O Thiam Chin’s The Last Voyage and Janet Tay’s The Gift mirror each other. Each takes a real historical character around whom legends have accrued, largely because we have so few solid facts about them, and they create entirely convincing voices for them.

O Thiam Chin shows us Admiral Zheng He reflecting on his great sea voyages and past glories He shows us too his private pain and longing, as he prepares now to venture into the unknown territory of love. The Gift revisits the story of Hang Li Poh sent from her home in China and delivered “appropriately packaged like a birthday gift fit for a king” to marry Sultan Mansur Shah of Malacca, a sweetener for a trading partnership between the two nations. In both stories there is a revealing of physical mutilations (for Hang Li Po it is her bound feet, for Zheng He the scars of castration), and a hope for acceptance in the face of truth.

There is more lighthearted fare in the book. Playwright Ann Lee’s Su and her Natural ove for Swimming brings together an unfulfilled housewife and a rather strange swimming pool attendant who form an unlikely friendship. Amir Muhammad’s contribution – written in the form of a proposal to a head of studio for a remake of Raja Bersiang – is a tongue in cheek piece in which Amir draws on his extensive knowledge of the film industry in Malaysia. As he suggests each change the story (transposing the story to a private secondary school, tapping into the teenage vampire craze, turning it into a musical) the story becomes increasingly farcical.

Another piece that stands out is Rehman Rashid’s The Legend of Din Ketolak which grew out of his research for a series of articles he was commissioned to write on Pulau Pangkor. The voice of the old man comes through most strongly as he tells us about the days when the Malays were giants, three times bigger than they are now, and true heroes.

Elsewhere, Zed Adams rewriting of Batu Belah gives the traditional story an imaginative sci-fi twist; Ho Lee Ling accounts for the strange Singha creature spotted by the Prince of Palembang after which the Lion City got it’s name; and Kee Thuan Chye’s retells the story of Hang Nadim the young man who saves Singapura from the swordfish scourge. It is as Kee says it is “a tale that speaks to use today”, with its echoes of the contemporary political scene, and indeed he has used it as the basis for his bitingly satirical play The Swordfish, Then the Concubine.Working with original tales clearly gave the writers a firm framework on which to hang their own ideas. If I might be permitted a slight niggle though, a short synopsis of each original story would have helped readers to appreciate the transformation. (Perhaps this information could have been put on a website?). However, most of the retellings are strong enough to be enjoyed in their own right, and this is without doubt one of the best Malaysian short story collections of recent years.

George Town Literary Festival

Exciting news for book lovers in Penang - the first George Town Literary Festival, organised by Bernice Chauly, features a line-up of Farish Noor, Tan Twan Eng, Shih-Li Kow and Iskandar Al-Bakri.  You can read more on the festival blog.

Thanks MPH

I was having lunch today with David T.K. Wong when he told me that my letter to MPH had been published in Quill some weeks before.  Actually I had tried to obtain the magazine from the MPH store, but the assistants said that it had gone online, and then I couldn't find the website.

Now I have, (see page 8 for a clearer version) and I consider that things have been put right.

 
 Meanwhile, there's lots of other good stuff to read in the magazine and, if you want even more, the 105th Anniversary issue of Quill can be found here.

Lesson for the Digital Future

My review in The Star today :

Two renowned authors share insights into the future of the book.

This Is Not The End Of The Book

Authors: Jean-Claude Carrière & Umberto Eco

Publisher: Harvill Secker, 336 pages

THESE are anxious times for book lovers. New digital technologies mean that we find ourselves on the edge of a literary revolution of a magnitude that hasn’t been seen since the invention of the printing press in the 15th century. Industry insiders predict that the traditional, printed book will disappear completely within the next 25 years in the face of competition from e-books and the easy availability of plentiful information at the click of a mouse on the Internet.

Last year, Amazon.com, as good a barometer of changes in book-buying habits as any, announced that for the first time sales of digital books have outstripped US sales of hardbacks on its website. American bookstore chain Barnes and Noble claim that they are selling three times as many digital books as all formats of physical books combined. We are witnessing an increasing number of libraries ditching physical books in favour of digital content. There are huge shakeouts in the publishing industry, and book retailers are also under threat.

No wonder so many of us worry that the book as we know it, the artifact that we have grown up with, and which has delivered to us so much knowledge and personal pleasure, will be lost to us.

This Is Not The End Of The Book delivers some much needed hope and reassurance. Jean-Philippe de Tonnac brings together, in a series of conversations, novelist and critic Umberto Eco (best known for his novels The Name Of The Rose and Foucault’s Pendulum), and playwright and screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière to debate the place of the book in the digital age. Both are bibliophiles of the most devoted kind and have a deep understanding of the history of the book.

On the question of whether or not the book will survive, Eco sets our mind at rest within the first few pages. The book, he points out, is already an entirely effective piece of technology and “like the spoon, scissors, the hammer, the wheel. Once invented, it cannot be improved.”

But so far most of the innovations in storing data (including floppy discs, videotapes, and CD-ROMs) in recent decades have become obsolete incredibly quickly, with the resultant loss of important cultural heritage. Printed books have proved more durable, so that “we can still read a text printed five centuries ago”.

As well as contemplating the present and future of reading, this book takes us on a tour of the past. De Tonnac tosses into the ring the questions that spark the discussion, and what ensues is a delightfully meandering conversation, full of fascinating asides and anecdotes.

Eco and Carrière look at the way that words have been stored over time, and how ideas have been communicated down the ages. They give us insights into how the book lovers of the past got their fix; they talk about libraries, editors, Shakespeare, the holy books of Islam and Christianity; and about the books that are lost to us through accidental fire, negligence and stupidity. Indeed, one interesting question that is raised is whether the books that have survived from ancient times actually are the greatest works of their time, and what might we have actually lost along the way?

In previous centuries you didn’t need to have read a great deal to be considered well-educated: in the 18th century, for example, the upper classes would be able to carry their whole libraries with them in trunks when they travelled as just 30-40 books contained all the learning of the decent individual. Today, of course, much more is published and considered important than it is possible to read. Eco and Carrière talk about how we are deeply influenced even by the books we have not read.

No discussion of books and reading down the ages would be complete without a discussion of censorship. Book burning is seen as a symbolic act of “purification” after a culture has been “poisoned by certain books”. “You have to respect a book’s power to want to destroy it,” says Carrière – Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses being a case in point.

Perhaps the most enjoyable aspect of the conversation is the personal insights into the relationship that the two have with books. Carrière’s first contact with books was with the Bible in the church in the French village where he grew up; and also with George Sand’s Valentine, a book that his father read over and over because he was fond of it. Eco recounts how he fell in love with reading, poring over the eclectic stack of unbound volumes his book-binder grandfather left behind.

They go on to discuss their personal libraries, how they gathered the books they have, how they display them, and to whom they plan to bequeath them eventually. Eco has 50,000 books in his various homes, 1,200 of which are rare titles, among them books on “human error, bad faith and idiocy” – subjects that, he says, fascinate him. Carrière says that he owns 30,000-40,000 books, 2,000 of them ancient.

Have they read all the books in their vast libraries, though? Carrière replies that “a library is not necessarily made up of books that we’ve read, or even that we will eventually read. They should be books that we can read. Or that we may read. Even if we never do.” Eco agrees with him. “A library is an assurance of learning,” he says.

That’s a lesson one hopes will be remembered in our headlong rush towards the digital future.

The Write Stuff

“In our country the importance of reading is still not being inculcated in homes or schools, and somewhere along the way of memorizing answers we have lost people who take pleasure in reading. If we don’t encourage reading, there will be no writing, no demand for books and authors ...We really need more quality writers locally and we need more fiction writers!”

says ZI Publications Ezra Zaid, interviewed in The Star by Sandra Low. He goes on to talk about what he expects from potential authors.  She goes on to talk to  Chong Ton Sin, who owns publishing company SIRD (Strategic Information and Research Development Centre) about publishing non-fiction; and authors Yvonne Lee and Brian Gomez about their paths to publication.

Readings From Readings @BFM 89.9

Bernice and I were interviewed for the I Love KL Show which was broadcast last Saturday 18th June. Here we are talking about the event and the book it spawned: BFM: The Business Radio Station

 

Who Will Win the Poppies?

The Star has a feature today about the only local book awards - the Star-Popular Readers’ Choice Awards. Here are the nominations in the English fiction category, which interests me most. :

1. Rojak: Bite-Sized Stories: Not, it’s not about food. Instead, these short-short stories (most don’t run over two pages) make astute observations about life in 1Malaysia, all wrapped in lashings of humour. Comedy, mysticism and sarcasm abound in the stories, such as the one about a holier-than-thou man who prays virtuously even while he has vitriolic thoughts about the sins of others. Moral values? No, there is no preaching in this book, just life lessons subtly expressed.

Amir Muhammad is a writer, publisher and occasional moviemaker who has been writing – and been published – since he was 14. Aside from Rojak, other books he released in 2010 are 120 Malay Movies and the text for the photography book KL Panorama.

2. Madness Aboard!: Here’s a look behind the scenes at the fascinating happenings inside an airplane. The author shares hilarious, sometimes bizarre experiences from her years as a flight attendant: There are tales of lecherous old coots, sightings of the “galley ghost”, all sorts of troublemakers, and a passenger on a fart fest, among other things!

Yvonne Lee is the bestselling author of The Sky Is Crazy: Tales From A Trolley Dolly, which has been translated into Bahasa Malaysia and Bahasa Indonesia. She also wrote Vanity Drive: The Vagaries Of One Woman’s Vanity. Both books made it into the top 10 titles in The Star-Popular Readers’ Choice Awards in 2008 and 2009.

3. The Rice Mother: This big, sprawling saga has gained devoted fans over the years, and when it was published in 2002, was often a first introduction to Malaya for Westerners. Magical realism, folklore and symbolism are all woven together as each memorable character tells his and her story – or even each other’s – over the years and across generations, through war and occupation.

Rani Manicka was born and educated in Malaysia and is currently living in Britain. She drew on her own Sri Lankan-Tamil family history as inspiration for this, her first novel. It won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in 2003 for the South-East Asia and South Pacific region and has been translated into 22 languages.

4. Kebaya Tales: The rich culture and history of the Straits Chinese are mined for this collection of stories that tell of opulent pasts, arranged marriages, and the disruption cause among genteel lives by the Japanese Occupation. Elements of the supernatural are present, too, and of course, there is a fascination with food and tradition that is so typical of the Peranakan.

Lee Su Kim is the author of eight non-fiction books, including two bestsellers, Malaysian Flavours: Insights Into Things Malaysian (2004) and Manglish: Malaysian English At Its Wackiest (1998). Lee is herself of Peranakan parentage. She is a founder member and the first woman president of the Peranakan Baba Nyonya Association of Kuala Lumpur & Selangor.

5. Orang Asli Animal Tales: You learn the most interesting things in this book, like how the once-cruel tapir got its white band and became the timid animal that it is today. And why the flying lemur always hides his tail and flies only by night. And while learning all that, we are also given a peek into the rich scientific and cultural heritage of the orang asli, which is much overlooked in this country.

Lim Boo Liat is a pioneering zoologist in the country who began his career in the Institute for Medical Research in 1947. He started as a laboratory assistant, and in 1969, was awarded a Medical Research Council Fellowship (London) to pursue an MSc at the University of Aberdeen in Britain. After obtaining his PhD at Universiti Sains Malaysia in 1977, he was seconded to the World Health Organisation, where he remained until his retirement in 1987.

6. The Embrace Of Harlots: This sizzling tale is set in Hong Kong at a time when British colonial rule was winding down in preparation for the 1997 hand-over to China. Through the lives of the three main characters – Suen, Po-Chee and Amber – the author examines everything from the struggle for individuality and the effects of foreign occupation to the clash of cultures and the meaning of success, among others.

David T.K. Wong was born in Hong Kong and has degrees in political science and journalism from Stanford University in America and a post-graduate diploma in public administration from the Institute of Social Studies at The Hague. His short stories have appeared in magazines in several countries and have earned him a number of awards.

7. A Bit Of Earth: Set during Malaya’s colonial years, this richly textured novel tells the story of three families inextricably tied to the land: the Wongs, sons of the Chinese earth; the Wees, subjects of the colonial masters; and the Mahmuds, scions of the Malay world. Each family struggles on its bit of earth in a country in flux, and when they meet, hopes clash and tragedy looms.

Christine Lim Suchen was the inaugural recipient of the Singapore Literature Prize for her third novel, Fistful Of Colours (1992). This novel, her fourth, was shortlisted for the same prize in 2004. Apart from co-authoring a play and writing children’s books for schools, Lim has also published short stories in international journals and anthologies and written a non-fiction work, Stories Of The Chinese Overseas (2005).

8. Inspector Singh Investigates: A Bali Conspiracy Most Foul: Inspector Singh, the Singaporean cop who reminds everyone of a favourite uncle, is on secondment to Bali. A bomb has exploded and Singh has been sent to help with anti-terrorism efforts. But there’s a slight problem: he knows squat about hunting terrorists. He’s much better suited to solving murder! So when a body is discovered in the wreckage, killed by a bullet before the bomb went off, it’s Singh’s time to shine.

Shamini Flint is a Cambridge graduate and was a lawyer with British firm Linklaters for 10 years. She travelled extensively in Asia during that period before giving up her practice to concentrate on writing; she now lives in Singapore. Apart from the Inspector Singh series, she has also written several children’s books.

9. Sweet Offerings: You can read this as a fictional story of events that ripped one family apart, and that in itself is affecting. But dig a little deeper into this novel that ranges in time from the 1930s to the 1960s and you’ll also get a taste of Malaysia’s historical, political and cultural changes during its transition from colonial rule to independence and beyond.

Yap Chan Ling was born in Kuala Lumpur. She was educated in Malaysia and subsequently in Britain where she obtained a PhD in Economics. She lectured at Universiti Malaya before joining the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation in Rome, where she worked for 19 years; she now lives in Britain. Sweet Offerings is her first novel.

10. Under The Sun: From murders to mysterious disappearances, from distorted childhood memories to unfulfilled desires, from flights of fantasy to brutal ruptures of reality, Under The Sun delivers more of this author’s keen and honest observations on human flaws and foibles and the revelatory moments of life.

O Thiam Chin was born in 1977 and lives in Singapore. He is the author of three collections of short stories, Free-Falling Man (2006); Never Been Better (2009), which was longlisted for the 2010 Frank O’ Connor Short Story Award; and Under The Sun (2010). He was an honorary fellow of the Iowa International Writing Program in 2010. Having just completed his fourth story collection, he is currently working on his first novel, which is his reaction to the devastation of the Asian Tsunami in 2004. – Malini Dias

The Popular-The Star Readers’ Choice Awards 2011 are a precursor to BookFest@Malaysia 2011, which will be held at the Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre from Aug 27 to Sept 4.

Fixi-ated on Fiction

Amir Muhammad has plans to move into Bahasa Malaysia publishing with his new company, Fixi. This is a very exciting development, and it came about like this:

... in August last year during a book event honouring the most popular books of the year. Amir realised that the majority of the 10 best Bahasa Malaysia novels for that year were romance novels. In fact, he was told that most Bahasa Malaysia readers are women, and that the market leaders are romance novels.

“I am not going to be quoted as saying that they’re bad or anything, but I just want something slightly different. Because a lot of these books seem to be targeted at young, Malay women – but what about the rest of the population?” asks Amir.

“It can’t be true that all young Malay women have all the same taste either,” he adds.
He knows of some women writers who told him that they’d tried to pitch a certain idea to a publishing company only to be told that they want only love stories.

“Some even have strict guidelines like ‘the bad guy must not win’ – it’s a market caution thing,” says Amir.

As he had previously read local author Brian Gomez’s thriller Devil Space (he calls it the “best Malaysian novel I’ve ever read”), he wondered, “Wouldn’t it be exciting if we had more books like this, but in Malay where it can reach more people?”

Indeed it would.

 

Readings From Readings at Kinokuniya

Writers Unlimited Tour of KL

We're just a few days away from the Writer's Unlimited Tour - our mini lit-fest happening in June. Please click up to size the poster and the information about the writers taking part. Please pass on the information to your own circle.

Press Release

Writers Unlimited Tour KL/Makassar 2001
June 10,11 & 12th June

Writers Unlimited - the Hague Literature Network (www.winternachten.nl)

Since 1995, Writers Unlimited has focussed its attention on the maintenance and development of the network of writers from both The Netherlands and mainly non-Western countries. Writers Unlimited (formerly known as Winternachten) organises an annual international literature festival in The Hague in January. More than seventy writers, poets, thinkers and musical groups come together for a programme focussing on the presentation of literary work to the public, in addition to hosting cultural and social debate. Apart from its annual festival in The Hague, Writers Unlimited organises literary events abroad, in cooperation with local partner organisations. Once every two years, Writers Unlimited organises a literary festival in each of their partner countries. Amongst their current partner organisations are ITEF Festival in Istanbul, University of Western Cape in South Africa and the Literary Festival Foundation in Surinam. Writers Unlimited is coming to Malaysia, and ‘Readings@CeritAku’ is pleased to be its first local partner.

Readings was created by Malaysian poet/writer Bernice Chauly in January of 2005 as a platform for live literary events, which focusses on emerging and established writers. Sharon Bakar took over as organiser in 2006 for Readings at 67tempinis satu in Bangsar, and Bernice Chauly expanded the literary repertoire to create Readings@CeritAku at KL’s top jazz bar No Black Tie in 2007. Now in its seventh year, both Readings’ are the city’s longest lasting live literary events.

“I was fortunate to have been invited to tour as a writer/poet with Writers Unlimited last year to the Dutch Antilles, Suriname and South Africa and was privileged and honoured to have seen the work that Writers Unlimited does in countries outside the Netherlands. As a result of this collaboration, Writers Unlimited has decided to come to Kuala Lumpur to seek new shores and to work with Malaysian writers and thinkers”.

The theme of the festival is Writing the Truth – Fact of Fiction? We are fortunate to have four touring writers of various origins from the Netherlands, Turkey, Egypt and the US who will be performing in languages as diverse as Arabic, Dutch, Turkish and English. Our five Malaysian writers will perform in Bahasa Malaysia and English. Writers will discuss their own work as intersections of history, politics and autobiography. Is fiction ‘the lie’ that can help us get at ‘the truth’? Or do we rely on fact as truth to then fictionalise new versions of the truth?

This three-day event will incorporate readings, panel discussions and a visit to a local university. This small literary festival has the potential to invigorate and inspire many who write, think and enjoy discourse.

We hope to see you there!
Bernice Chauly
(festival director)
Bernice Chauly (festival director)

012 323 0929/mulutmata@gmail.com


Bernice Chauly is a writer, poet, photographer, filmmaker and actor who has worked extensively in the arts in KL for twenty years. She has worked on many award-winning projects and has also written, acted and directed for the stage and screen. Her photographs have also been exhibited locally and internationally. She has published two collections of poems, a collection of short stories and has performed in literary festivals all over the world. Her upcoming fictive memoir, Growing Up With Ghosts, chronicles a hundred years of her Punjabi and Chinese family diasporas and stories will be published later this year. She lives in KL with her two daughters.