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Much of his short fiction though remains unpublished and there is also the hope (probably unfounded)  that there may be some unpublished works in his safe that  could at last see light of day.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

Colum McCann Takes NBA Fiction Prize

The National Book Award winners were announced November 18 during a ceremony in New York City. These are probably the major US awards after the Pulitzer Prize, and there are several categories.

The prize for fiction went to Irish author Colum McCann for Let the Great World Spin, which is based on life in New York City in the 1970s. The piece was described as an "indelibly hallucinatory portrait of a decaying city" by judges.

T. J. Stiles wins the non-fiction award for The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt, and Keith Waldrop, the poetry award for Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy. Phillip Hoose took the Young People's Literature Prize for Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice.

Gore Vidal wins an award for distinguished contribution to American letters, while Dave Eggars wins the Literian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community.

This year there was also a bonus prize to mark the awards' 60th anniversary. The public voted online for the Best of the National Book Awards, and the winner was Flannery O'Connor's The Complete Stories. Finalists included books by John Cheever, Ralph Ellison, William Faulkner, Thomas Pynchon and Eudora Welty.

You can find interviews with all these authors and information about the books on the NBF website.

Ioannis at Borders

You can catch up with author Ioannis Gatsiounis at Borders, The Curve between 3-4pm this Saturday, where he will be signing copies of his new collection of short fiction Velvet and Cinder Blocks.

Ioannis Interviewed

Fiction is something I’ve quietly been pursuing alongside the news analysis. Media is seductive in that it offers an immediate outlet to voice your concerns. But it’s not well suited to explore how relationships between individuals and communities play out against the backdrop of the larger world. And I was finding post-9/11, post-Iraq that those two realms—the personal on the one hand, and the external, which has become increasingly politicised—were growing inextricable. Fiction was better suited to explore that relationship.

Malaysian-based American writer and freelance foreign correspondent, Ioannis Gatsiounis, talks to Eric Forbes of MPH about his new collection of stories Velvet and Cinder Blocks.

And here he is too on this week's Fairly Current Show, talking to Fahmi Fadzil :

... about writing stories, living in and responding to all things Malaysian, and his most recent collection of writings ...

And notice how he slips into saying "we" when he talks about Malaysia, a sure sign of being hooked by the country.

Anyway, started reading the book today ...

Ioannis Turns to Fiction

Another local author deserving a cheer is Ioannis Gatsiounis with his collection of short stories entitled Velvet & Cinder Blocks. (Thank you ZI Publications for sending me a copy!) Here's the blurb :

Ioannis Gatsiounis’s debut collection of short stories brilliantly captures the spirit of the individual who struggles to define himself in a world where the idea of identity is both concrete and perpetually fleeting, a world where loyalties, friendships and family ties can alter in an instant. A young painter follows a false prophet deep into a desert. A pious rape victim struggles to see past her faith in the aftermath of a tsunami. A Chinese-American’s Chineseness is put to the test in multi-racial Malaysia. A young Malay caretaker and his lone guest at a remote guest house struggle to find direction and compassion in an era of stark civilisational divides.

With these ten beautifully imagined and decadently engrossing stories, Gatsiounis offers us a timely, penetrating meditation on intimacy, alienation and triumph in the post 9/11 world.

(Click covers up to size to read.)

Ioannis' last book was, of course, Beyond the Veneer and some of you will have caught him reading from it at Readings@Seksan last year. (Susan Loone has a very good review of the book here.)

You can find his short story, Fathers, at QLRS.

Life After Booze

Much ink has been spilled on the question of why so many writers are alcoholics. Of America’s seven Nobel laureates, five were lushes—to whom we can add an equally drunk-and-disorderly line of Brits: Dylan Thomas, Malcolm Lowry, Brendan Behan, Patrick Hamilton, Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis, all doing the conga to (in most cases) an early grave. According to Donald Goodwin in his book “Alcohol and the Writer”: Writing involves fantasy; alcohol promotes fantasy. Writing requires self-confidence; alcohol bolsters confidence. Writing is lonely work; alcohol assuages loneliness. Writing demands intense concentration; alcohol relaxes.

But what happens when a writer stops drinking? asks Tom Shone in Intelligent Life Magazine. Does the writing become pedestrian, lose its vigour? He looks at the careers of some of the greatest American authors - F Scott Fitzgerald, John Cheever, Hemingway. Raymond Carver stands out as the writer who eventually gave up the bottle after a long struggle and realised a new creative vitality :

For a year he wrote nothing (“I can’t convince myself it’s worth doing”), just played bingo and got fat on doughnuts, but then he remarried, and he went on to write some of his best work—he was nominated for a Pulitzer prize for his story collection, “Cathedral”, illuminating the downtrodden blue-collar lives he had written about before with unexpected moments of revelation and connection.

The Thomas Pynchon Voice-Over

Thomas Pynchon is a noted literary recluse. Despite being the best-selling author of V and Gravity's Rainbow and achieving cult status for his writing, so little is know about him that he was once described by CNN as :

... an enigma shrouded in a mystery veiled in anonymity. ... you won't see Pynchon hawking his wares on Oprah's book club. You won't find him signing his name for fans down at the corner bookstore. ... He so shuns publicity that he doesn't allow his likeness to be used on book jackets. All known photographs of the man date to the early 1950s. Until Nancy Jo Sales of New York Magazine tracked him down last year, no reporter had interviewed him in four decades.

He did, it's true appear in an episode of The Simpsons (and don't you love the paper bag!) :



and he did (remember?) step forward to defend Ian McEwan against that plagiarism charge.

Now, in his closest brush with public life for decades, Pynchon reads in the trailer for his new book Inherent Vice [via Reading Copy]. Enjoy! :



In these days when authors are expected to have a high public profile to publicise their work, I think it's really nice to read about a writer who is able to keep his mystique and let his work talk for him.

Twitter Revenge

Your book got a lousy review? Twitter seems to be the tool of choice for hitting back at the reviewer.

Alice Hoffman called Boston Globe critic Roberta Silman a moron for this review (which actually contains plenty that isn't negative!) and demanded to know :

How do some people get to review books? Now any idiot can be a critic.

She then tweeted (is there such a verb, or should that be twote?) Silman's phone number and email address to the world asking her followers to :

... tell her what u think of snarky critics ...

This bordered on harrassment writes Kate Ward at Entertainment Weekly who adds a rather amusing aside :

Thanks to a tipster, we stumbled upon an interview with author Richard Ford, in which he admits to putting a gunshot hole through a book written by a writer who panned one of his books. The reviewer? Alice Hoffman.

UCL's professor of English, John Mullan in The Guardian reckons we can expect more authors sounding off on Twitter because it is a safety valve, but reckons that the best response to a less than good review is a dignified silence. This blogger agrees.

Postscript :

Philip Hensher writes in The Telegraph :

The danger of the internet ... is not so much that anyone can express their opinion – if that is true, everyone is also free to ignore that opinion – but the way it sets a casual statement in stone, and propagates it freely. An author's response to a bad review may be immediate, but the heartfelt expression of your emotional pain is there for as long as anyone chooses to preserve it. ... A comment in conversation, a bad-tempered grunt over breakfast, disappears into thin air; five foul-tempered sentences responding to a blog stay there indefinitely. In former times, what preserved your writing was what came out in hard covers.

Revisiting Bradbury

I was so busy rushing headlong into the future, loving libraries and books and authors with all my heart and soul. was so consumed with becoming myself that I simply didn't notice that I was short, homely, and untalented ...

writes Ray Bradbury in the forward to Bradbury Stories: 100 of his Most Celebrated Tales.

I bought the book last night in Kinokunia, hungry to reread the stories that gave me so much pleasure when I was 15 or so, and which weened me off pulp sci-fi comics (the sort of stuff you guys would now call graphic fiction) and probably gave me more reading pleasure than anything else I picked up at that age.

I found them quite by accident : I lived in a small village in the very centre of England, with just one general store with one rotating stand of books for sale, most of which were lurid romances or thrillers.

I was drawn to Bradbury's books by the cover art (and try as I might I can't find pictures of those covers online now). What a happy coincidence it is when the right book and right reader collide!

Almost four decades later (!) I can still remember many of these tales, first encountered in The Illustrated Man and The Golden Apples of the Sun, and despite a jaded palate for reading at the moment (or maybe it's just time to write more?) am so looking forward to re-encountering them and discovering new ones that I didn't find the first time round.

Bradbury is still writing at 90 and recently launched a new collection of stories We'll Always Have Paris. Rob Woodard on The Guardian blog describes Bradbury's latest as being :

... as inventive and life-affirming as ever ...

Now Bradbury, his passion for books burning as strongly as ever, has joined the battle to keep libraries open across the US because :

Libraries raised me ... I don’t believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don’t have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn’t go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years.

Here's Ray Bradbury live at The Beverly Hills Library, with other readers presenting extracts from We'll Always Have Paris :

Debut Novel Wins IMPAC

The world's richest literary prize, the IMPAC Dublin has been awarded to debut novelist Michael Thomas for his novel Man Gone Down. The American author beat off some powerful competition on the shortlist including Junot Dias, Indra Sinha and Mohsin Hamid.

The judges said of the book :

We never know his name. But the African-American protagonist of Michael Thomas’ masterful debut, Man Gone Down, will stay with readers for a long time. He lingers because this extraordinary novel comes to us from a writer of enthralling voice and startling insight. Tuned urgently to the way we live now, the winner of the International Dublin IMPAC Prize 2009 is a novel brilliant in its scope and energy, and deeply moving in its human warmth. ... The first person narrator in Man Gone Down has not fallen, yet. But he stands at a precipice. A black man from Boston married to a white woman with whom he has three children. A once promising Harvard student now broke and working in construction in Brooklyn. When we meet the narrator, he’s had to leave his wife and children with his disapproving mother-in-law, and now has just four days to raise the money necessary to reunite the family and return the children to school.

Thomas explains in The Guardian how the novel came into being. He'd written what he thought was the beginning of a short story collection for his graduate thesis :

... but one of the stories was crying out to become a novel. ... One day I was doing my laundry and I realised the breaks were chapters, not pages, and I started writing a novel. ... I write to images, or lines, and the end came to me – the last two paragraphs, the last line. I was always writing to it. I had to get there.

Robinson Takes the Orange

Marilynne Robinson has won the 2009 Orange Prize for Fiction for her third novel, Home.

Chair of Judges Fi Glover called it :

A kind, wise, enriching novel, exquisitely crafted. We were unanimously agreed – it is a profound work of art.

Her previous novels are Housekeeping (1981) and Gilead (2004) both of which were highly acclaimed and award-winning.

Here's the synopsis :

Jack – prodigal son of the Boughton family, godson and namesake of John Ames (main protagonist of Gilead, Robinson’s last novel), gone twenty years, has returned home looking for refuge and to try to make peace with a past littered with trouble and pain. A bad boy from childhood, an alcoholic who cannot hold down a job, Jack is perpetually at odds with his surroundings and with his traditionalist father, though he remains Boughton’s most beloved child. ... His sister Glory has also returned to Gilead, fleeing her own mistakes, to care for their dying father. Brilliant, loveable, wayward, Jack forges an intense new bond with Glory and engages painfully with his father and his father’s old friend, John Ames.

There's an excellent profile of Robinson by Emma Brockes today in The Guardian.

In her acceptance speech Robinson talked about how fiction could help people “step back” from material obsessions to re-assess “what is to be valued in life”.

A Novel in Stories Wins Pulitzer

The Pulitzer Prizes have also been announced, and the winner in the fiction category is Olive Kitteridge, by Elizabeth Strout :

... a collection of 13 short stories set in small-town Maine that packs a cumulative emotional wallop, bound together by polished prose and by Olive, the title character, blunt, flawed and fascinating.

The New York Times review is here. And you can find an extract here.

The other finalists were :

The Plague of Doves - Louise Erdrich
All Souls -Christine Schutt

Missed Author

Caribbean-American author and creative writing teacher Brenda Flannagan is interviewed in StarMag by Martin Vengadesan. She visited schools in Terengganu to talk to children :

about literature, history and living joyfully

and was apparently in KL to do a reading. I'm sad I didn't know about that ...

Our Lady of the Metaphors

My Facebook buddy, Maximilian Loh, tagged me on his note to share this wondrous classic of overwriting (Click to enlarge to readable size.) :

Because bad writing has to be shared. And pointed-and-laughed at. ... This has to be the worst description of a person/character that I have ever come across, in fiction or not. Hopefully, you'll have as many laughs as I did while reading this.

The original blog entry is here on vadonavan's page on Live Journal and stirred up a lot of comment ... and even some attempts to paint a portrait of the character described, including this one dubbed Our Lady of the Metaphors.

The extract is taken from is the second volume of a fantasy tetralogy Bronwyn : Silk and Steel by one Ron Miller. It managed to muster one and a half stars on Amazon.com.

Arthur C. Clarke is quoted as saying of it :

Ron Miller is unfairly talented.

Though he was probably talking about Miller's ability to cause enormous mirth.

Silk and Steel deserves to become a cult classic ... and I desperately want a copy!

Man and Machine

I recently met up with David Ritchie, an American editor in Korea and the author of 10 Million Tigers a whimsical study of life in Seoul. We had a very interesting conversation over lunch about all manner of things ... and of course, I invited him to blog a post for me! Here t'is :

You may have heard the saying that people tend to look like the cars they drive. One might say something similar about a machine in my life, because the computer I use for writing is starting to resemble me, in more ways than one.

A boxy desktop, the computer always has looked like me to some extent. It is gray, like my beard and clothing, and a bit old-fashioned: it still has that quaint leftover, a floppy A-drive.

But now it has begun to sound like me as well, because my repertory of grunts, moans, gurgles, and yawns sounds uncannily like the noises my computer makes while chewing on data.

This cranky old gadget produces a wide range of vocalizations, from a drone to a sputter, which might as well convey everything from boredom to outrage, with an occasional cough or honk thrown in as if to say “Pay attention!”

Sometimes the computer seems to growl at me as if objecting that I insert too many footnotes (cue mechanical voice: “This is pedantry!”) or switch from English to Korean (“Can’t you choose one language and stick to it?”). Conceivably, it is commenting on the day’s news (“What a pack of lies!”) or complaining about an excessive workload (“ENOUGH!!!!”).

From time to time, I run out of energy and have to take a brief nap at my desk. In similar fashion, my computer simply quits on occasion. Unexpectedly, the screen goes dark, and the CPU falls silent.

The problem, our IT people once told me, is somewhere in the power supply. I can sympathize. Because of diabetes and advancing age, my power supply is faulty too.

On the IT staff’s advice, I unplug the computer for a few seconds, then reconnect it and try again. Obediently, the computer hums back into action, seemingly fresher for its brief slumber (“I needed that!”).

So it goes, day after day, as my machine and I stumble through life together: two old wrecks keeping each other company on their way to the scrap heap. One can only wonder which of us will outlive the other!

I offer my space to anyone else out there who would like to write about any aspect of books and/or writing!

Giving the Mundane its Beautiful Due

The writer must face the fact that ordinary lives are what most people live most of the time, and that the novel as a narration of the fantastic and the adventurous is usually an escapist plot, that aesthetically the ordinary, the banal, is what you must deal with. So I tried to make interesting narratives out of ordinary life by obscure and average Americans.

One of America's greatest authors has passed away yesterday, aged 76, after battling lung cancer. John Updike was that rare animal - a best-selling author who enjoyed literary acclaim winning the Pulitzer twice. His novels include the four novels in the Rabbit series, featuring onetime basketball star Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom who becomes a car dealer in a small town. Perhaps though his most widely known novel was The Witches of Eastwick which was turned into a film. His most recent novel is a sequel : The Widows of Eastwick, which came out last year. A collection of short fiction My Father's Tears and Other Stories is due out in June. The BBC has a list of Updike quotations (from which I took the one above), and here's another lovely one about being a writer:

There's a kind of confessional impulse that not every literate, intelligent person has. A crazy belief that you have some exciting news about being alive, and I guess that more than talent is what separates those who do it from those who think they'd like to do it. That your witness to the universe can't be duplicated, that only you can provide it, and that it's worth providing.

Meanwhile, the tributes flow in. Mitchiko Kakutani in The New York Times calls him :

... arguably this country’s one true all-around man of letters. He moved fluently from fiction to criticism, from light verse to short stories to the long-distance form of the novel ... a literary decathlete in our age of electronic distraction and willful specialization, Victorian in his industriousness and almost blogger-like in his determination to turn every scrap of knowledge and experience into words.... (But) It is as a novelist who opened a big picture window on the American middle class in the second half of the 20th century, however, that he will be best remembered. In his most resonant work, Mr. Updike gave “the mundane its beautiful due,” as he once put it, memorializing the everyday mysteries of love and faith and domesticity with extraordinary nuance and precision. In Kodachrome-sharp snapshots, he gave us the 50’s and early 60’s of suburban adultery, big cars and wide lawns, radios and hi-fi sets, and he charted the changing landscape of the 70’s and 80’s, as malls and subdivisions swallowed up small towns and sexual and social mores underwent a bewildering metamorphosis.

I'll put in links to other interesting pieces as I find them. Postscript : The Guardian has Updike's life in pictures and a whole list of authors including Richard Ford and Toni Morisson pay tribute. I like what Zadie Smith says :

Updike's example seemed the model of a real writer's life, in that this was an existence spent not in talking about writing, promising to write, boasting of having written or telling other people how they should write, but simply in the act of writing, every day, for decades.

There's another piece here by Martin Amis - and I impressed to learn that Updike had four studies in his house, each for a different type of writing! John Mulland and John Sutherland suggest the best titles to begin with, if you're embarking on your own voyage of Updike discovery. The Telegraph has an interview with the author from last year.

Relationship Expert - Aged 9

Would you take love advice from a nine-year old?

That's how old Alec Greven, author of How to Talk to Girls, is. The book inspired by his experiences in the school playground, and based on an essay he wrote for class, is now poised to be a bestseller.

He actually talks a lot of sense! :

Saved from the Fire

My father told me what his most important books were. He named Laura as one of them. One doesn't name a book one intends to destroy.

Wonder (along with The Literary Saloon who wondered first) why Dmitri Nabokov didn't think of this earlier, instead of getting us all hot and bothered about whether he was going to torch his father's last novel or not?

(See also Chris Green's piece in the Independent and an excellent summary of all that's happened at Gawker.com.)

You can also watch an interview with Dmitri from the BBC's Newsnight.

David Foster Wallace Dies

Heard the sad new from Preeta that American author David Foster Wallace took his own life on Friday evening at the age of 46. As Preeta says :

... it's a tremendous loss ... was a genius according to most definitions of the word: a true innovator, a challenger of convention, someone who changed his art form as much as he contributed to it. The art of the novel hasn't been the same since Infinite Jest and his influence is apparent in the work of so many who've followed ...

Timothy Williams writes the New York Times obituary and Michiko Kautani appraises his work.

Postscript :

Obituary by Michael Carlson in the Guardian and a heartfelt blog post by Robert Potts.

Guy Adams in the Independent explores the author's dark side.

Charlie Rose interviews him here.

Harpers provides links to a whole lot of his writing.

Pausch's Last Lecture

What would you say if you knew you were going to die and had a chance to sum up everything that was most important to you?

College professor Randy Pausch lost his battle against pancreatic cancer a few days ago, aged 47. His book The Last Lecture , currently riding high on best seller lists, is based on a talk entitled Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams which Pausch gave to an audience of 400 people at Carnegie Mellon University last September.

His lecture went viral on the internet with more than 10 million people downloading it. Many wrote to Pausch to say that his words had changed his life.

You can watch the whole lecture here if you have an hour or so to spare :



I usually run from books containing pre-digested wisdom, but Pausch is both entertaining and very genuine ... and yes, inspiring.

Here's a line to chew over today :

The brick walls are there for a reason ... The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something.