New Biog of Mahathir Isn't Reaching Shops

800 copies of an authoritative new biography of our former PM entitled Malaysian Maverick: Mahathir Mohamad in Turbulent Times have been held up for the past three weeks at customs at Port Klang. Says The Asian Sentinel, the book written by former Asian Wall Street Journal Managing Editor Barry Wain :

... is a warts-and-all, critical but fair account of Mahathir's 22 years in power. It is certain to become an essential study for scholars seeking to understand the onetime premier's reign and its consequences. But maybe not in Malaysia itself unless the locals buy through Barns & Noble (available Jan. 10) or Amazon (Jan. 5) for US$60.75.

And the piece gives a lovely insight into how a book can be prevented from reading its audience without ever actually being banned by time time honoured practice of foot-dragging :

Foreign published books air-freighted into Malaysia often go through customs without being checked, or with only a cursory check at the airport. Books sent by ship or by land from Singapore are often stopped for inspection, however, which can mean customs officers spending weeks reading the material. Sometimes they just sit on the book, leaving the publisher with little option but to withdraw it or be faced with being hit with storage charges, leaving the book effectively banned without the government having to face criticism for formally banning it.

Aliran says that this is

... nothing short of crude and reckless censorship, although indirect, the effect is the same. It very undemocratically denies Malaysians reading material that should be made freely available to all and sundry. This book is of particular interest to citizens who are appalled by the disclosure that under Mahathir RM100 billion could have been squandered. They have been waiting anxiously to find out how this atrocity involving a mammoth, mind-boggling amount could have happened without anybody commenting on this extravagance.

(One silly silly line at the end of the piece :

But for readers who buy Kindle or another electronic reader, it's easy to get.

because of course there isn't a single e-reader for the Malaysian market as yet !)

More about the book on Anak Bangsa Malaysia's blog.

Update 27/12 :

This from The Star :

The book Malaysian Maverick: Mahathir Mohamad in Turbulent Times is not being put through any additional scrutiny by the Home Ministry.

It has been withheld to undergo the normal process for any foreign publication, said ministry deputy secretary-general Datuk Ahmad Fuad Abdul Aziz.

“Studying the content is the usual process for any publication from abroad and the book written by Barry Wain is no exception,” Ahmad Fuad said in a statement yesterday.

He said this was to ensure the publication’s contents would not jeopardise national security and public safety.

He said the ministry had 60 days from the time it was submitted to decide if the book should be allowed to be distributed in the country.

Authors' Letters Go the Way of the Dinosaur

When was the last time you took pen to paper and wrote a letter? In this digital age, we are at risk of losing one of the greatest communication tools of all-time - the letter. ...

The Abebooks blog looks at a treasury of author letters that they have up for sale. Here's Ray Bradbury's illustrated letter to Herman Kogan (left); an invitation to tea with Conan Doyle; Vladimir Nabokov's contract with Doubleday, and much more.

But the question they raise is a very important one:

Today we can look back at the great minds of yesteryear through their letters that collectors and libraries treasure. Will anyone keep the emails of Ian McEwan or the Twitter tweets of Neil Gaiman?

In a piece at The New York Times some time back, Rachel Donadio addressed these same concerns :

The problem isn't that writers and their editors are corresponding less, it's that they're corresponding infinitely more -- but not always saving their e-mail messages. Publishing houses, magazines and many writers freely admit they have no coherent system for saving e-mail, let alone saving it in a format that would be easily accessible to scholars. Biography, straight up or fictionalized, is arguably one of today's richest literary forms, but it relies on a kind of correspondence that's increasingly rare, or lost in cyberspace.

It isn't just letters that future generations will miss out on as they try to gain an insight into the inner workings of authors' minds - but also perhaps things like notebooks, drafts and annotated manuscripts since so much of our thinking now is done at the keyboard. Maybe authors need to be proactive in storing their stuff and letting others know where and how it is stored?

Holroyd's Magic Carpet

Sebastian Barry has won a second major prize for The Secret Scripture, carrying off the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction (Britain's oldest literary award) last night.

The award for biographer, meanwhile, went to Michael Holroyd, who has won it more than four decades after his wife Margaret Drabble won for fiction with Jerusalem the Golden! His book A Strange Eventful History, is about 19th-century Shakespearean actors, Ellen Terry and Henry Irving and their families. It was written over a period of seven years, while Holroyd was suffering from bowel cancer. He says :

Whenever I could escape from the sick room, I used to immerse myself in another world, of actors in the Edwardian age ... I hoped that need to get away from sickness and enter another world would give the writing an additional intensity. It was a magic carpet, and I was the time traveller.

You can read reviews of the book at The Washington Post and The Independent.

'Horses' Takes James Tait Black Prize

The results of the world's oldest book award, The James Tait Black Memorial Prizes have been announced [via]. Rosalind Belben's Our Horses in Egypt won the fiction prize.

This from the website :

Two stories intertwine in Belben’s finely written novel – that of Philomena, a horse serving in Egypt and Palestine during the First World War, and Griselda, her daughter Amabel and Nanny, the original owners of the horse before her requisition, who travel across Egypt to find her. That Philomena’s stoicism and duty is as apparent as her owners is testament to Belben’s ability to give life and language to animals as well as humans. She does this without any sense of strain or anthropomorphism, through a rich and innovative use of language that never slips into the sentimental. An innovatively plotted and convincingly executed novel.

The novel is reviewed by dovegreyreader, and by Jane Shilling in the Telegraph.

The biography prize went to Rosemary Hill for God's Architect: Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain, which took the author 15 years to write

Augustus Welby Pugin (1812-1852) — think Big Ben, think the spire of the ‘Hub’ near the top of the Royal Mile in Edinburgh — was an eccentric but influential designer of everything from cathedrals to plant-pots who paved the way for High Victorian Gothic and sowed the seeds of the later Arts and Crafts movement. He also led a personal life of colourful complexity (and sad brevity) at the centre of the mid-century ‘English Catholic’ revival. Rosemary Hill’s very full and readable biography does justice to all the facets of the man and his work, and relates them outward to a fast-changing world beyond.

Professor Colin Nicholson, of the University of Edinburgh and one of the judges, praised the two books for their readability, although he said (most diplomatically) that all the shortlisted titles would have been worthy of the prize.

The James Tait Black Memorial Prizes are awarded to one work of fiction and one work of biography each year.

Nasty Naipaul

You might remember Paul Theroux's Sir Vidia's Shadow, the novelist and travel writer's memoir of his 30 year (somewhat troubled) relationship with the author V.S. Naipaul, who was once his mentor and friend.

Now in the Times, Theroux responds to a new biography which he sees as complete vindication for his own harsh treatment of Sir Vidia between the pages. Describing Naipaul as :

... a grouch, a skinflint, tantrum-prone, with race on the brain. He was then, and continued to be, an excellent candidate for anger management classes, sensitivity training, psychotherapy, marriage guidance, grief counselling and driving lessons – none of which he pursued.

reading Patrick French’s authorised (!) biography, The World Is What It Is, he finds that he didn't know :

... the half of all the horrors. ... Now French’s biography amply demonstrates everything I said and more. It is not a pretty story; it will probably destroy Naipaul’s reputation for ever, this chronicle of his pretensions, his whoremongering, his treatment of a sad, sick wife and disposable mistress, his evasions, his meanness, his cruelty amounting to sadism, his race baiting. Then there is the “gruesome sex”, the blame shifting, the paranoia, the disloyalty, the nasty cracks and the whining, the ingratitude, the mood swings, the unloving and destructive personality.

Sounds completely unmissable actually!

(Thanks Jordan for the link.)

Monumental Matisse

I was impressed to see that Walker had a story about the Whitbread Book of the Year up before the media got it! Bloggers are out at the front of the field ...

The £30,000 prize is awarded to the best book overall, from all the other Whitbread categories. I don't envy the judges, having to make comparisons across genre, and apparently last night the voting was the closest in the prize's two-decade history.

In the end, the winner was not odds on favourite Ali Smith for The Accidental, or Tash (whom previously won the first novel award, if you remember), or Kate Thompson's children's book The New Policeman, or poet Christopher Logue's Iliad epic ... but the second volume of Hilary Spurling's biography of the artist Matisse.

Matisse The Master has been described as monumental and ground-breaking and took the author 15 years to write. (An earlier volume about Matisse's early work, The Unknown Matisse, covered his evolution into a painter.) The work has been widely praised and Michael Morpurgo, who chaired the judges, said of it:

So many people felt it was a massive work, but yet it didn't read like it. It read like a story. ... We were reading about this man and his pictures and the life that he had, his family and his travels. Somehow she managed to paint a picture of a painter that was accessible to people not necessarily familiar with art. It was an extraordinary achievement to write a book that length and you get to the end and you're sorry it's finished.

Check out this review of the book from the Sunday Times.

The painting below comes without the usual (for Malaysia) censor's black pen bikini, lest our eyes fall out of our heads for looking at such forbidden fruit! If you want to know more about Matisse's work and see some of his art, go here.

And if you want to read the book ... it's going on my must-buy list for the British Council Library.

Bits of Burgess

In a shop called Bookthrift in South Kensington, I found the Biswell biography of Anthony Burgess I mentioned some time ago, and there and then skim read the Malaysian part. (Too poor to buy it for now.) See if you can recognise the following very famous poem which Burgess attempted to translate into Malay:

Bulan April ia-lah bulan yang dzalim sa-kali
membawa bunga lilac daripada tanah mati
menchamporkan ingatan dengan nafsu.

I say attempted because I think Burgess gave up before he got much further. It's one thing to be able to find equivalent words and quite another to cope with all the references to things that the local audience has had no experience of.

A Malaysian audience would ask: What's so special about April? Why is it "cruel"? And what's a lilac anyway?

How can anyone who hasn't experienced it first-hand truly understand the stirrings of new life after the grey and freezing winter?

It's a lesson I wish could be learned by those who set the literature syllabuses here! I've already mentioned the ubiquitous Daffodils. And then there's Sonnet 18 on the present SPM syllabus - how do you explain to Malaysian kids just why a poet might want to compare his lady love to a hot sunny day when we suffer from an overabundance of heat and sun?

Burgess apparently wrote a book called English Literature: A Survey for Schools while he was in Malaya just prior to independence. This quote may well cheer you all up:

Chinese, Malays, Africans and Indians reading this book may well themselves contribute to English literature.

They may. They just may!
Burgess also wrote a piece for orchestra called Symphoni Malaya. I've never heard it performed and have no idea if it's any good or not. But maybe the MPO could resurrect it!