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.)

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 Naïve and Sentimental Novelist

My review which was in the Reads Monthly section of The Sunday Star yesterday :

What actually happens when we read a literary novel? And what is in the mind of an author when he writes one? These are the central questions addressed by Orhan Pamuk in The Naïve and Sentimental Novelist. And since the Turkish writer is both an avid reader and the Nobel Prize winning author of several internationally acclaimed novels (including Snow, My Name is Red, and The White Castle), he is extremely well-qualified to do so.

The title of the book is taken from the famous essay by Friedrich Schiller . Pamuk’s “naïve” novelists, he says, are unaware of the techniques they are using, and they write spontaneously as if carrying out a natural act, as opposed to “sentimental” or reflective novelists “who are concerned with artificiality of the text and its failure to attain reality”. I have to say though that I did not find the distinction a particularly useful scaffold for Pamuk’s arguments, particularly as the author himself admits that all great novelists ultimately have to be a blend of both. At times, his discussion seems rather abstract and academic, perhaps not surprisingly, as these six linked essays were initially delivered in the form of lectures at Harvard University in 2009.
On Naive and Sentimental Poetry

But it is when he writes more anecdotally and personally that he is at his best. Anyone who has fallen passionately in love with reading will recognize themselves in Pamuk’s descriptions of his younger self, encountering the great works of fiction for the first time, discovering in them important truths about life, and acquiring from them “a breathtaking sense of freedom and self-confidence”. Pamuk draws on the classics for his examples, including Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and War and Peace, James Joyce’s Ulysses, Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, and Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.

Pamuk captures the special magic of the literary form. He describes how the words on the page become invisible as we look through them onto an entire landscape with the ability “to oscillate between the long view and fleeting moments, general thoughts and specific events, at a speed no other literary genre can offer.” We can simultaneously see, he says “the broader picture, the whole landscape, the thoughts of the individual, and the nuances of the character’s mood.”

More than once he refers to the “intense and tiring effort” required to read a literary novel, and he lists a whole lot of different things that the reader actually has to do simultaneously to connect with the text. We observe the scene and follow the narrative, and transform the words on the page into images. Our memory labours intensively to hold all the threads of the story and what we know of the characters. We appreciate the style, make judgments about the moral choices the characters make, and congratulate ourselves for being able to read “a difficult” novel.

As we read, we are constantly wondering, he says, how much of the novel tells of real experience and how much is an act of imagination, and also how much of the author’s own life is invested in the fiction. Indeed, he devotes a whole essay to the topic, but concludes, not surprisingly, that “the novel is not completely imaginary nor completely factual.”

But even as we are deriving pleasure from the surface details of the novel, we are searching at a deeper level for “motive, idea, purpose”, in fact what he calls “a secret centre”. Reading literary fiction, he says, is the act of determining the real centre of the novel, “whose source remains ambiguous but which nevertheless illuminates the whole.” It is the slow uncovering of this centre that gives the reader full satisfaction.

Popular genre fiction, he says, typically lacks this centre, and is read largely for comfort. But he does single out some genre writers (including Patricia Highsmith, John Le Carre, Stanislaw Lem and Philip K. Dick) as authors whose work can be read at a deeper level.

Pamuk is perhaps at his most controversial when he talks about the creation of character in the novel. He suggests that over the past 150 years our curiosity about characters has taken up much more space in the novel than it has in life, and that “It has sometimes become too self-indulgent, almost vulgar”. He believes that “People do not actually have as much character as we find portrayed in novels” , and reckons that human character is not nearly as important in shaping our live as it is made out to be in the novels and literary criticism of the west. This certainly is food for serious thought.

He goes on to attack the idea of the character-driven plot, where the author seems to expect that “… the hero like a prompter on stage will whisper to the novelist the entire course of the novel.” This approach, taught extensively on creative writing courses, “merely goes to show that many novelists begin to write their novels without being sure of their story, and that is the only way they are able to write.” He says that in his own writing his protagonist’s character will be formed, as a real person’s is, by situations and events.

Much of what is written about literature in academic circles is made inaccessible to the ordinary book-lover and writer by the jargon of literary theory. This book can be enjoyed by both the enthusiastic reader and by writers, and should serve to spark deeper discussion of the craft of the novel - whether or not one chooses to agree on all points with Pamuk.

And of course, perhaps more importantly for fans of Pamuk’s work, The Naïve and Sentimental Novelist gives an intriguing insight into the preoccupations and approach to writing of one of the world’s most important authors.

Sellerating Away!

I was very happy to receive my copy of  Clutch, Brake, Sellarator - the compilation of the winning entries for last year's MPH Short Story Competition, for which I was one of the judges. Encountering the stories again reminded me of the morning all those months ago the six of us battled it out over the 20 stories that had been shortlisted for us. And I have to point out that anything I say in this post reflects my own views and not necessarily those of the judging panel as a whole.

There were, you will remember, two grand prize winners.

Tan Twan Eng's  Some Things Will Remain set the bar for the competition very high indeed (as you would expect from a Booker-longlisted author) I loved the control of the piece - not a word is wasted and the story builds and builds to its heart-stopping climax while the peace and beauty of the setting, a lotus-covered lake, contrasts so starkly with the ugliness of the crime. I appreciated too how much is left unsaid, for the reader to bring their own interpretation of events to the story. 

The title story by Ivan Yeo was enjoyed by all the judges for its humour, carefully observed characters (we particularly loved the "not girlfriend"), and strong Malaysian voice. However,  I must confess that I found it a little over-written in places and I personally had a problem with the sudden change of mood at the end which seemed out of keeping with the rest.  But it is a very strong debut piece and I do hope that Ivan keeps writing : control and craft can be learned, but the strong storyteller is there already.

Of the runners-up, the story I thought strongest was Lee Eeleen's The Englishman at Table 19. It is simultaneously a coming-of-age tale, a ghost story, and a comedy exploring the family holiday from hell: it works very well on all these levels.

Pilling Time is a surreal short story by Shih Li Kow which the judges enjoyed very much.  It was very nicely written (and would we expect any less from Shih-Li?)  but I have to say that I preferred her more "rooted-in-the real-world" pieces in Ripples.

The Hunter and the Tigress by Zed Adam Idris is a dark and magical story which captures the smell and feel of the Malaysian rainforest. It's disturbing (I found particularly chilling the scene where the tiger design on the plate begins to move and bites the hand of the man trying to steal it) and it doesn’t give easy answers.  I was interested to see in the notes in the front of the book that this piece had grown from a short short story - because I've told Zed that it feels as if it needs to grow larger still and perhaps become a novella.

Vincent Foo's The Cobra's Mate is set in Sarawak.  I liked that there was plenty of action  and that the writer manages to maintain tension. I was fascinated by the insights into the dayak culture of the time.  


The competition has, I think, been very important in opening up another avenue for local writers, and in encouraging short story writing, and this collection is well worth a read.   I'm looking forward to next year so I can send in an entry myself!

Making Ripples

I approach writing much as I would approach the acquiring of any new skill. Learn the basics, check out what the pros do, practise, get some feedback, then go back through the cycle again. Learn more, read some more, write some more, and try to have some fun along the way.

Frank O'Connor shortlisted author Shih-Li Kow talks to Daphne Lee in Starmag about writing her collection Ripples, and about how she writes and gets her ideas.

And I review the book here. The last line of the review has changed, and I intended it to read :

The best pieces in the collection display Kow as an intelligent and subtle short story writer, with a firm grip on her craft. She is an excellent prose stylist, and there’s a musicality in her writing which makes it seems effortless. Ripples confirms her as one of the best writers in the form in the country, and one feels that the book can stand proudly beside its competitors on the Frank O’Connor Short Story Prize shortlist.

Personal is Political

(This review of Preeta Samarasan's Evening is the Whole Day appeared in the July 2008 edition of Off The Edge.)

It’s a twenty to ten on a September morning in 1980, and the Rajasekharan family of Big House, 79, Kingfisher Lane, Ipoh family are assembled to pack their disgraced servant, Chellum, back on the bus to Gopeng. Lawyer Raju Rajasekharan (known throughout the novel simply as Appa) stands at the gate in the rain with Chellum’s wheedling, drunken father, while the two youngest children, Aasha and Suresh are kept at the breakfast table to bear witness to their mother’s scarcely contained fury as the hapless girl bumps three-wheeled, broken-strapped suitcase down the stairs.

We don’t immediately know Chellum’s crime (though Amma plants the rumour that she may be pregnant) but we are told that a year from now Chellum will be dead. This is not at all the spoiler it may at first seem, because this is a novel entirely concerned with excavating the past: the narrative seeks causes, and causes of causes, moving backwards in tiny increments of time, even while unveiling the larger story of an immigrant family’s rise from humble beginnings.

We soon learn that there’s been a death in the family. Appa’s formidable mother, Paati has died under mysterious circumstances in the bathroom, and Chellum is to be blamed for it. But just as the 1980 TV series Dallas (much loved by Malaysian audiences) invited viewers to ponder “Who killed J.R.?” so it appears as the novel unfolds that Chellum isn’t the only one complicit in her death. And as it turns out, this isn’t the only skeleton rattling round in the family cupboard. As the layers of lies and evasions are peeled away, no-one (not even Paati, not even sweet little Aasha) is entirely innocent, and convenient and face-saving fiction is invented to hide uncomfortable truths.

Since the powerless are always the most convenient scapegoats, carrying away in a metaphoric sense the sins of the rest, and so it is with Chellum and Appa’s brother (the quaintly named Uncle Ballroom). Both are unceremoniously packed off baseless pretexts when their real crime was actually to have been witness to much more.

Despite the god-like authority of the narrator, the narrative stays closest to six-year old Aasha, the latest in a long literary line of child protagonists drawn into an adult world in a way they cannot understand or really cope with. (There is, incidentally, a beautiful nod to Ian McEwan’s Atonement in the scene where the children put on a play for their parents.)

Watchful and aware, Aasha is the main witness the novel’s events and the keeper of secrets. She is even on speaking terms with the Big House’s ghosts, the most permanent of which are the daughter of the previous owner of the house, forever trapped in her last memory of being pulled into a mining pond as her abandoned mother committed suicide, and the ghost of Paati, who returns from the ashes of her funeral pyre even more grotesque and lizard-like than when she was alive.

The dispatch of Chellum is only the last in a series of events which have rocked Aasha’s world. The most painful has been the sudden change in her once doting older sister Uma before she leaves to study in America, and the child’s heartbreak is palpable.

Although on a the surface a story about a particular, dysfunction family in Ipoh, the novel must also be read on a higher level, the personal and domestic reflecting the national and political. For, just as Saleem Sinai in Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children is born at the exact moment his country gains independence, and his own fortunes are closely paralleled by those of India, so too the events taking place in the house on Kingfisher Lane echo those of the wider nation. At Independence, the house is taken over from Mr. MacDougall, a dyspeptic Scottish tin-miner, and on the stroke of midnight 31st Aug 1957, Appa’s father, Tata, switches on the light switches for the first time. Appa himself has great schemes, both personal and political, and in 1959 sets out to find a bride as “the first part of his five year plan”.

Chapter 7 is the only part of the novel where the action moves beyond the claustrophobic atmosphere of Big House, opening the novel up to light and air in much the same way as a garden courtyard serves an old Malaysian mansion. Uma and her mother make a trip to visit family in Kuala Lumpur. Amma is heavily pregnant with Suresh. Riots break out in the city, preventing their return home, and Amma is about to deliver and needs to get to hospital. The date : May 13th 1969.

May 13th has left deep scars the Malaysian psyche, yet the race riots and their causes have remained the great unwritten about in Malaysia fiction. The only other author willing to enter this territory was Lloyd Fernando with Green is the Colour, and even then the actual conflict remains largely in the background. Samarasan plunges her characters into the thick of the action and exposes the racist sentiments of the various groups in a way that Malaysian readers may indeed find unsettling.

So much remains unanswered about this dark incident in Malaysian history and so it is fitting that the author handles this part of the using personified Rumour (in a red dress) and Fact (in coat and tales) dancing a grotesque tango in the streets. “Some events and emotions are so huge that they don’t seem to be governed by the laws of realism,” Samarasan has said. Malaysian readers will of course know only too well that Rumour and Fact will continue to dance in a country where press freedoms are limited.

Samarasan is clearly critical of the insularity of her characters. Despite living in an ostensibly multi-cultural society, the Rajasekharan family have little contact with Malaysians of different races, and don’t even deign to learn the national language. It is ironic of course, that at the same time the children’s frame of reference includes so much that is imported from the west such as Wrigley’s chewing gum, Hawaii Five-O, The Wind in the Willows and Simon and Garfunkel. Malaysians of all racial backgrounds will recognise the phenomena of the cultural cocoon.

Just as we have our scapegoats in the foreground of the novel, so too they appear in the background. Appa is involved in the conduct of a murder case of one Angela Lim found stuffed sown a manhole near Tarcian convent school. Is Shamsuddin bin Yusof really the murderer, or has he been conveniently framed? Malaysian readers will of course immediately spot the anachronistic references, to more recent murder cases and tabloid scandals which have captured the national imagination.

Not only is Evening is the Whole Day an extremely intelligent novel which works on different levels, and explores a variety of themes, the writing is simply stunning. The style, while evocative of other Indian authors influenced by the exuberance Rushdie such as Arundhati Roy and Kiran Desai (against whose work comparisons are bound to be made), also draws on the darkness of the gothic, and as far as I’m aware, no other writer has managed to better use absolute misery for such comic effect since Stella Gibbon’s Cold Comfort Farm.

There’s a playfulness and a sensual love of the language which means that every sentence, every single paragraph gives an almost physical pleasure and must be fully savoured, and the imagery is fresh and frequently surprising. There is too a sharp eye for the tiniest of details and Samarasan delights in long lists with one object piled onto another which not only achieve a kind of a poetry, but also add to the cluttered and claustrophobic atmosphere of Big House.

Samarasan has moved away from the frangipani and jasmine scents of much Asian fiction, confounding perhaps a Western audience’s expectations of a certain kind of exoticism. There are to put it bluntly, and awful lot of scatological references: shit seeps into many of the scenes whether the stench from Amma’s mother improvised chamber pot doing battle with the smells of the family dinner, or Chellum’s “volcanic attack of diarrhea, all rapid fire bangs and squeaks and liquiescent bursts”, or the anonymous “sly lingering fart” on Ipoh railway station platform.

Perhaps more remarkably, in a novel published overseas and aimed at an international market, a great many local words, both Tamil and Malay are woven into dialogue in the way that Malaysian speakers actually do speak These words are not italicized, not footnoted, not explained in a glossary and not in any sense apologised for. This is as much a political decision as a literary one. As Samarasan has pointed out in an interview with Quill magazine :

“Schoolchildren studying literature in the colonies had to navigate Cockney speech patterns, imagine for themselves what toad-in-the-hole might taste like, picture moors and bogs and fens and determine the emotional significance of each of these landscapes. Now we get to tell our own stories, and this requires your dealing with my rubber estates and char kuay teow and cursing in Tamil. In the long run, this will be good for all of us. A little cultural immersion never did anyone any harm.”

Samarasan is an astonishingly self-assured young author who seems to have hit the ground running at first attempt. She plays with our expectations of an Asian novel in Evening is the Whole Day, revisiting the well-worked genre of the Indian family saga with a freshness that easily transcends all the stereotypes. And for a Malaysian reading public hungry for fiction that explores political and social issues unflinchingly, and Evening is the Whole Day will be seen a fearless burst into new territory.

Perhaps we’re getting a little blasé these days, but our Malaysian authors have done enormously well on the world stage recently, winning and being nominated for major international awards. I think we can expect Samarasan to add one or two more to the national mantelpiece.

All the Lonely People

I asked you a couple of days ago what you are reading and it's only fair I should reciprocate! I have a fair bit of catching up to do here. Here's a start.

The book I've enjoyed most recently is far and away No-one Belongs Here More than You, Miranda July's funny, sad, startling collection of short stories that won the Frank O'Connor last year. You may remember that the book comes with different coloured covers so that you can coordinate your copy with your clothes. I bought mine via Abebooks and got a bright green copy which clashed a bit with my wardrobe. (Just read on Eric's blog that he found copies at MPH Midvalley but he doesn't say what colour.)

Often bordering on the bizarre, these 16 stories of lonely misfits, injured by life, aching for love and acceptance would really hurt to read, but the characters are survivors, buffered by their rich fantasy lives.

The protagonist of Shared Patio longs to write for a magazine advice column and the story is sprinkled with offbeat advice. She builds fantasies around her neighbour which she gets close to fulfilling when he has an epileptic fit on the shared patio one day.

In Swim Team a woman coaches a swimming team comprising old people in her apartment and without the aid of water (although she does provide them with bowls when they need to practice breathing exercises!)

A woman dreams of an erotic encounter with Prince William in Majesty and awake plots how she might meet him.

In The Sister A lonely man is set up on a date with a colleague's sister who never turns up, and turns out never to have existed. Perhaps it doesn't matter in the end.

It's hard to pick a favourite, but Something That Needs Nothing is a love story that broke my heart. This Person is about how we will always go on sabotaging ourselves is as perfect a short short story as they come, and you can read the whole thing here.

I wonder it everyone reading the book will find themselves reflected in this book. Do you feel as lonely, as out of sync with the world, as uncertain, as July's characters?

It's frightening to admit, but I do sometimes. I really do! And if you say yes too, I think I will look at you oddly (as of course you will have to look at me). Maybe this is the great unsayable - we aren't as together as we'd like the world to think we are.

But when you look at Miranda July, who successful, young and beautiful, everything her characters are not, you wonder how the hell she channels these voices!

I feel like turning the book over and beginning it all over again. This is a collection that is staying on my writing desk to stir up my slothful own muse.

Here's a video from a really fun literary event organised around the book by Strangers in Seattle, and you can hear the author reading excerpts that are bound to have you rushing out for the book.

Just make sure you coordinate clothes and handbag and shoes.

Elmo's Story

I'm just a very ordinary man who wrote a book and they called me a novelist after that.

said award-winning Sri Lankan author Elmo Jayawardena very modestly at the MPH Breakfast club last Saturday.

I finished Elmo's first novel, Sam's Story a couple of day's back and very much enjoyed it. The story is narrated by a young man called Sam, who is mentally slow and illiterate, and who finds employ as a domestic servant with a family at "the river house". Alternating chapters unravel the story of Sam's growing up in a village in the rural Kalutera district where the poverty is absolute, and the only jobs to be had are tapping rubber or digging sand ... and for the young men, joining the Sri Lankan army to fight the on-going civil war.

The novel is largely based on real life. There actually is a Sam and he still works for Elmo (who "drives areobblanes" for a living) and his family, and many of the incidents described in the book with such humour and affection really did happen. (Elmo took out his family photos to show me Sam and the house by the river before the event began.)

The background about Sam's family and childhood which real Sam was unable to tell him, he filled in from his own experiences of growing up dirt poor, often going without food, and from his charity work with the poor.

There is reality in the real sense of it ... when a person is poor they don't have hope.

In the book, Sam's voice is convincingly realised and his quirky way of seeing the world acquires it's own logic. (Why have a statue in the garden of a boy pissing into the fish pond when he can do it just as well? Why pack away the Christmas tree when it will only need to be brought out again next year? Why isn't the dog his when he loves it most?)

He's aware of the ironies too. The family dog gets the best medical treatment and a stream of visitors when he gets food poisoning. Sam's mother has to walk miles and wait hours for medical treatment, and is prescribed medicine and an improved diet which they can't afford. His master's family have two children who are educated overseas and who barely think about the civil war. Sam's brothers are conscripted, and one killed while the other becomes a deserter.

The war enters the household in the form of conversations between the master and his friends over drinks - everyone expounds on what should be done, but no-one really has answers. Meanwhile in the kitchen, there is enmity between Sam and the two servants Janet and Leandro. Sam doesn't know what the war is about but he knows that the Tamils are supposed to be the enemy of the Sinhalese.

But as the Masters wife (hey, this is my friend Dil!) says, sadly shaking her head each soldier in the conflict is some mother's son and really it is as simple as that.

As Elmo said at MPH :

We hate because we do not know them, and we will not know them because we hate.

I find it really interesting that Elmo the author is so easily able to slip inside another skin, and see himself too through that person's eyes. (He isn't always complimentary about Elmo the character!) The ending of the novel, thank goodness, is fiction.

The real Sam is unable to comprehend that he has become the hero of a book and that a lot of people travel to meet him, but in the pages of this book he becomes the perfect vehicle to explore the effects of poverty and war on the the ordinary Sri Lankan citizen.

Sisterhood!

I've sat on this review of Shirley Lim's Sister Swing for an awful long time, but because Shirley is back and launching her next book Princess Shawl at Silverfish today, it seemed an appropriate time to actually put my notes together. I've also noticed that I get an awful lot of hits from folks - students? - looking for information about the novel so I get very guilty when I spot those visitors on my site meter! Here 'tis then :

Some years ago Shirley Lim wrote a story called Mr. Tan’s Girls which won the Asiaweek short story contest and found its way into several anthologies, including The Merlion and the Hibiscus which is where I first came across it.

In Sister Swing, she picks up the same cast of characters and replays the short story in the first chapter. But this time the father, Ah Kong, meets his end in a rather more shocking manner - he dies after seeing his two elder daughters examining their private parts in a mirror! (It's a terrible secret the elder sisters share and I was surprised Lim didn't make much more of this later in the novel).

The novel is the story of three sisters, Yen, Swee Yin and Paik, and the narration moves between them with Lim inventing a separate voice for each of them.

Swee Yin, nicknamed Sister Swing, is really the character at the centre of the story. She sees the family name wing as “an occult name … conjuring feathers and flight" and the metaphor is a fitting one because she does indeed test her wings and is the first to fly the nest.

The sisters are left a tidy sum of money in their father's will and Swee decides to take up a course in New York State, where she is incredibly lonely. She's also the first sister to discover love, and has an affair with her lecturer, Professor Lopez.

The complex relationship between the sisters and their various rivalries is very well drawn. Yen, whom Swee refers to as "my oldest sister who grew up to become younger than me" grows up a little lazy, more laid back than Swee Yin, and very much dependent on her younger sister.

Lim spoke at a reading at Silverfish some time ago about the problems that writing the voice of this characters in such a way that it retained something of the quality of Malaysian English, yet was intelligible by American readers.

I was interested to see how Lim rises to the challenge she sets herself, particularly as other Malaysian and Singaporean writers will find this an issue that they also need to resolve.

In Yen's case, though, I must confess the voice does not entirely convince. It is somewhat uneven – some complex constructions are perfectly grammatical, yet in other places phrases in broken English are scattered in and seem a little jarring.

The third sister, Peik, is their father’s favourite child, the one who tries hardest to please. After the father dies she feels left out when Yen becomes Swee's closest confidant, and finds consolation in religion, turning to an evangelical church and changes her name to Pearl. Lim convinces rather more with this voice, particularly with the way her speech is peppered with biblical expressions. (One can't help feeling very sorry when she tells Swee later in the novel that her husband “did not want to make me big with child”.)

I must say that I like the colour and humour of the Malaysian chapters better than those set in an America which is quite cold and distancing.

Yen decides that she also would like to study in the States and the sisters take up courses in Long Beach, California where Swee becomes quickly involved with Sandy, ex-military and studying welding part time, while Yen becomes involved with a biker called Wayne. I really felt frustrated that the girls take up with such obvious losers! Sandy turns out to belong to a white supremacist group, although Swee is very slow to pick up on this.

Central to the novel is the theme of Asian identity, which Lim handles very well. Everyone in America seems to have an idea about what Asians are, or what Asians should be, and seem to want to put everyone together in the same box.

Swee finds herself lumped together with all other Asians, regardless of nationality, and subject to all kinds of preconceptions. Her first lover, Lopez, himself only too aware of racism, urges Swee to "find her community".

Mrs. Butler, her lecturer for Race in America, teaches her about slavery and the history of the blacks, but shows her resentment against the upstart Asian immigrants who “aren’t willing to wait their turn”, and in a clever kind of reverse racism, Swee is not given the A for an assignment she so clearly deserves. “I know you fresh immigrants” says Mrs. Butler “you’re pushy”.

Swee is criticised by a driving instructor who says Asians are too timid and cause accidents by going too slowly. And the sisters are called “gook girls” and “sluts” by the child-wife of Keith, Sandy’s welding teacher (but actually the leader of the white supremacist group). Pinny, a Hong Kong student Swee remembers from her first college, adapts to fulfil racial stereotypes perfectly, and plays the part of a Vietnamese “mamma-san” in a bar for Vietnamese veterans .

Swee is forced to lead an uneasy double-life. As she grows more aware of how Asians are perceived in America, and begins to write articles to give a voice to the wider Asian community, with whom she finds herself identifying increasingly. At the same time, she finds herself increasingly pressurised by Sandy to reinvent herself as "Sue" and dye her hair brown, so as to appears almost white.

In her naivety she cannot see Sandy for what he is, or the danger he poses, and this ignorance has tragic consequences.

Paik also ends up in California, running a mission with her husband Robert and his father Pastor Fung to minister to a congregation of mainly Latinos and Asians. She decides that she wants to spend her portion of the inheritance installing a huge cross atop the makeshift church which uses the premises of a disused furniture warehouse - but like Swee she is impossibly naive and good intentions backfire. Both girls really are unequipped to really cope with life in America, and the novel is really a journey for them to find themselves.

While the plot, in the wrong hands, could have been fodder for melodrama, Lim's writing shows just the right of amount of restraint.

If anything I would have liked the novel to be have been longer and to have explored Paik's story rather more. And the tying up of ends in the last couple of chapters seems rather too neat.

It's almost as if the novel it could have developed into something really good but got reigned back abruptly before it could quite get there ... and one wonders why. Sister Swing comes close being the kind of novel that might have found commercial success in an international market, which is no less than Ms. Lim deserves.

The Saddest Story Ever Told

"This is the saddest story I have ever heard." What could be more simple and declaratory, a statement of such high plangency and enormous claim that the reader assumes it must be not just an impression, or even a powerful opinion, but a "fact"? Yet it is one of the most misleading first sentences in all fiction. ... And if the second verb of the first sentence cannot be trusted, we must be prepared to treat every sentence with the same care and suspicion. We must prowl soft-footed through this text, alive for every board's moan and plaint.

Julian Barnes in The Guardian reminds me that it's high time to revisit Ford Maddox Ford's The Good Soldier, surely one of the best ... and most underrated novels in the English language and very much ahead of its time.

I couldn't remember the details of plot till I read Barnes' article, but I can remember all too well the sensation of the ground shifting beneath my feet. Unreliable narration? No author has done it better (though more recent authors Kazuo Ishiguro in Remains of the Day or Zoe Heller in Notes from a Scandal do it very well indeed).

Barnes points out that it is a novel which has strongly influenced other British authors. He mentions :

... fellow-writers who have been vocal in his cause, from Graham Greene to William Carlos Williams to Anthony Burgess.

And among the living? Well, here are two examples. About 10 years ago, while writing about Ford, I ran into one of our better-known literary novelists, whose use of indirection and the bumbling narrator seemed to me to derive absolutely from Ford. I mentioned this (a little more tactfully than I have stated it here), and asked if he had read Ford. Yes, indeed he had. Would he mind if I mentioned this fact in my piece? There was a pause (actually of a couple of days) before the reply: "Please pretend I haven't read The Good Soldier. I'd prefer it that way."

More recently, I was talking to Ian McEwan, who told me that a few years ago he'd been staying in a house with a well-stocked library. There he found a copy of The Good Soldier, which he read and admired greatly. A while later, he wrote On Chesil Beach, that brilliant novella in which passion, and Englishness, and misunderstanding, lead to emotional catastrophe. Only after publishing the book did he realise that he had unconsciously given his two main characters the names Edward (as in Ashburnham) and Florence (as in Dowell). He is quite happy for me to pass this on.

My money is on the unnamed author being Ishiguro! (If I'd been lucky enough to interview him, I'd have asked him just that question! Honest I would.)

The Good Soldier isn't at all an easy read, so I hesitate to tell you to rush out and buy a copy. I struggled to get into the book and tried several times before I managed it (a friend I lent it to said the same thing) but once the first few pages had passed, I found it one of the most satisfying novels I've ever read.

Barnes says Ford is not so much of a writer's writer (which he is often called) as :

... a proper reader's writer. The Good Soldier needs The Good Reader.

Am I recommending this book to you? No. Not unless you are a fan of the other British authors listed above and ready for the challenge. But I reckon it's essential reading for the novelist - established or budding!

Update :

How did the novel get its title when it isn't about soldiers or war at all? It was as the result of a joke, Gary Dexter reveals in the Telegraph.

Hearts of Darkness

Two works of non-fiction I've read this week were both in a sense journeys into the heart of darkness.

I picked up a copy of William Styron's Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness at the Big Bookshop sale. It's a very slim volume, just 84 pages long, which started life as a lecture given at a symposium sponsored by the Department of Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. It was later developed into a piece for Vanity Fair before being published as a book.

Styron was hit by serious depression at the age of 60, and describes most evocatively his own struggle with the life-threatening illness from first symptoms, through his treatment, his brush with suicide, hospitalisation to eventual cure. Along the way he includes the stories of friends and others so afflicted - many of them also writers.

It's the honesty of the book that makes it so compelling. It was one of the first "insider" accounts of depression, and captures extremely well just what it feels like. (You have to have been there to know.) I agree with him that the word "depression" is totally inadequate, sounding more like a mild case of the blues rather than something that fills your soul with dread and despair.

The second book involved a physical journey into the part of the world that Conrad described in his novel Heart of Darkness - the Congo. Tim Butcher, a journalist for The Daily Telegraph decides to recreate H.M. Stanley's famous expedition in the 1870's. (Stanley had been also sponsored by the same newspaper!) He was also curious to see the country that his mother had visited in the 1950's as a tourist. He was told that by just about everyone he contacted that the journey was impossible, but against the odds he manages to enlist the help of aid workers (including a pygmy human rights activist and the Malaysian commander of a vessel working for the UN) and others. Each stage of the journey is uncertain, and he's constantly in danger of his life and in great discomfort. But he does manage in the end to find the transport he needs (motorcycles, dugouts, a UN barge) and the journey continues. It's impossible not to salute his courage.

Blood River : A Journey into Africa's Broken Heart is a fascinating account, not just because it takes us into a part of the world we wouldn't normally venture into and lets us share the journey (from our comfy armchairs!), but also for the historical perspectives which are woven into the narrative.

In the space of half a century, Congo has gone completely backwards - it is not "a developing country", or an "underdeveloped country", so much as an "un-developing country", going backwards so fast that almost nothing remains of the infrastructure left under Belgian rule due to the greed and incompetence of its leaders. It's a terrifying portrait of how quickly things can unravel. You also come to realise that putting things right isn't a matter of throwing financial aid at the problems, but in establishing the rule of law.

It's impossible not to really pity the ordinary people of this failed country, but that there is such potential for economic growth (minerals, fertile land) turns this missed opportunity into a tragedy.

As you would expect, there's plenty of coverage of the book on The Telegraph website, including photos and extracts.

The book was chosen as one of the reads for the Richard and Judy bookclub and of course made the shortlist for this year's Samuel Johnson Prize.

Many thanks to Kavita of Pansing for passing me this copy.

A Window on Biafra

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun, got a thumbs up from every member of our book club at our meeting last night. The novel was discussed up and down and inside out after a lovely supper cooked by Shashi (though it did seem a little wrong to be discussing a book in which the characters are literally starving to death, with comfortable full tums.)

I think the novel profoundly affected all of us.

Renata and I who had grown up in Britain, remember the shocking footage of the war in Biafra shown on the television news, and especially the images of starving children with bloated bellies. It was the first time ever that such a thing had been shown. (Ethiopia ... Darfur ... haven't we just got so blase about the images of starvation since then?) Our Malaysian friends, and Naho in Japan who joined in our conversation via Skype (ah the miracles of modern technology!) had not heard of the war at all, or only heard it mentioned in the vaguest terms and so were grateful to learn about it.

I lived in Nigeria in the early '80's and can attest to the fact that the war was not a topic of conversation.*

I was living in the North of the country, so far away geographically from what was then Biafra, so perhaps that was part of the reason. One of my closest friends there was an Igbo - a physics graduate from Nsukka called Frederick, who was posted to my school as a "Youth Corper" - and a handful of the girls I taught were too, so I learned much about the culture of the Igbo from them. But I can remember only one person really talking about the Biafran war with me - a taxi driver who had been a soldier with the Nigerian forces during the conflict and who had returned home badly wounded.

Adichie gives the conflict a very human face by taking her time to create a cast of characters we really care about - especially the twin sisters Olanna and Kainene, and the houseboy Ugwu who comes to lives with Odenigbo, (an intellectual of revolutionary persuasion) and Olanna's love interest. (The group felt that Adichie had probably struggled much harder with the wimpy British journalist, Richard, Kainene's lover, who decides to throw his lot in with the Igbo people .) There are a number of very well realised minor characters including the twins' wealthy parents, and Richard's comic houseboy Harrison, who delights in concocting British dishes.

The main events are seen from the vantage point of these Olanna, Richard and Ugwu in turn.

"Unputdownable" was a word that was used rather a lot, last night. As I said before, I was a bit thrown initially by what I felt were strong similarities (probably imagined?) to Romesh Gunasekera's Reef, but was quickly drawn into the book by all the human drama - love, infidelity, sisterly rivalry, family tensions, black magic. Then, when the war came, for me the physical book in my hands melted and became an open door. I wasn't watching Biafra in black and white news broadcasts - I was there. Yes, there were of course harrowing scenes, but it is the story of day to day survival in the face of starvation that Adichie portrays so well.

You can read an excerpt from the novel here, and do check out Adichie's website. You might also like to revisit Janet Tay's excellent review of the novel from Starmag.

I was wondering how the novel (first published in the US) would be received in Africa, and was very moved by the comments left by Nigerians invited to tell their own Biafra story, particularly those who mention that reading the novel gave them their first opportunity to talk about their own experiences or to find out from their parents what really happened. This is an episode in Nigeria's past that very much needed to be written about and Adichie makes that history highly accessible.

(*It isn't in the school textbooks either.)

Out Stealing Awards

Although Per Petterson's Out Stealing Horses is set in rural Norway and is a work of fiction in translation, it fits into a genre that readers of literary fiction will find familiar.

As in L.P. Hartley's The Go-Between (from which Petterson actually lifts a quote towards the end), as in John Banville's The Sea, we have an elderly man looking back on the events of a fateful summer when he was caught up in a web of events and powerful adult emotions that he is not yet equipped to deal with, and can only make sense of in retrospect. But whatever happened back then has left him emotionally stunted as an adult, and his only chance to heal his spirit is to finally make sense of it all.

The pivotal question, asked late in Out Stealing Horses, is whether its protagonist is the hero of his own life (the reference is lifted from Dickens' David Copperfield) or whether he abdicated that role to others. This certainly seems to be the case.

Petterson's novel shifts between three layers of time. Trond Sander, now 67 when the novel opens in 1999, has sold up all his possessions and moved to a secluded house in the far east of Norway where he intends to live out his days in solitude and simplicity. But an encounter with his neighbour, whom he recognises from his past bring memories flooding back of a fateful summer shortly after the war. Lars Haug, he realises, is the younger brother of his once best friend.

In 1948, 15 year old Trond is staying in a small cabin near the Swedish border with his father during the summer vacation. Ostensibly the trip is part holiday, part opportunity for a bit of father-son bonding.

Trond befriends Jon, the son of one of a neighbouring farmer, and the two are always off on outdoor adventures together. Very early one morning Jon invites his friend to come "Out stealing horses" (an expression which acquires other connotations in the book) but in this instance he just means riding the horses in a local farmer's field.

Later, while destroying a bird's nest, Jon suddenly seems to experience some sort of a breakdown, and it turns out that he left his hunting rifle at home forgetting to take the bullets out. Jon's two younger brothers fought over it, and Lars accidentally killed his twin brother. Trond never sees his friend again, as Jon disappears off to sea.

It strikes me that if a film were ever made of the novel (as I think must surely happen) it will be a whole different animal from the book. Films deal with sharply realised details, and close-ups. Petterson gives us only parts of the story, and then often in long distance shots, leaving space for us to create much of the story for ourselves. Trond gradually uncovers pieces of the story of his father's role in the Norwegian resistance during the war, and about the true nature of his relationship with Jon and Lars' mother. He also only later comes to realise why his father is so insistent that the trees around the cabin must be felled, and the logs floated downriver to a sawmill in Sweden, even though it is completely the wrong season to do this (the river too low to float timber effectively, the trunks heavy with sap.)

The novel is richly atmospheric with evocative descriptions of landscape careful descriptions of the practicalities of rural life.

Ann Born's translation captures the narrator's voice very well*, the slight hesitance at the beginning as he searches for a way to tell his story, the long run on sentences when he becomes excited, the terse exchanges of dialogue.

The novel has deservedly garnered plenty of accolades. It won the Independent Foreign Fiction Award 2006, last year's IMPAC Dublin Prize, and was a top ten New York Times Notable Book.

(*I must point out though that I found some grammatically questionable sentences in places and am surprised proofreaders did not pick these up.)

Silverfish's Full Stop

The seventh book in the Silverfish New Writing series is also, of course, the last in the series of the short story anthologies which has done so much to revitalise local fiction over the years.

Like most of its predecessors, it's a pretty mixed bag with some first-rate new fiction, a number of other pieces which are interesting and certainly worthy of inclusion, and only one or two disappointments.

Overall, it's a less even collection than Silverfish New Writing 6 which also had a much stronger Malaysian flavour, but it still sets a standard that other locally produced anthologies of short fiction have fallen well short of.

Of the 19 stories in the collection, four are by Singaporeans, five are by Malaysians, and another four stories are by expats resident in Malaysia, the remaining pieces coming from writers from further afield. The original intention of opening the anthologies to writers from outside Malaysia and Singapore was to provide a little competition and to lift the standard. Perhaps it is a sign that the short story in Malaysia and Singapore has come of age that many of the strongest pieces are by local writers.

One of the best known writers in the book is Wena Poon. Her story Dog Hot Pot, which humourously dissects the attitudes and prejudices of Singaporeans. The story is included in her collection Lions in Winter, which has just been nominated for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Prize.

Fellow Singaporean Yvonne Tham gives us one of the quirkiest ghost stories I've come across. Jumi who works as a subtitler at a TV station, has recently lost her mother and is experiencing some strange goings on at home, including all the papayas from her tree mysteriously disappearing. She isn't too surprised when a ghost turns up ... except that instead of it being her mother's ghost (which would, she feels have been much scarier!) it is the ghost of Chinese writer Zhang Ailing, whom she greatly admires. The depiction of the growing friendship between the writer ghost and the ghost writer is both funny and touching.

Of the stories contributed by Malaysian writers, I particularly enjoyed Shih-Li Koh's most unlikely of love stories The First Time, and Saras Manickam's The Invisible, the story of an Indonesian maid after she is fired by her employer for letting her lover, another migrant worker, into the house. Both stories avoid all the usual cliches and give us the sense of real women in straightened circumstances making tough decisions.

Four of the stories are by expats who have made Malaysia their home. Robert Raymer is already well-known for his short stories, and in particular for his collection Lovers and Strangers. Only in Malaysia is told from the point of view of an expat whose marriage to a Malay woman has fallen apart. I found it fascinating for its cross-cultural insights, though a little slow in the telling. I much preferred his Transactions in Thai, a very nicely observed piece about the goings on in a Had Yai hotel where two Westerners on holiday from their real lives negotiate a deal with a hotel manager for a couple of women they want to take on holiday. Who, one wonders, is that backpacker scribbling in his journal at another table? It couldn't be Raymer himself playing fly on the wall, could it?

Peter Brown's The Last Deejay, set in a dystopian Malaysian twenty years in the future is nail-bittingly tense. Social order has completely broken down following the collapse of oil prices. Mobs rule the streets, and the forces of the United Islamic Army have landed (although the government denies this in the newspapers!). A deejay is murdered in his club in Jalan Bukit Bintang, and his mother and best friend must risk their own lives to bring back his body for burial.

The most risk-taking story in the book is Yusof Martin A. Bradley's The Good Lieutenant which follows over the course of a day, the life of a British policeman posted to Malaya during The Emergency. What I found exciting about the narration is the way that the lens of the camera sweeps from close up glimpses of the minutest details of the natural world around Reggie Gold (the birds, the insects, the drip of rain drops) to a wide angle view which encompasses the entire range of historical and social forces that brought Gold to Malaya. While little of note happens in the foreground of the piece until the tragic climax, the background is so full sketched that Gold is completely located within his temporal and physical context.

Editors Ashraf Jamal and Shanti Moorthy point out in the introduction that there is something a little unfinished and tentative about some of the stories, that they show :

... something that they (the writers) can't quite name and put a finger to ...

and I think that this is indeed true of some of the stories.

Viren Swami gives us The Beggar, a puzzling piece not amounting to a story, because story implies plot and this has only incident, a single incident, a chance encounter with a beggar in the final paragraph. Just who is the narrator and what is the meaning of the this encounter? The piece reads like the opening of a gothic horror novel, and even though the setting (Orchard Road, Singapore) is so familiar and no doubt coloured by our experiences of happy shopping trips, Swami creates an atmosphere of menace and a sense of dread which makes us see it in a new way entirely.

Layang-Layang by Yew Kwang Min is also a-not-quite-story - but an account of a journey back to the quaintly named Johor town with a friend who asks whether there is anything interesting to see. Perhaps to the outsider there isn't, but to the narrator, who grew up there every nook and cranny is replete with memories. This piece left me wanting to read more.

Of those stories by writers from further afield I especially enjoyed Shalini Akhil's surreal tale of a briefcase that took possession of its user, and Jane Downing's That Smile and the Tilt of Her Head in which the mother of a young man fighting in Iraq finds consolation in the memorabilia of an earlier war in the markets of Vietnam, including a haunting photograph of a young girl.

So yes, this was another Silverfish anthology that gave me much reading pleasure, and it really does grieve me to think that there won't be any more to come. Will MPH's collections fill the gap? Will another collection that another friend was talking to me about some months ago, finally materialise? Will Raman manage polish one or two of his protegees to publishable standard?

In all cases, I really hope so. But they really will have something to live up to.

The Author Who Was Brave Enough

I recently read Lloyd Fernando's Green is the Colour (which had been sitting on my shelves for some time) partly as my way of commemorating Lloyd's death and partly, because it seemed a particularly relevant book to read around the time of the election.

It is a very interesting novel of ideas, set in an almost dystopian Malaysia in the aftermath of the racial riots of May 13, 1969. The country is still scarred by violence, vigilante groups roam the countryside, religious extremists set up camp in the hinterland, there are still sporadic outbreaks of fighting in the city, and everyone, all the time, is conscious of being watched. It comes as some surprise to find that the story is actually a contemporary (and very clever) reworking of a an episode from the Misa Melayu, an 18th century classic written by Raja Chulan.

In this climate of unease, Fernando employs a multi-racial cast of characters. At the centre of the novel there's a core of four main characters, good (if idealistic) young people who cross the racial divide to become friends, and even fall in love.

There's Dahlan, a young lawyer and activist who invites trouble by making impassioned speech on the subject of religious intolerance on the steps of a Malacca church; his friend from university days, Yun Ming, a civil servant working for the Ministry of Unity who seeks justice by working from within the government.

The most fully realised character of the novel is Siti Sara, and much of the story is told from her viewpoint. A sociologist and academic, she's newly returned from studies in America where she found life much more straightforward, and trapped in a loveless marriage to Omar, a young man much influenced by the Iranian revolution who seeks purification by joining religious commune. The hungry passion between Yun Ming and Siti - almost bordering on violence at times and breaking both social and religious taboos - is very well depicted. (Dahlan falls in love with Gita, Sara's friend and colleague, and by the end of the novel has made an honest woman of her.)

Like the others, Sara is struggling to make sense of events :

Nobody could get may sixty-nine right, she thought. It was hopeless to pretend you could be objective about it. speaking even to someone close to you, you were careful for fear the person might unwittingly quote you to others. if a third person was present, it was worse, you spoke for the other person's benefit. If he was Mlay you spoke one way, Chinese another, Indian another. even if he wasn't listening. in the end the spun tissue, like an unsightly scab, became your vision of what happened; the wound beneath continued to run pus.

Although the novel is narrated from a third person viewpoint, it is curious that just one chapter is narrated by Sara's father, one of the minor characters, an elderly village iman and a man of great compassion and insight. This shift in narration works so well that I'm surprised Fernando did not make wider use of it.

The novel has villain, of course, the unsavoury Pangalima, a senior officer in the Department of Unity and a man of uncertain racial lineage (he looks Malay, has adopted Malay culture, so of course, that's enough to make him kosher!). He has coveted Sara for years, and is determined to win her sexual favours at any cost.

The novel is not without significant weaknesses. It isn't exactly a rollicking read, and seems rather stilted - not least because there are just too many talking heads with much of the action taking place "offstage", including the rape at the end, which is really the climax of the whole novel.

If we're interested in Yun Ming, Dahlan and Omar it is because of the contradictory ideas they espouse, but in each case their arguments could have been explored in greater depth and the characters themselves have been more fully fleshed.

The plot of Green is the Colour never really holds together as well as it might but seems to be perpetually rushing off in new directions (as actually do the characters!) without fully exploring what is set up already. (I was particuarly disappointed that we don't get to spend more time with Omar in the commune.)

But the strengths of the novel more than makes up for these lapses.

There's been a lot of talk on this blog about local authors not being brave enough to write about the great mustn't-be-talked-abouts of race, religion and politics in Malaysian society. Here's one author who was brave enough to do just that. (And look, hey, the sky didn't cave in!)

Here's an author too who was able to think himself into the skin of people of different races - how many since have been able, or prepared, to make that imaginative leap?

Here too is an author who is able to convincingly evoke the landscape of Malaysia both urban and rural in carefully chosen details.

Above all, though, one feels that here is an author who says what needed to be said. Heck, what still needs to be said!

Here, he's using Dahlan as his mouthpiece, but the sentiments are clearly the author's own :

All of us must make amends. Each and every one of us has to make an individual effort. Words are not enough. We must show by individual actions that we will not tolerate bigotry and race hatred.

Reading this novel now, very many years after I should have, I feel even sadder that just as Lloyd was talking about writing a third novel, illness cut him down. We can only imagine how much further he might have gone.

Well worth reading on the novel is Wong Soak Koon's essay which forms the introduction to the Silverfish edition of the book, and also Peter Wicks paper entitled A Dream Shattered : Lloyd Fernando's Literary Vision of Malaysia which is downloadable as a PDF.

One question about the book which still puzzles me - what does the title refer to?

Another Literary Abduction

Another novel, another missing child!

In Peter Carey's new novel His Illegal Self, the child, a seven year old called Che (named for revolutionary Che Guevara) is not only a willing party to the abduction, he's actually been waiting for it.

They will come for you, man. they'll break you out of here

his neighbour predicts, referring to the boy's parents, famous student radicals on the run from the FBI.

When Dial arrives one day at the apartment Che shares with his WASP grandmother in New Yorks Upper East Side, he recognises her immediately, and soon the pair are on the run from the law and with financial and, with tactical help from the activists, eventually skip the country and find themselves on the run in Australia. Is the young woman with honey-colored skin, tangled hair in 15 shades, hindu necklaces and little silver bells around her ankles his real mother though?

Now I must confess that I found myself frequently scratching my head in the first part of this book, struggling to find out exactly what was happening. I felt as if I were watching a film through frosted class - I couldn't quite get the picture into focus and I felt distanced. Most of the pieces do fall into place later in the novel, but still there is still a need to suspend a fair old bit of disbelief, and I am still not convinced about Dial's motives for taking Che in the first place.

For me the book really began to pull together once the pair move into a hut in the inhospitable Queensland wilds, and find themselves part of an equally inhospitable hippy community (based on a commune Carey had once been part of) guaranteed to knock any residual nostalgia for the good old '60's and 70's firmly on the head.

(I must add a note here while I remember that I am thinking of founding a society for the prevention of cruelty to fictional animals, because the incident with the cat was totally uncalled for, I thought.)

The great strength of the book is in Carey's ability to create characters we can fully believe in and want to root for. His portrait of the watchful, needy Che is pitch perfect. We sympathise deeply with Dial, torn between regret for opportunities lost (she was due to start a new career as a college when she found herself drawn into her friend's mess) and her fierce love for Che whom she took care of for a time when he was a baby. The narrative is told at times from her perspective, at times from his, and I very much like the way that sometimes the same event (most notably the actual abduction) is viewed through both sets of eyes to show the differences in the child's and the adult's perception.

There's also Trevor, their neighbour in the commune is just the kind of wily rascal that Carey excels at creating, who gradually assumes the role of a father figure to Che and lover to Dial.

It's a sort of modern adage that there are two kinds of families, those we are born into, and those we struggle to create. In his novels, Carey frequently draws characters who are in some sense orphaned as these three are. The love that grows gradually between them is earthy and real. So real in fact that I wanted to spin the last few chapters of the book out for as long as possible, though when I got there, the life-affirming ending had me cheering.

So in the end, yes, I was a satisfied reader, although I didn't feel as strongly for the book as I have done for most of Carey's other novels, notably True History of the Kelly Gang and Theft.

Will the novel get Bookered? I bet.

If you want to know more about the book, here are some leads you might follow :

You can read the first chapter of the novel on the New York Times website and there's a very interesting review of the book by Liesl Schilinger which concentrates on its political context.

Ruth Scurr also reviews the book in the Times, describing Carey (very aptly, I think) as :

... a feral writer.

You can also read Carey's Q and A about the book on the Random House website.

Here's an interview from ABC :

Abduction Fiction

Some of my most recent reads seem to have the theme of abducted children running through them, which seems pretty topical. (Another is Peter Carey's His Illegal Self which I also plan to share my thoughts on anon.)

Our book club chose Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita as our month's shared read, and I was very happy to re-encounter this old friend of my own adolescence. But I definitely appreciated it far more several (!) decades on.

I particularly love what Preeta calls "voicy" novels, in which we hear the voice of the main character, especially when he or she is not telling us the truth, and sometimes not even aware of their own self-deception.

Humbert Humbert, we learn right from the first page, is a murderer and the paedophile abductor of twelve-year old Dolores Haze alias :

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.

The novel is his confession, written later in prison, and it is a meticulous study of obsession. And right from the start it puts the reader in a very uncomfortable position: while we know that what Humbert is doing is morally repugnant, while we are horrified by the chilling tyranny he exerts over his stepdaughter, we are disarmed by his honesty, seduced by the sensuality of the writing, and drawn into collusion with him in this most perverse of love stories. It's a very strange and unsettling sensation.

It's hard to imagine too that the book was written 50 years ago, because it seems so contemporary ... and thanks to the internet perhaps we are more aware of paedophilia now than we were back then.

I felt terribly sorry for Lolita, for although she is no innocent (having gleefully lost her virginity at a summer camp, and knowingly strung our narrator along), HH finally faces towards the end of the book the extent to which he has damaged his step-daughter. Having escaped HH's clutches, she eventually marries a war-veteran and, little more than a child herself, dies in childbirth. Perhaps the most heartbreaking part of all is where HH recalls Lolita talking to a friend about death, and realising that the nature of their relationship utterly precluded being able to reach her on a deeper level.

Lolita is also an early example of the genre referred to as a road novel, and I loved the way the essence of the whole journey criss-crossing small-town America moving is so skilfully distilled into a series of vignettes.

Is Lolita porn? Well, it was certainly seen that way when Nabokov first approached American publishers, five of whom rejected it, fearing that they'd be prosecuted on obscenity charges. The language of the book though is never sexually explicit, and all the more potent and sensual for that.

This is the climax (pun of course intended) of one of the most shocking scenes :

She was musical and apple-sweet. Her legs twitched a little as they lay across my live lap; I stroked them; there she lolled on in the right-hand corner, almost asprawl, Lola, the bobby-soxer, devouring her immemorial fruit, singing through its juice, losing her slipper, rubbing the heel of her slipperless foot in its sloppy anklet, against the pile of old magazines heaped on my left on the sofa—and every movement she made, every shuffle and ripple, helped me to conceal and improve the secret system of tactile correspondence between beast and beauty—between my gagged, bursting beast and the beauty of her dimpled body in its innocent cotton frock …

What dazzling, what shameless writing!

Stephen Metcalf in Slate magazine (asking the question Is Lolita Still Shocking?) says :

Lolita is a disgusting book. Furthermore, the day will never come when it is not a disgusting book.

and certainly it changes the reader's inner landscape. Not so long ago Woolworth's stores across the UK were forced by furious parents to withdrawn the sale of beds named Lolita which had been designed for six-year-old girls.

(And Muntaj in our book club - a more respectable pillar of society you could not hope to find - said that the book had severely messed with her head and even when in the supermarket found herself weighing up which young girls HH might consider "nymphets"!)

If you haven't read Lolita yet (hey, where were you hiding?) but are considering picking it up, I'd recommend the Penguin Classics annotated version which seemed to be very helpful when I glanced at a friend's copy (especially as HH throws in a lot of words and phrases in French).

I really enjoyed the radio programmes about the book on NPR, and you can listen to the lovely Jeremy Irons reading the opening of the novel.

Lo. Lee. Ta.

Guat's Old House

Chuah Guat Eng broke new ground when she became the first Malaysian woman to have published a full length novel in English, Echoes of Silence, in 1994. Now her new book The Old House and other Stories brings together her short fiction published in various publications (at home and abroad) over the past two decades, the earliest pieces appearing in the New Straits Times in the good old days when the paper actively supported and encouraged new Malaysian writing.

Although a single short story should stand perfectly well by itself, a collection of works by the same writer lets us see patterns and preoccupations that we might otherwise miss. This was true in the case of Wena Poon's Lions in Winter, and certainly is so with this collection of Guat's work too.

Putting the stories side by side also allows us to appreciate that a strong supernatural element runs through several of the stories. Guats' ghosts, though, are not obvious monsters with dripping fangs or shrieking pontianaks. Instead, they are manifestations of disturbing memories that have become buried and calloused over with time. When these internal hurts are dragged back into the light of day by current events they invariably force a huge psychological upheaval and a necessary re-evaluation.

Something else that comes through in story after story is how it is often those closest to us, those who we entrust to love and protect us, who so often end up betraying us.

Almost the Worst Thing (published originally in Silverfish New Writing 3) the story of a wife reflecting on her husband's infidelity is so subtly written that some readers miss the paranormal twist in the ending which leads you to rethink the whole piece. (I only discovered it on second reading.)

The title piece, The Old House, begins as a classic haunted mansion story. Suan and her five-year old daughter decide to take a look at an about-to-be demolished house when they're out for an evening stroll. They hear the disquieting sound of a child crying in the garden although they can see no-one, and find an old necklace in the neglected garden. When this turns out to be valuable, Suan decides to track down the original owners so that she can return it. But when she meets the woman who grew up in the house, and her small daughter, she realises how child abuse can be passed on from one generation to another, and how important it is for love to break the cycle.

Buried memories of abuse, this time sexual, also come to the fore in Seventh Uncle (which first appeared in the Penguin collection The Merlion and the Hibiscus). Siew Hoon goes home for a family funeral. The old man is remembered fondly as a dandy, a bit of a bon vivant, and for his love of aphorisms, which Siew Hoon has herself internalised and followed. Soon her memories of him must be re-examined when she meets up after many years with the cousin once dubbed Non-Brain Noneh who offers Siew Hoon a very different version of the past.

Noneh, unlovely, deeply angry, is one of the characters I feel most for in the whole collection, and her howl of pain when she recalls past taunts is deeply affecting:

Just because of these big, stupid tits, people think I have no brains, cannot feel pain, cannot feel shame, cannot feel anything, cannot cry, cannot speak up, cannot tell the truth!

Karuna's Mermaid, the most recent story in the book is a lovely mysterious story in which a body is washed onto the beach of a small resort island. Is it as four-year old Karuna believes a mermaid, or is it, (as her mother and dying grandmother believe) in some sense reincarnation of a much loved brother and son who committed suicide by drowning? I like the way that the loose ends are not too neatly tied, giving the reader space for speculation.

I enjoyed Two Pretty Men - especially for its portraits of the two gay men and careful attention detail, but I felt that I would have liked to have inhabited that world and stayed with those characters rather longer rather than be tugged away from them by the workings of the plot, which in any case proved less than convincing.

The Tamarind Tree is firmly rooted in kampung life and creates a very strong sense of the central character who almost is incensed at the when a man hangs himself from the tamarind tree of the title. She considers it her tree, the tree where she has spent many hours gorging herself on tamarind fruit and (for it is clearly also a Tree of Knowledge) her boyfriend Lek's embraces. The suicide jars the girl into a series of reflections on her changed relationship with her father (a widower who has remarried) and her about her own issues with men - and their sexual needs - in general.

Although Guat's stories often they take us into a world which is often dark and painful, the collection does have its lighter moments. Passing Clouds 1997-8 is a lovely study in contrasts. Outside the air is thick with (that which is euphemistically called) "the haze", inside a computer screen saver affords a tiny glimpse of blue sky and white clouds. Su Lin, a freelance (and necessarily cash-strapped) script-writer working from home is visited by her friend, the irresponsible and completely impractical Gim, who can afford new Ferragamo shoes but can't repay a loan.

The Power of Advertising, the first piece in the book, is a delicious revenge tale set in the world of advertising (in which Guat herself once worked) and achieves a neat symmetry, as well as a certain irony by being bracketed by condolence notices in the newspaper- surely advertising of a different sort!

And while the language in many of the stories is measured, precise and slightly formal, in The Day Andy Warhol Died the writer convincingly inhabits the voice of a teenager, trying to make the best sense she can of her colourful Aunt Bongsu (who reminded me of Muriel Spark's Jean Brody!) while to great comic effect her younger sister manages all the time to be a great deal more knowing.

There is much to admire in the quiet craftsmanship of Guat's stories, and I do hope there is more of them to come. And I wonder, after reading Professor Quayum's interview with the writer at the end of the book whether there mightn't be very interesting material in Guat's childhood for a memoir? It certainly would be one that I would like to read.

Now I have to add (because the technical side of local publishing interests me so much) that this is the first locally produced book (either self-published as this one is, or commercially produced) I've seen for some time without any clumsiness of tenses at all, without a single grammar or tense error - the proofreading alone hits a new high standard. I also really like the blue-lady cover and layout of the book, although (for future reference, Guat!) the binding is a little tight and I have had all kinds of heavy objects holding the pages open while I've been typing this!