Another Year of Bad Sex

Maybe Neil Gaiman got it succinctly right on Twitter a few hours ago :

Just read the Guardian Bad Sex Award contenders ... I may never write a sex scene ever again. O Roth. O Banville. Argh.

Yes, it's that time of year again when literary lust becomes fodder for fun. The Guardian has extracts from all the 2009 nominees for The Literary Review's annual Bad Sex Award which you can read at your peril. But those of you of a somewhat tenderer disposition may want to ignore the link. (I started down the list earlier but had had a surfeit of fictional bonking before I made it through all the contenders, so will resume later in the interest of - ahem - research. ) My question to you is, do you really think these are examples of bad writing about sex? The Roth extract, green dildo aside (!) i though pretty intriguing and I'm off to buy the book. I didn't snigger pruriently at Banville's :

... tang of fish-slime and sawdust ... .

Theroux's : '

Yoni puja – pray, pray at my portal.

is a rather sweet line I can hear being taken up as a reprise by his female readers and Richard Milward's, yes, IS funny - but that is his intention surely? The usual refrain on posts of this nature on my blog - sex is very difficult to write well anyway. Postscript : And that is the point made very well in Sarah Duncan's response on The Guardian blog :

Writing about sex can be like a complicated game of Twister. You sit in front of your laptop, trying to work out where everything's going. It's worse than following the instructions for assembling flatpack furniture.

Malaysia's New Place in the Literary Sun ...

... Gets a Sunflower!

The reviews for Preeta's Evening is the Whole Day have started to appear. Salil Tripathi writes a very nice piece in The Independent called - ahem - Malaysia's new place in the literary sun. It begins with a lovely loud cheer for the changes occurring in our local literary landscape :

Samarasan represents the quiet emergence of new Malaysian writing in books such as Rani Manicka's The Rice Mother and Touching Earth, Tash Aw's The Harmony Silk Factory, and Tan Twan Eng's Booker-longlisted The Gift of Rain last year. These writers have significantly broadened our understanding of the region earlier seen largely through the gin-soaked, misty eyes of Somerset Maugham, the Tiger-beer induced nostalgia of Anthony Burgess*, or the laconic fiction of Paul Theroux.

He discusses the socio-political background of the novel :

Malaysia permeates Samarasan's novel without didacticism about the country's identity politics. It shows the symbiotic and separate relationship between Malays, Chinese and Indians. Jo Kukathas, the gifted satirist, once joked that in Malaysia "the Chinese do the work, the Malays take the credit, the Indians get the blame". Buried within the quip is a stark divide, explaining the consequences of the May 1969 riots which formed the basis of Lloyd Fernando's 1993 novel, Green is the Colour. ... Those riots led to Malaysia's preferential policies, which benefited Malays over Chinese and Indians, so forcing many non-Malays to seek educational and employment opportunities abroad.

and calls the story multi-layered, but feels that the plot gets rather complicated.

Francesca Segal in The Observer yesterday found the novel :

Vibrant, descriptive, and peppered with colourful Indian-Malaysian dialogue, this is an epic that's informative without being worthy, and engrossing but not frivolous.

Indian reviewers seem perplexed by the novel - you can almost hear them thinking How come this novelist of Indian heritage, clearly influenced by Indian authors, isn't writing the kind of Indian novel we expect? Check out Amardeep's review and the interesting debate in the comments at Sepia Mutiny.

You can find other reviews on Preeta's website.

I'm feeling more than a little frustrated at the moment because I'm longing, nay dying, to talk about what I think of the book, but since I have reviewed it for next month's Off the Edge, am not going to go there yet. Except to say that I told Preeta that I think she wrote the novel especially for me! I was so hungry for this kind of fiction about my adopted country.

I will, though, be posting up extracts from an interview with Preeta here soon.

The novel is in the bookshops now (I saw trade paperback copies in MPH the other day for RM59.90) and there are bound to be discounts and rebates to factor in here and there to bring the price down further.

Postscript :

Shirley from MPH reminds me to say that Preeta will be here to do bookshop appearances in October ... and hurray, she will be at Seksan's again too!

Postscript :

Another nice message from Shirley :

Good news! MPH Bookstores will be giving out cut-out coupon 25% for Preeta's book in StarMag in June Reads Monthly, coming out on 29 June, valid till 13 July.

*I think this statement shows a misunderstanding of The Malayan Trilogy though ...

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.)

Theroux by Train

As you read travel books, you should be able to see the people and places, to hear them, to smell them. Some of it is painful, but travel - its very motion - ought to suggest hope. Despair is the armchair; its indifference and glazed, incurious eyes. I think travellers are essentially optimists, or else they would never go anywhere. A travel book ought to reflect that optimism.

I'm a little slow posting a link to Paul Theroux's excellent piece on reinventing travel writing in the Guardian the other day (so thanks Uma for the nudge). Some of Theroux's best books have been based on long train journeys, and two of them The Great Railway Bazaar and The Old Patagonian Express, have just been reissued in the Penguin Modern Classics series.

I've read almost all of Theroux's travel writing over the years (the exception being Dark Star Safari which is on my to-be-read shelf).

He is, though, something of a grouchy travel companion at times. I did get a bit cross with him in The Great Railway Bazaar which describes a journey across Asia. When he got to the part of the trip I was most anticipating, the Trans-Siberian leg, the author was so pissed off with travelling that he offered really jaundiced descriptions of the great snowy wastes of Russia. It's still a journey I'd love to make one day.

And I've never forgiven him for his rather negative descriptions of Britain in Kingdom by the Sea. perhaps he sees us Brits as we really are, but that's not an excuse to tell the whole world.

Readsmonthly Rocks!

In yesterday's Readsmonthly section of Starmag, I got to pay tribute to Doris Lessing. There's also a list of suggested reads. Writing it really had me scraping round in the far corners of my brain for traces the books had left behind decades before ... and left me wanting to reread especially The Grass is Singing and Memories of a Survivor.

The shy and very talented Shahril Nizam is interviewed by Daphne Lee about his new collection of poetry and art If Only. Daphne is absolutely right about how self-effacing he is in public, but she told me that she'd found Shahril so fascinating to talk to that she had forgotten to take notes at points during the interview!

The poet/illustrator says about his work:

Drawing and writing are just ways of externalising thoughts and ideas ... But I find it hard to be direct all the time. Maybe that’s true of everyone. Sometimes we are open and sometimes secretive, even with ourselves. Sometimes, there are things we don’t truly understand or even want to admit. That doesn’t mean we can’t be honest, too. ... I find writing a poem or drawing a picture allows me to be honest without revealing too much. The imagery, symbolism and so on can mean anything. And it can mean one thing to one person and another to someone else. It can be different truths to different people.

Celebrity reviewer Tom Abang Saufi talks about Paul Theroux's The Elephanta Suite. (Tom of course is one of Malaysia's top fashion designers.)

I've read a lot of Theroux, travel writing and fiction, and very much enjoy his work. But he's so prolific that I gave up trying to keep up some time back. But I think I've just been talked into picking up this one! Especially as I love the idea of intertwined stories.

I had to nick this lovely picture of Amir Muhammad from the page listing author events happening up and down the country! Both Amir and Shahril Nizam are appearing at the Courtyard, MPH Mid Valley Megamall, on November 11th 3-4 p.m.

Travelling Companions

It's Northern hemisphere summer, and folks there are revving their internal engines for long trips to exotic climes. Books are part of the holiday experience for most, and the newspapers traditionally have their lists of holiday reads.

Sam Leith in the Telegraph reckons that reading on holiday is a material pleasure as well as an intellectual one, he reckons:

A good book returns from a good holiday battered and discoloured, with sand in odd crevices, with mysterious stains and pages missing, with mild spinal injuries and a new lover or two. Just like its owner. ... One hardback will have a semi-translucent, coconut-smelling thumb-print on a right-hand page. A paperback will be a fat, crinkly, chlorine-damaged wad after it joined you in the pool when the kids upset your lilo. Another paperback, left splayed for an hour in full sun so that the heat melted the glue in its spine, is shedding pages into your bag. The book becomes a souvenir of the pleasure you took in it and the place where you read it.

But what should a holiday read be like? Something light and frothy? The things we've always meant to get round to reading? A big classic novel (which is what Leith himself favours).

The Guardian asked authors (here and here) which books they have taken with them on journeys. JG Ballard writes nostalgically about a a copy of the Los Angeles Yellow Pages which he took from his suite at the Beverly Hills Hilton, and which he says transformed his holiday. And Paul Theroux recounts his experiences reading Naipaul's A House for Mr. Biswas on board a ship between Singapore and Borneo in 1970, in the company of what seemed "like a cast from a Maugham novel".

My happiest reading memory was reading Theroux's O-Zone in a hammock on Tioman. I'd travelled there alone, and was staying at the wonderful but basic Nazri's Place with nothing to do all day but read and snorkel. (Leave food out of the equation: there was basically only a choice between freshly caught mackerel and tuna each meal time!)

Absorbing fiction about a future America, rigidly divided by social class, seemed to go very well with stunning island scenery. Don't ask me why!

Mind you, I think you can go too far with dystopian fiction on a beach ... one of the suggestions for beach reading for the summer of 2007 at the end of Leith's article is The Road by Cormac McCarthy. The most bleakly desolate novel ... perhaps of all time ... has no place in anyone's beach bag, I'd say.

It's fun trying to choose book to fit holiday location and Sam Jordison on the Guardian blog writes about trying to find the perfect match.

I read Colin McPhee's A House in Bali, the first time I stayed in Ubud and it was a magical match. McPhee's book was written in the 1930's. The musicologist/composer heard some recordings of Balinese gamelan and travelled to the island to learn study it. The book gives an insight not only into the music but also a fascinating glimpse into into Balinese society. My biggest thrill though was in meeting one of the people McPhee had written about all those years before - a dance teacher who was still training performers. (And it was very special to me years later to hear the piece based on gamelan that McPhee composed, played by the Malaysian Philharmonic.)

What was your best holiday reading experience?

Banned Unbanned Banned ...

When things are banned, it’s pathetic. Who bans things? People who are frightened. It’s fear. So what are they frightened of? Of people writing or saying something? And why are they frightened? When someone bans something, it’s very revealing ...

says Paul Theroux in an interview with Kristina Tom in today's Star. He was referring to the Singaporean government's banning of the film of his novel Saint Jack.

The film has just been unbanned and Ben Slater who has written a book about the making of Bogdanovich's film comments:

One thing I say in the book is that Singapore has changed radically, so that was never in doubt! Censorship is still a daily reality in Singapore, but I feel that the unbanning of Saint Jack is a very crucial symbolic act - the film stands in for a past that Singapore's authorities have spent 28 years trying to eradicate, so by saying "You can watch it now", it is finally accepting that it's OK for people to reconsider those times. But the fact remains, the world of Saint Jack has disappeared. You can't go back there, but you can now take a look at the movie".

Just as one country loosens up about its past, another clamps down. Read yesterday in the Star that the Malaysian government's decision to ban Amir's The Last Communist has been made final. Home Affairs Minister Datuk Seri Mohd Radzi Sheikh Ahmad said:

It will be like allowing a film portraying Osama Bin Laden as a humble and charitable man to be screened in the United States. ... People who don’t know about Chin Peng will think what a ‘poor old man’ he is.

A plausible reason? Are Malaysian audiences so undiscerning - particularly those gullible arty-farties who go to see Amir's films? Or does this banning also speak most loudly about the insecurities of the banners?

Your comments as always greatly appreciated.

Related Posts:

The Lost Communist (13/5/06)
Too Many Amirs and Two Minutes of Fame (23/5/06)
Index: On Censorship

Star Turn

Starmag is looking for book reviewers - and that could mean you!:

Do you have a brilliant read that you want others to try? Write a review of not more than 500 words and send it to starmag@thestar.com.my. Published reviews will be paid.

There is for sure a shortage of good reviewers in Malaysia, and those of you who drop by the blog are pretty passionate about books, so why not give this a go?

My personal tips:

• Aiyoh - don't just regurgitate the plot! If we're interested, we'll read it anyway. If not, you're wasting your breath.
• Don't read other reviews of the book until you have your own opinion firmly formed. What matters is what you think of the book, even if other reviewers have a very different opinion.
• Of course, be prepared to support your opinion with examples from the book.
• Be fair!
  
• Important this - Don't gobbledegook over the heads of readers, no matter how brilliant you are.
• Stick to the word limit, or you'll get cruelly chopped.
  

And if you want to know what good reviews look like, read the book pages of the newspapers listed in the sidebar of this blog.

Today's copy carries a review of The Impressionist by Hari Kunzru. Kee Thuan Chye liked it less well than I did, but it's a nicely written piece.

What tickled me was that the book is referred to (under the heading) as "an obscure gem"!

Elsewhere in Starmag is the news that travel writer/ novelist Paul Theroux (left) was in town, travelling the route he took 33 years ago (when writing The Great Railway Bazaar?) Y.S. Lim interviews him, but the questions, for this fan of his books, are just too vague and general, and elicit uncharacteristically polite and diplomatic responses! (C'mon, Theroux, grouch a bit and let us know it's really you!)

There's a nice piece on Pramoedya by Anu Nathan who points out, quite rightly, that while this great writer was not well known in Malaysia and Indonesia, she was amazed to meet German and Dutch backpackers in Indonesia:

... who not only knew who Pramoedya was but were also toting around well-thumbed copies of Child of all Nations.

It's an interesting irony. And a deeply shaming one.

This Sunday morning, nursing my first cup of tea, am aware at how big a hole in my life the absence of the Malay Mail has created. (Sad life, hey!) I miss all the murders and the scandals and the gossip gleaned from Britain's Daily Mail. It will be back on the newstands soon, spruced up, reformulated and designed to appeal to a younger set. I hope it will still be the only afternoon newspaper in the world you get to read over breakfast!