Janet TAY reviews Nam LE's The Boat (Canongate, 2008)

Seven wonders
A Vietnamese-Australian writer’s first book explores many different aspects of human strife

Review by JANET TAY

THE BOAT
By Nam Le
(Canongate Books, 288pp)

NAM LE was a name I discovered thanks to a short story that was published in the Summer 2006 issue of Zoetrope All-Story, an American literary magazine launched in 1997 by Hollywood filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola.

The magazine showcases work by emerging and established writers, and its many contributors have included the likes of 2007 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award-winner Miranda July, Salman Rushdie, Alice Munro and Gabriel Garcia Márquez.

As for Le—who was born in Vietnam, raised in Australia and is the fiction editor of the Harvard Review—his début collection of stories, The Boat, has followed his work for Zoetrope as well as that for other venues like the Best American Nonrequired Reading, Best New American Voices and Best Australian Stories. The book was recently published in Britain, Australia and the United States.

His story in Zoetrope titled “Love and Honour and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice” is the first story in The Boat. The account is perhaps an autobiographical one—the protagonist is a young Aussie writer of Vietnamese descent named Nam, and the story is set in his final year at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (in the US).

He is visited by his father from Australia and this results in quiet clashes between the two men who are unable to reconcile the differences that exist between them.

“Cartagena” is a surprising second story in this collection of seven. As readers leave Nam and his father in a wistful winter scene in Iowa, tropical Colombia is a confusing but not an uninteresting change. It takes a while to fully immerse oneself in the world of Colombian petty drug pushers and youths who get mixed up with hard core criminals, but Le’s deft and confident use of language and storytelling skills are convincing.

The story is of Juan Pablo Merendez (or Ron, as people call him) and his friends who become entangled with Colombian drug lords for whom murder and drug-trafficking are an everyday business. There is something familiarly (Quentin) Tarantino-esque about the scenes in “Cartagena,” but Le manages to pull off a somewhat authentic insight into the sinister world of organised crime.

From the underbelly of Colombia we move to New York, where a painter—middle-aged Henry Luff—faces an almost certain diagnosis of colorectal cancer. He yearns to meet his daughter, Elise, who he has not seen in 17 years. His young lover, Olivia, who was his nude model has died of cancer. In this story, Le explores the harsh reality of love, complex relationships and detached human behaviour.

Of love, Le brutally and beautifully describes sensuousness and passion in wonderfully unvarnished terms: “I’m watching her eat, sloppily, lips smeared with mango juice, sweet with the nectar of plums. I never thought it would be me: the painter who falls for his nude model .... Then she smiles. I drag her toward me, fend her off. Through it all, she loves hitting me. Her lips turn martial. Afterward we fall apart, marks on our bodies, smelling of fruit and mineral spirits, soap and charcoal.”

The third story, “Halflead Bay,” depicts the trials and tribulations of an Australian boy who worries about fighting with a bully named Dory at school. There’s also Allison, a girl he likes but is rumoured to be Dory’s girlfriend, and his mother who is dying from multiple sclerosis.

Then we change country and continent, and Le takes us to “Hiroshima” for the perspective of a young girl during World War II.

He then takes readers to Iran in “Tehran Calling,” where Sarah Middleton decides to visit her friend, Parvin, despite the political upheaval in the city. Here, Le continues to demonstrate his ability to take on a different voice—that of an American woman who tries to get over a broken love affair despite being caught in the middle of all the unrest.

The last story in the collection is the title story. With this, The Boat seems to have come full circle. The collection starts with a story that echoes the past of Vietnamese refugees and ends with a tale of their journey to better lands.

A vividly bleak image is painted by Le when depicting the harsh, inhumane conditions suffered by the refugees in their journey to escape the war in their homeland, the smell of death and decay, the vomit and staleness of unwashed bodies, but also the resilience of the human spirit in its persistence to survive.

Le’s ability to inhabit different lives with an impressive degree of precision lends credence to his collection of stories.

In a time when publishers and agents are loath to take risks with short-story collections, The Boat shows that an open mind can lead to a rewarding discovery of promising new talent.
Nam Le is certainly the new voice in literature to watch.

JANET TAY is a litigation lawyer by training, but decided to leave the legal profession to pursue her first love—books and writing. She is now a book editor with a Malaysian publishing house in Kuala Lumpur. She is also working towards a Master’s degree in English Literature at Universiti Malaya. She enjoys reviewing literary fiction.

Review first published in The Sunday Star of August 31, 2008

Here’s the unedited version of the review:

Inhabiting Different Lives

THE BOAT
By Nam Le
(Canongate Books, 288pp)

Review by JANET TAY

NAM LE was a name first known to me through a short story he had published in the Summer 2006 issue of Zoetrope All-Story, an American literary magazine launched in 1997 by Francis Ford Coppola. Zoetrope has showcased work by emerging and established writers alike, such as the 2007 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award-winner Miranda July, together with veterans such as Salman Rushdie, Alice Munro, Gabriel Garcia Márquez and many more. Less than two years after the publication of his story in Zoetrope, Le’s début collection of stories, The Boat, has been published in Britain, Australia and the U.S.

The story published in Zoetrope entitled ‘Love and Honour and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice’ is also the first story in The Boat. The account tempts the reader to think it a semi-autobiographical one—the protagonist is a young Australian writer of Vietnamese descent named Nam, and is in his final year at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Nam is visited by his father from Australia—a 33-hour journey that culminates in quiet clashes between father and son who are unable to reconcile the differences that naturally exist between them, either from generational gaps or Nam’s yearning to be free from his father’s draconian rules. Nam’s father was a soldier during the Vietnam War and is haunted by his past; Nam tries to overcome his misgivings about his father, a strict man who had brought him up with rules that, once broken, come with heavy prices to pay, by both Nam and his mother.

‘Cartagena’ is a surprising second story in this collection of seven. Leaving Nam and his father in a wistful winter scene in Iowa, tropical Colombia is a confusing but not uninteresting change. It takes a while to fully immerse oneself in the world of Colombian petty drug pushers and youths who get mixed up with hard core criminals, but Le’s deft and confident use of language and storytelling skills is convincing. Juan Pablo Merendez, or Ron, as people call him, and his friends becomes entangled with Colombian drug lords, for whom murder and drug-trafficking are an everyday business. There is something that is familiarly Tarantino-esque about the scenes in ‘Cartagena’—a complimentary observation—and despite the suddenness of the transition in setting, Le manages to pull off a somewhat authentic insight into the sinister world of organised crime.

From the underbelly of Colombia we move to New York, where a painter, middle-aged Henry Luff, who faces an almost certain diagnosis of colorectal cancer, yearns to meet his daughter Elise, whom he had not seen in 17 years after her mother had left him due to his infidelity. His young lover, Olivia, was his nude model who had died of cancer. In this story, Nam Le explores the harsh reality of love and complex relationships, and detached human behaviour, and does so in decidedly blunt terms: “She acts like she sees this every day: a sweat-drenched man, naked save for his white wing-tip formal shirt, blood leaking from his ass, lying in a fetal position, shakily smoking a cigarette. Her coolness feels familiar to me.”

Of love, Le brutally and beautifully describes sensuousness and passion. There is no neatness with Le, who takes the situation in its nakedness and presents to the world the aesthetics of unvarnished truths: “I’m watching her eat, sloppily, lips smeared with mango juice, sweet with the nectar of plums. I never thought it would be me: the painter who falls for his nude model. I love that, she says. What? When you look at me too long. Then she smiles. I drag her toward me, fend her off. Through it all, she loves hitting me. Her lips turn martial. Afterward we fall apart, marks on our bodies, smelling of fruit and mineral spirits, soap and charcoal. You’re a dirty old man, she says, giving me her best dirty young girl look, steering my cigaretted hand to her lips.”

The third story, ‘Halflead Bay,’ depicts the trials and tribulations of an Australian boy who worries about fighting with a bully named Dory at school; Allison, a girl he likes but is rumoured to be Dory’s girlfriend; and his mother who is dying from multiple sclerosis. Change country and continent, again, and Le takes us to ‘Hiroshima’—the perspective of a young girl during the Second World War before the horrific bombing of Hiroshima. Yet another unlikely setting follows—that of Iran in ‘Tehran Calling’, where Sarah Middleton visits her friend, Parvin, who is caught up in political upheaval in Tehran. Here Le continues to demonstrate his ability to take on a different voice—an American woman who tries to get over a broken love affair in the middle of political troubles in Iran.

The last story in the collection is the title story. With this, The Boat seems to have come full circle. The collection starts with a story that merely echoes the past of the Vietnamese refugees, and ends with an actual tale of their journey to better lands. A vividly bleak imagery is painted by Le, depicting the harsh, inhumane conditions suffered by the refugees in their journey to escape the war back home: the smell of death and decay, vomit and staleness of unwashed bodies, but also the resilience of the human spirit in its persistence to survive. Le’s ability to inhabit different lives with an impressive degree of precision lends credence to this collection of stories.

In a time when publishers and agents are loath to take risks with short-story collections, The Boat shows that an open mind can lead to a rewarding discovery of promising new talent. Perhaps, in anticipation of readers who may wonder why Le chooses to write vastly different narratives when he “could totally exploit the Vietnamese thing,” but instead writes about “lesbian vampires and Colombian assassins, and Hiroshima orphans—and New York painters with haemorrhoids,” Le’s answer is The Boat—proof that writers do not have to cater to perceived market demands if their voices are strong enough to transcend captious criticism. Nam Le is certainly the new voice in literature to watch.

TimeOut Kuala Lumpur: THE WRITE STUFF

Local publishing seems to be on the rise ... but strangely not in this country. S.H. LIM investigates

WITH BETH YAHP’s The Crocodile Fury, Rani Manicka’s The Rice Mother, Tash Aw’s The Harmony Silk Factory, Tan Twan Eng’s The Gift of Rain, Preeta Samarasan’s Evening Is the Whole Day and Chiew-Siah Tei’s Little Hut of Leaping Fishes all enjoying some measure of literary success overseas, it’s not presumptuous to say that maybe, just maybe, Malaysian writers of serious fiction in English have arrived. Google their names and you see links to reviews in international presses, reading group blogs, even including amazon.com, where their books are being sold.

But I’ve been corrected.

We still have many rungs on the ladder to climb, according to two notables in publishing. Eric Forbes, senior editor of MPH Group Publishing, puts it this way: ‘The success of one book isn’t the success of the whole publishing industry.’ Raman Krishnan, owner and operator of Silverfish Books, expresses it in different words, saying that these successes are just ‘here and there.’ Sporadic. Intermittent. There’s no pattern to suggest that things are different now. In any case, these are writers who live overseas (most of the time and make occasional visits to our shores to press skin with local readers to promote their books or to have face-time with their families), and are published there. Not here.

Because the requisite building blocks for successful local publishing are not in place.

Forbes points out that an absence of strong locally published works in the marketplace is ‘an interconnected problem.’ You need writers, literary agents, good editors and publishers and a reading public. When local works don’t sell, publishers don’t invest. After all, publishing is about ringgit and sen. About the bottom line. It’s not about charity. Or, heaven forbid, the art of writing and the message delivered.

There are challeneges facing publishers of serious fiction. Foremost, what moves off bookstore shelves and make the cash registers ring is nonfiction. Self-help books, in particular. (Feng shui and astrology are the established best-selling genres.) ‘We want to enhance our lives through magic. These self-help books point to something wrong in our lives, pander to our insecurities and promise quick fixes.’ And who doesn’t want a quick fix to life’s many problems?

‘The success of one book isn’t the success of the whole publishing industry.’

But according to Raman there is more truth in fiction than in these you-too-can-be-a-millionaire books. Read thoughtfully, Forbes says, ‘Literary fiction is an investment to making our lives richer and more meaningful.’ Raman has another take. ‘There are thousands of stories that tell us who we are as Malaysians,’ he says with evangelical fervour. ‘They need to be told. They need to be written. But we don’t have enough writers. We don’t have enough people writing. We need stories about ourselves. Our history.’

‘I get manuscripts but many are so bad that they are rejected outright,’ says Forbes. Good typescripts are so hard to find.’ Most local publishers want almost-ready-to-print scripts. They just don’t have the resources to work closely with a writer on rewriting and editing. They are working on what generates revenue. To get published locally, in any genre, writers often have to seek the services of freelance editors to clean up their scripts. And the cleaning up often means grammatical and usage errors only. Forbes reveals, ‘There were days when editors would actually line-edit text, check facts and figures, weed out inconsistencies, and turn clichés into elegance.’ Today’s writers have to rely on themselves to learn to rewrite and self-edit so that their writing can shine.

Silverfish Books takes another route to find scripts to publish. It tries cultivating people who have stories to tell and are willing to sweat them out onto paper. Raman doesn’t worry about looking for writers; he wants people with stories and who possess workman discipline and attitude to knuckle down and get their stories in print. He will be their editor, working with them on technique and form. Including grammar. News from Home is the product of this endeavour. He readily admits that while much of what is published by Silverfish Books is good, little on the whole measures up internationally. ‘When you write in English, you compete with Dickens, Shakespeare and others,’ he says, and, of course, thousands of titles across hundreds of genres that come out each year.

Both Forbes and Raman underscore that anyone who is serious about writing must read too. A lot. It is pointed out that most local writers don’t write well because ‘they do not read enough.’ Raman laments that in our country the level of English is quite low. ‘Writing in English is not really taught in schools. Most writing is self-taught. We are working against the tide of our education system.’

But beyond writers, there’s also a need to have skilful editors. Publishers have to invest in nurturing good editors to improve on potentially good work. There is a lack of editing skill in Malaysia. Editors are the arbiters of quality, making sure that mediocre writing doesn’t flood the market.

Forbes says, ‘We must nurture good writers. We have talent here. Many of them have proved that they are capable of writing full-length books. It’s really up to them where they want to go next.’ But they definitely need support with writing workshops from literary agents, good editors and publishers. And better education. Somewhere along that chain, the government should assist with grants and funding for workshops.

Reproduced with permission from the September 2008 issue of TimeOut Kuala Lumpur

A Mercy (Alfred A. Knopf, November 2008) by Toni MORRISON

Home (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, September 2008) by Marilynne ROBINSON

MA Jian ... Beijing Coma (2008)

The Wasted Vigil (Faber & Faber/Alfred A. Knopf, September 2008 ) by Nadeem ASLAM

How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken (Harper, August 2008) by Daniel MENDELSOHN

The Road Home (Little, Brown, August 2008) by Rose TREMAIN

ON THE COUCH ... Tess GERRITSEN

MEET DR TESS GERRITSEN,
THE CRIME NOVELIST
Literary journalist TAN MAY LEE speaks with the New York Times best-selling author of thrilling page-turners

TESS GERRITSEN was a successful Maine physician before giving it up to raise her children and concentrate on writing romantic and crime thrillers. She brings to her novels her first-hand knowledge of emergency and autopsy rooms. But her interests span far more than medical topics. As an anthropology student at Stanford University, she catalogued centuries-old human remains, and continues to travel the world, driven by her fascination with ancient cultures and bizarre natural phenomena. She has since entertained her readers with her Boston detective Jane Rizzoli and Dr Maura Isles series and 20 novels, winning the Rita Award (for The Surgeon) and Nero Wolfe Award (for Vanish) as well as making it to the New York Times’ best-seller list!

Gerritsen published her first historical thriller, The Bone Garden, in 2007, a story about a serial killer loose on the streets of Boston in the 1830s. She was busy promoting her new book in the United Kingdom when TAN MAY LEE of Quill magazine contacted her to find out more about her impressive writing career which she now does full-time.

*

Tell us about yourself and your heritage.
My mother is a Chinese immigrant, and my father (now deceased) was a second-generation Chinese American. I grew up in California, in a neighbourhood that was largely Caucasian, so I always felt very conspicuous. It was uncomfortable being the only Asian in my elementary school class, and I think that feeling of discomfort is still with me today, a feeling that I’ll never really “fit in” with any group. But it made me work harder, because I believed that if I could just be successful, maybe I’d be accepted some day. I think that reflects the experience of many Asian Americans—that they have to work harder than others to be accepted.

How do you feel about the mixed responses to The Bone Garden?
For the most part, the responses have been good. There’ve been some readers who simply don’t like historical novels. But those who do have been wildly enthusiastic, and I’ve never received such terrific fan mail for any of my other books. The important thing is that I myself believe this is my best book. I know it’s the most ambitious book I’ve ever done, and I felt I had no choice but to write it.

When you approach a writing project, do you look at the overall storyline, or do you focus on details?
I plunge into the writing process knowing how the story starts, but not knowing where it will end. I just let it take me where it will. The details develop along with the story. Every single sentence requires detail work. Writing, for me anyway, is a difficult process and I don’t approach it casually. I take it very seriously.

What kept you going with the eight romance novels? Did you have the confidence that you would one day hit the best-seller charts?
I wrote the romances because I enjoyed reading the genre. There’s no other way to write a convincing romance—you have to actually love the storylines. So I wrote those for love, without having any idea that I’d one day hit the best-seller charts. I just wanted to tell the stories.

Why do you write?
Because I have stories that I want to share, stories that I’m excited about. Stories that are only half-formed in my head, and I’m anxious to find out how they turn out. Writing is discovery for me. I meet new characters, and I want to know what happens to them.

Can you imagine yourself writing in a different genre?
I can imagine myself writing in any genre that interests me. I’ve written romance, thrillers, science fiction, and now a historical. I don’t see why any writer should be limited to a single genre.

What are your thoughts on writing books—to entertain, to inspire, or to provoke people?
My primary goal is to entertain. My secondary goal is to enlighten.

Do you have a muse?
No muse. Only hard-headed determination.

How much deeper can you go with a character like Boston detective Maura Isles and medical examiner Jane Rizzoli?
I don’t know. I’ll have to see.

You more or less produce a book every year and already have so much to write. How come you keep a blog as well?
Writing books is damn hard work, and it gives me gray hairs. In addition, I blog because sometimes I get frustrated or feel a need to vent, and the blog satisfies that need.

The book industry is finding it more difficult to get people to cultivate a reading habit. How would you encourage people, especially younger people, to read?
I’d tell them to read what they want to read. To not feel “forced” to only read what people tell you is good for you. Sometime during their school years, unfortunately, many young people seem to forget what it’s like to read for pleasure. We’re told that we must read the classics, or the prize-winners, or the worthy books, when many of us just want entertainment. It’s all right to read for entertainment! And once you’ve established a reading habit, you just might expand your reading to other books, more difficult books. The important thing is to get kids reading anything, and hope that the habit sticks with them into adulthood.

Look out for Tess Gerritsen’s new thriller, Keeping the Dead (U.K.) or The Keepsake (U.S.), in January 2009

Reproduced from the April-June 2008 issue of Quill magazine

2007 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction and Biography

A WORK OF FICTION and another of biography have been declared the winners of the 2007 James Tait Black Memorial Prizes, Britain’s oldest literary awards, it was announced today in Edinburgh, Scotland. Novelist Rosalind Belben’s Our Horses in Egypt (Chatto & Windus, 2007) won for fiction, while first-time nonfiction writer Rosemary Hill’s God’s Architect: Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain (Allen Lane, 2007) won for biography. Hill, who took some 15 years to complete her biography, said she was both thrilled and honoured to win the prize: “I first heard of this award not as a writer but as a reader, where I found it set like a seal on everything I most admired in biography. It has been given, fearlessly, to books of many kinds—scholarly, experimental and iconoclastic. As a result it has become a gold standard and I am thrilled and very honoured to have won it.”

POINT OF VIEW Kunal BASU

Can marketing kill the arts?
If research could predict what kinds of cars we want, why couldn’t it anticipate the next literary masterpiece, KUNAL BASU questions

MARKETING is everywhere—from the most private to the most public of places, and increasingly laying its claim to the holy land of the arts. Before finding out where marketing might take the arts, let’s turn back to business to see where it came from.

In the 1970s, a profound shift occurred in the world of business. Till then, companies believed in the rather benign “product concept,” which translated to: If you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door.

Experts developed new mousetraps to offer to the market. It was the world of the “backroom”: scientists, engineers and artists engaged in the solitary perfection of their craft.

Marketing, as we know it today, changed all that. In championing the “marketing concept,” it ridiculed the mousetrap makers. Who cares about a better mousetrap? How can you be sure that consumers would want to buy it? It encouraged starting from the outside—the consumers’ needs in order to please them in the end.

Standing between the makers and the buyers, the marketers discovered a role for themselves: the matchmakers. But the lure of marketing came from the promise of market research—a “scientific” process capable of predicting consumers’ needs and behaviours. Suddenly, everything seemed ripe for marketing—including the arts.

Are the arts different from cars and computers? Yes, if one were to subtract from it routine items of entertainment. Deriving its power from the power to surprise, they foster passion and wonder that is distinct from the instant gratification of daytime drama or a song contest.

Is it in marketing’s gift to anticipate surprises? Even diehard marketers would grudgingly admit that tangibles are better measured than intangibles let alone our appetite for a truly creative experience—where we consumers are most idiosyncratic, least articulate, constantly shifting and downright unpredictable. The best brief that a marketer could give to an artist would be no more than to be unconventional and creatively unique.

Marketers, in fact, have displayed staggering myopia with tangibles as well. The president of 20th Century Fox claimed notoriously in 1946: “Video won’t be around for more than six months. People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box.” And as late as in 1977, the chairman of Digital Equipment, a marketing guru, took an astute view of consumer behaviour: “There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.” Decca’s rejection of the Beatles (“guitar groups are on their way out”) isn’t peculiar to arts marketing, but marketing.

Creativity in the arts can’t come from researching the consumers. But it can be fostered by others—the backroom appraisers, passionate reviewers, and eventually, the word-of-mouth endorsement from adventurous audiences.

The best of these—commissioning editors, gallery curators, music label scouts and agents—are often the unsung heroes, who climb the mountain of “marketability” in order to see an innovative project through. Relying on human judgement, that eternally fallible but irreplaceable quality, it is they who place the risky bets against the scientific odds of research.

The power of marketing, its real power, lies not in idea generation or even in market creation, but in market expansion for an idea that is hovering secretly and subconsciously at the edge of acceptance. Its calling is that of a populariser. The rest is its delusion.

Thus, the well-honed tricks of placement and distribution, promotion and tie-ins, can indeed stir up an audience that is late in getting to a new play, picking up that startling new novel, or trying out an unknown band’s CD. Its techniques of extending reach and awareness are well-proven, and as long as the cause is good, the effects can be beneficial to artists.

As a propagator, marketing is not hostile to the arts. If anything, it could be a nice complement, lending a push to lethargic public imagination. Its threat lies in its ambitious self-concept—that it isn’t simply a supportive function, but the raison d’être; more a grand philosophy than a set of techniques; the composer and the conductor, not simply the violinist. In a classic Harvard Business Review article titled “Marketing is Everything,” Regis McKenna claims: “Marketing will do more than sell. It will be the way a company does business.”

That way is the way of the tyrannical matchmaker, arranging a union between the artist and the audience, based on the measured needs of one and the formulaic creation of the other. It is the way of seeing a successful novelist as a “product” capable of laying a row of identical golden eggs, or remaking popular films at the expense of new screenplays. It is the philosophy of seeing all that is good in simply good consumption.

With so much in our landscape guided already by the marketing ethic, it isn’t far-fetched to imagine the spectre of marketing next stalking the arts. To counter it is to believe that art is enough for art’s sake, not the sake of market share; and combating the logic of repeat purchase for a “proven product.” It means, ultimately, standing up for the arts.
Unlike an arranged marriage, the creation and the appreciation of the arts is a spontaneous affair. Backstage orchestrations could kill the spirit, and end up wounding the actors. Perhaps, fatally so.

KUNAL BASU was born in Calcutta, India, but has spent much of his adult life in Canada and the U.S. He has taught at the McGill University in Canada and has been a Professor of Marketing at Templeton College, Oxford University, England. He has also acted in films in India and written a screenplay, Snakecharmer, as well as written and directed two documentaries. He is the author of three acclaimed novels, The Opium Clerk (2001), The Miniaturist (2003) and Racists (2006), he has acted in films and on stage, written poetry and screenplays. His first collection of stories, The Japanese Wife, was published by HarperCollins India in January 2008. His story, “The Japanese Wife,” has been made into a film by India’s celebrated director Aparna Sen.

Reproduced from the April-June 2008 issue of Quill magazine

MPH Breakfast Club with ... Preeta SAMARASAN

“COFFEE, CURRY PUFFS AND BOOKS:
WHAT A TANTALISING COMBINATION!”

The 15th MPH Breakfast Club on Saturday, October 25, 2008, at 11.30a.m. to 1.00p.m., will be featuring Malaysian novelist and short-story writer Preeta Samarasan, the author of Evening Is the Whole Day (Houghton Mifflin/HarperCollins, 2008). Samarasan is at the moment working on her second novel, a story about a group of people in Cameron Highlands living in a Utopian community. She has a story in the forthcoming collection, Urban Odysseys (MPH Publishing, 2009).

Preeta Samarasan was born and raised in Malaysia and moved to the U.S. for her high-school education. She received her MFA from the University of Michigan, where an early version of her novel won the Avery and Jule Hopwood First Novel Award. She recently won the Asian American Writer’s Workshop short-story award. She lives in France.

Eric Forbes will be introducing Preeta Samarasan while Janet Tay will be moderating the session.

Photograph of Preeta Samarasan courtesy of Miriam Berkley

Date October 25, 2008 (Saturday)
Time 11.30a.m.-1.00p.m.
Venue MPH Bangsar Village II Lot 2F-1 (2nd Floor), Bangsar Village II, No. 2 Jalan Telawi 1, Bangsar Baru, 59100 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Phone (603) 2287 3600

Food and refreshments will be served
All lovers of literature are most welcome

Preeta Samarasan will also be doing a reading at readings@seksan at 3.30p.m. on the same day. Seksan Design is at No. 67 Jalan Tempinis Satu, Lucky Garden, Bangsar, 59100 Kuala Lumpur

***

“… THE LONG SLOW BANQUET of a fine novel. Preeta Samarasan’s delicious first novel, set in Malaysia in 1980, provides such a feast. ... Her ambitious spiraling plot, her richly embroidered prose, her sense of place, and her psychological acuity are stunning. Readers, responding to the setting, will immediately compare her to Kiran Desai. I think Samarasan’s dialogue and description are reminiscent of Eudora Welty, another woman who knew how to write about family and race and class and secrets and heat.” Allegra Goodman, in The New York Times Book Review

“A MAGICAL, EXUBERANT tragic-comic vision of postcolonial Malaysia reminiscent of Rushdie and Roy. In prose of acrobatic grace, Samarasan conjures a vibrant portrait, by turns intimate and sweeping, of characters and a country coming of age. The début of a significant, and thrilling, new talent.” Peter Ho Davies, Man Booker Prize-longlisted author of The Welsh Girl (2007)

“RICH, QUIRKY AND COLOURFUL, Evening Is the Whole Day captures not just the sense of a family struggling to deal with its past, but the crazy uncertainty of a country coming to terms with itself. Often funny, sometimes sad, never predictable, this is a novel that announces a unique talent.” Tash Aw, the author of The Harmony Silk Factory (2005)

“A WONDERFULLY ENGAGING NOVEL, poignant yet comical, about the contradictions and hazards inherent in a modern, postcolonial world.” M.G. Vassanji, author of The In-Between World of Vikram Lall (2003)

“PREETA SAMARASAN’s passionate, striking book, stunned with light and heat, is full of the memory of enchantment and the enchantment of memory. Samarasan cultivates with brilliance the taut battle between the public and familial being, and the hidden and fragile inner self, trapped in a world of myth and mystery.” Susanna Moore, author of One Last Look (2003)

“SOMETIMES A BOOK COMES BY that doesn’t just grab you—it embraces you entirely, seizing your senses and emotions, so much so that the moment you finish it, you go back to the beginning and start reading all over again. Sometimes, a book comes by that makes you laugh out loud at almost every page and yet hurts you and hushes you with its lyrical beauty. ... One such book is Evening is the Whole Day by Malaysian Preeta Samarasan. ... It is the rich imagery of the language that grabs the reader’s attention with experiences that most Malaysians will recognise: eating Sunshine bread, Marie biscuits and Milo (straight from the tin); raffia string around a suitcase; the skirt zipper that works its way to the hip; whining drunken man at the gate .... Preeta’s rich, multi-layered approach soaks into the language, characters, situations and events, creating a novel that is uniquely Malaysian but not overly nostalgic. Her characters flavour their conversations with Malaysian English peppered with Tamil expressions, easily understood within context.” Saras Manickam, The Sunday Star

“AN IMPRESSIVE DÉBUT ... At one level, it is a nuanced portrayal of the trials and tribulations of one immigrant family, but at a deeper level it deals with issues of identity, of the underclass and of the deep divides which create classes in a nation.” Deepika Shetty, The Straits Times

“AN IMAGINATIVE, irreverent, funny, entertaining, beautiful, and unapologetically Malaysian creation. ... Samarasan presents, through the multifarious and difficult relationships among the inhabitants of the Rajasekharan household, our country with its complexities of class, race, religion, gender and colour.” Lim Soon Heng, TimeOut Kuala Lumpur

Smouldering Scottish Folk Tales

DAPHNE LEE has never believed in the tooth fairy and thinks Tinkerbell one of the most annoying characters in literature. She likes her fairyfolk tall—and handy with a bow and arrow, but thinks Tolkien’s elves could benefit from sessions of psychotherapy. She tells us why the Oriental-sounding Tam Lin, a character in Scottish folklore, has such sizzling sex appeal

THE IDEA FOR THIS PIECE came about when one of the editors of Quill and I were discussing “hot men of literature.”

I meant writers who got one hot under the collar, but she was thinking along the lines of Heathcliff, the moody bastard in Emily Bronte’s gothic romance Wuthering Heights. I am not a fan of either the novel or its hero. In fact, I have never lusted after any storybook character although I do still have a most innocent crush on Laurie in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. (I was outraged when someone recently suggested that he was gay.)

I am also rather intrigued by Bran, the white-haired boy in Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising Sequence. However, that was well and good when I was 18 and the character was about 14, but rather dodgy now that I’m 41.

Anyway, I jokingly said to the editor that if I had to pick someone out of literature to do the horizontal lambada with it’d have to be Tam Lin. “Who?” she’d asked. Was this someone from the classic Chinese novel, Dream of the Red Chamber? No, despite the Oriental-sounding name, Tam Lin is not Chinese, but a character in Scottish folklore.

The editor was intrigued and Wiki’ed him. “How fascinating! Yes, do write something about how you’re in love with Tam Lin,” she said. I agreed despite not being in the least enamoured of him: I have feigned devotion to men of flesh-and-blood before so why not one of ink-and-paper? So long as it pays the bills, I say.

Ahh … Tam Lin. I first encountered the man when I was but a girl. Although his story is originally and traditionally told in the form of a ballad (or song), it has also been conveyed in rhyme and in folk tales. The Tale of Tam Lin and the Faeries was in a collection of British myths and legends that my mother read to me when I was around eight, but I’m sorry to say that he did not make much of an impression on me at that point. Then I was more infatuated with King Arthur. I wanted to be Guinevere, and I would be less foolish and faithless than she was. In fact, I thought Janet, who loved Tam Lin, would have suited Arthur more. She was certainly infinitely more interesting than Tam Lin who, as far as I could make out, did nothing but hang about the woods warning unfortunate girls off his rose bushes!

But I should perhaps tell the story of Tam Lin for the benefit of those not acquainted with it. Tam Lin, a knight, has a little accident while out riding one day. He is saved by the Queen of the Faeries and obliged to stay with the faeries in the woods of Carterhaugh, an estate belonging to a nobleman. This nobleman gives Carterhaugh to his only daughter Janet. One day, she goes flower-picking in the woods and encounters Tam Lin who demands payment for the roses she has picked. He asks for either her mantle (cloak) or her virginity. Janet surrenders the latter, which leads me to believe that one of the following must have been true: one, she really had her heart set on those roses; two, the mantel was a one-off Parisian model that she loathed to part with; or three, she fancied Tam Lin something rotten.

Anyway, so Janet’s cherry is duly popped and, wouldn’t you know it, the single encounter with Tam results in a bun in Janet’s oven. Janet’s poor old dad is naturally concerned and questions his daughter who reveals that the baby’s father might not even be human. Amazingly, Janet is not grounded. She doesn’t even get her wrists slapped. (Here, obviously, is one spoilt brat, but I rather admire her defiance.)

Of course, Tam Lin assures Janet that he is not a faerie and tells her how she might rescue him from the Queen. The faeries make a sacrifice to hell every seven years, on Halloween, and Tam Lin believes that because he is human they will sacrifice him next.

To win him, Janet must wait for the faeries to ride out on Halloween night. She must then pull Tam Lin from his horse and hold him tight. The Queen will try to make Janet loosen her grip by changing Tam Lin into a variety of ravenous, deadly and frightening beasts. Janet rises to the challenge and the Queen throws a hissy fit but is obliged to hand Tam Lin over in all his naked, manly glory. Cor blimey!

The story ends there so we don’t know if Tam Lin proved a good husband and father, or if he was a wife-beater and womaniser. Maybe he simply ignored his family and spent all his time tending his rose bushes and winning blue ribbons at horticultural fairs.

I never gave Tam Lin much thought after that brief childhood encounter. The next time he popped up was when I was in my 30s and it was in the English folk band Fairport Convention’s version of the traditional ballad. Sung beautifully and hauntingly by Sandy Denny, the lyrics stirred my imagination more than the brief telling in the children’s collection of folk tales had. Tam Lin, in the song, sounds like a mysterious young man, a shadowy figure who oozes charisma and sex appeal. If you examine the lyrics, you realise that he isn’t actually described in detail, but you do get the impression of a strong, silent yet persuasive type. Well, obviously he must be quite beguiling considering how readily Janet gives in to him!

Tam Lin, because so little is actually revealed about his physical appearance, is really only as sexy as Janet thinks he is. Her eagerness to be with him and willingness to endanger herself for his sake implies that she thinks he has something her father’s knights lack. When questioned by her father, she is quick to insist that “There’s neer a laird about your ha/ Shall get the bairn’s name.” That lyric is from one of the earliest (c. 1729) recorded (written) versions of the ballad. Translation, from the Fairport Convention version: “There’s not a knight in all your hall shall get the baby’s name.”

In a version of the tale, by E.H. Hopkinson, Tam Lin is described thus: “It was said that he was six feet tall with sparkling sea-grey eyes and a voice so sweet as to silence even the holy angels.” I think this is probably purely wishful thinking on Hopkinson’s part though, because I have gone through practically every version of the ballad available online and found none that mention Tam Lin’s height, hair or eye colour.

Pamela Dean’s young adult novel, Tam Lin, is based on the traditional ballad but set in a liberal arts college in the 1970s. Her Tam Lin, or Thomas Lane, is a tall, blonde, handsome theatre major who (wonders will never cease) is straight! But in Diana Wynne Jones’s Fire and Hemlock, Thomas Lynn is “tall and thin and walked in a way that stooped his round, colourless head between his shoulders, making his head look smaller than it really was—though some of that could have been distance: he was so tall that his head was a long way off from Polly. Like a very tall tortoise, Polly thought.”

Tortoise! Now, Diana Wynne Jones is probably my favourite fantasy writer but I haven’t quite forgiven her for turning Tam Lin into Tortoise-man. Whatever was she thinking! To make matters worse, Polly, the heroine of Fire and Hemlock, is about 10 when she first meets Thomas (Tam) who (heaven help us) is well into his 20s if not early 30s. They later fall in love—not until Polly is past the age of consent, mind you, but it still feels icky to me.

I prefer to return Tam Lin to his original setting—in the Scottish countryside, astride a white steed. (Even the pale doomed knight in John Keats’s “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” in whose trance-like, feverish state Tam Lin might have ended up had Janet not rescued him, would be preferable to a besuited modern-day tortoise with a predilection for underage virgins.)

Love? Devotion? I would not (even with my electricity bill in mind) go so far. Tam Lin will have to be satisfied with lust. Getting jiggy with a strange, devastatingly good-looking man in a secluded 16th-century wood is the stuff of sexual high fantasy. And an enchanted knight among bluebells and roses is a much more attractive prospect surely than a pizza delivery boy on the kitchen floor.

Reproduced from the July-September 2008 issue of Quill magazine

Catch Anita DESAI in Singapore

DESAI Anita [1937-] Novelist, short-story writer. Born Anita Mazumdar in Mussoorie, Delhi, India. NOVELS The Zigzag Way (2004); Fasting, Feasting (1999: shortlisted for the 1999 Booker Prize for Fiction); Journey to Ithaca (1995); Baumgartner’s Bombay (1988); In Custody (1984: shortlisted for the 1984 Booker Prize for Fiction); Clear Light of Day (1980: shortlisted for the 1980 Booker Prize for Fiction); Fire on the Mountain (1977: awarded the 1978 National Academy of Letters Award and winner of the 1978 Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize); Cat on a Houseboat (1976); Where Shall We Go This Summer? (1975); The Peacock Garden (with illustrations by Jeroo Roy) (1974); Bye-Bye, Blackbird (1968); Voices in the City (1965); Cry, The Peacock (1963) STORIES Diamond Dust and Other Stories (2000); Games at Twilight and Other Stories (1978) CHILDREN’S The Village by the Sea (1982: winner of the 1983 Guardian Award for Children’s Fiction) NONFICTION Peasant Struggles in India (1979)

August 2008 Highlights

Novels
1. Twilight (Text Publishing, 2008) / Azhar Abidi
2. When Will There Be Good News? (Doubleday, 2008) / Kate Atkinson
3. Man in the Dark (Henry Holt, 2008) / Paul Auster
4. Exit Lines (Knopf Canada/Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2008) / Joan Barfoot
5. From A to X: A Story in Letters (Verso Press, 2008) / John Berger
6. The Other Hand (Sceptre, 2008) / Chris Cleave
7. The Idea of Love (Fig Tree, 2008) / Louise Dean
8. Everything I Knew (Penguin, 2008) / Peter Goldsworthy
9. People of the Whale (W.W. Norton, 2008) / Linda Hogan
10. The Private Patient (Faber & Faber, 2008) / P.D. James
11. Her Three Wise Men (Hutchinson, 2008) / Stanley Middleton
12. Dreams of Rivers and Seas (Harvill Secker, 2008) / Tim Parks
13. The Good Thief (Dell, 2008) / Hannah Tinti
14. The Road Home (Little, Brown, 2008) / Rose Tremain
15. A Blessed Child [trans. from the Norwegian, Et Velsignet Barn (2005), by Sarah Death] (Picador, 2008) / Linn Ullmann
16. The Birthday Present (Viking, 2008) / Barbara Vine

First Novels
1. A Girl Made of Dust (Fourth Estate, 2008) / Nathalie Abi-Ezzi
2. Girl in a Blue Dress (Tindal Street Press, 2008) / Gaynor Arnold
3. The Story of a Widow (Knopf Canada/Random House Canada, 2008) / Musharraf Ali Farooqi
4. Train to Trieste (Alfred A. Knopf, 2008) / Domnica Radulescu

Stories
1. A Better Angel (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008) / Chris Adrian
2. Country of the Grand (Faber & Faber, 2008) / Gerard Donovan
3. One More Year: Stories (Spiegel & Grau, 2008) / Sana Krasikov
4. The Boat (Canongate, 2008) / Nam Le

Poetry
1. Drives (Jonathan Cape, 2008) / Leontia Flynn

Nonfiction
1. Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection (W.W. Norton, 2008) / John T. Cacioppo and William Patrick
2. So I Have Thought of You: The Letters of Penelope Fitzgerald (ed. Terence Dooley) (Fourth Estate, 2008) / Penelope Fitzgerald
3. How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken (Harper, 2008) / Daniel Mendelsohn
4. Ghost Train to the Eastern Star: On the Tracks of the Railway Bazaar (Houghton Mifflin, 2008) / Paul Theroux
5. Woman of Rome: A Life of Elsa Morante (Harper, 2008) / Lily Tuck