eric forbes’s book addict’s guide to good books

A Chat with Marina Endicott

2012-02-15T22:15:00.000-08:00

ERIC FORBES talks to Canadian novelist MARINA ENDICOTT about her new novel, The Little Shadows, a story set in the picaresque world of vaudeville in the early 1900s

MARINA ENDICOTT is a prize-winning Canadian novelist who has written three novels, Open Arms, Good to a Fault and The Little Shadows, and is working on a novel about a man who tries to create heaven on earth by fixing the lives of all his friends. Good to a Fault was shortlisted for the 2008 Giller Prize and won the 2009 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Canada and the Caribbean, while The Little Shadows is set in the world of vaudeville in the early 20th century. Endicott teaches creative writing at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada.

Tell me something about yourself.
Something unknown? I play the harp. “I took my harp to the party,” goes the old vaudeville song, “But nobody asked me to play.”

You were born and bred in Golden, British Columbia, Canada.
Only born, not bred. We left when I was two—but I have surprisingly clear memories of Golden. My brother (who was also born there, just before my father was sent to a new Anglican parish) and I drove up into the Rockies to see the old rectory a few years ago and were slightly shocked to find that the house had become a thrift store, crammed with used clothes and household tat. But it was great to be able to walk through all the rooms and imagine ourselves there. The Rocky Mountains is a massive mountain range that cuts down the western side of Canada and the US; the landscape around Golden, near the peak of the Rogers Pass, is dry and very clean. Frightening drives careening round the sides of mountains, rock falls, waterfalls, and an alternating view of rockface or vast, wild vistas.

You started out in the theatre as an actor, playwright and director before writing novels. What prompted the change in direction?
Not so much a change of direction as a return home: I wrote before I acted, almost before I read. My acting career was littered with writing too, notebooks full of imagined previous circumstances and notes on relationships, etc. I was no great shakes as an actor, always better at readings than the longer marathon of performance runs. Directing is the best job in theatre, and I loved it; because I was already beginning to write I was commissioned to write a few plays, but don’t consider myself a good playwright. But I love the art of theatre, and the beauty of the backstage is always enchanting, especially that dual view—watching the performance from the shadows in the wings, while at the same time seeing the hidden mechanisms, the people behind the screen.

Was writing something you had always set your heart on?
Not so much set my heart on, like a shiny possession, but more like water or air, something necessary for living.

What do you enjoy most about your life as a writer?
I love the long, urgent task of creating and then solving imaginary (but as true as I can make them) problems. In all the arts I know, I haven’t found anything better than living the life-within-life of a novel.

What’s a day like in your writing life?
I write or think or fume about writing every day, most of the day. Domestic tasks intrude, and my family does demand a bit of human contact from me, but otherwise I am happy to work. I get up early in the morning, before my children have to be harried off to school (they’re nearly cooked now, one off to university next year and the other the year after), and come back to my computer until they come home and it’s time to scramble some supper together; in the evening, I work. I like to work. And I’m pretty slow.

The Little Shadows is your third novel. Was it difficult getting your first novel, Open Arms, published in 2001?
Unusually, no. I had been writing short stories for a while, and had won a couple of awards, and an editor wrote asking to see a novel when I had one finished. I finished it, sent it off, and they published it. That’s not normal, of course—my second novel, Good to a Fault, was rejected by several publishers. I couldn’t really blame them: a repressed spinster, a woman dying of cancer, and an Anglican priest doesn’t sound like a fun read.

Did you know where you were going with your novels as you were writing them?
I usually know where the novel will end, but I don’t know how it will get there.

What are some of the themes you explore in The Little Shadows?
I hope it works on a few levels: on the surface, the picaresque rags-to-riches adventures of the vaudeville company; a little deeper, examining the vicissitudes all girls go through, coming to terms with themselves, their bodies and minds; and in a larger sense, as an examination of how we become true artists—how life infests and influences the work that artists do. I wanted to write about love and death, just for a change; about money and its morality; and above all, art: what makes it good, is it worth suffering for, is trashy art worth doing—what threads run through our long lives in art? I wanted to talk about the medium-time in all the arts: not the geniuses (except Victor), but the ordinary people who make ordinary art without much fuss or hysterics, who have a workmanlike sense of their craft and a fitting modesty about their talent. And use that modest talent generously.

What drew you to this time, place and subject?
Three elements combined to make me susceptible to vaudeville: my early experience as an actor in touring theatre, and in small precarious theatre companies; working with, admiring and being depressed by comics in England, Toronto and in the west; and—this was an important factor—getting to know the audience in the prairies. Working with arts organizations in the west introduced me to the blessed company of farmers, insurance agents and teachers who spend all their free time organizing concerts to bring in musicians and performers of every variety, because in every place, and in every age, people have a deep continuing hunger for art.

Was there much research to do?
I spent a couple of years wandering in online archives, becoming enchanted with vaudeville photographs, before starting serious research in 2006. As well as straightforward archival research, I travelled the prairies to visit old vaudeville houses, including the Empress in Fort MacLeod, the Lyric in Swift Current, both of which are in the book. I drove the Death Trail, the route the Belle Auroras take through Montana and farther west. I spent years gradually immersing myself in the period and the lovely, ridiculous, expert art of vaudeville.

The research was a pleasure: discovering the hilarious, miserable, nonsensical stories of this strange culture and time. It reminds me of online gaming, which has sprung up just as quickly and become as all-pervasive, and which will be superseded by something else as technology moves along—but I can’t think of any other art which led artists to the development of such sheer physical skill. After a hundred years, all our performing arts still rest on the base laid down in vaudeville. I loved learning the technical tricks of vaudeville, many of which are still in use: the thunder sheet, the glass-crash man. I’ve put a vaudeville glossary on my website, but the reader learns about vaudeville as Aurora and Clover and Bella do, by wandering around backstage.

What was the editing process like?
It was a great honour to work with my invaluable editor at Doubleday, Lynn Henry. Although tiny, she is formidable, but we did not have to argue—I agreed with everything she said or suggested, and believed from the beginning that she had a perfect understanding of the book. You can’t help but be grateful for the enormous altruistic involvement of an editor, and for the intimacy of that long, drawn-out conversation.

As a fiction writer and an avid reader, what do you think are the essentials of good fiction?
I’m so glad you asked me that. Not that I have an easy answer. But “good” runs like a gold lode through so many genres, including what some people call the genre of literary fiction. I’ve come to believe that it depends on the quality of the imagining that goes into a book: the freshness and strength of the images, the deep reality (although many times there’s no “reality” involved) of the lives depicted, and the intelligence or emotional understanding the writer brings to the work. If language is expertly used, too, that’s extra delightful.

What distinguishes the great novels from the merely good?
A harder question. Shuffling slowly toward some understanding of this, I’m afraid I’m beginning to believe that the moral breadth of the writer comes into it. Not that it has to be a morality I’d necessarily agree with or hold, but that the great questions are seriously entertained: what is life? How should we live? And these questions can be asked, and answers attempted, in every genre. I think of children’s books like E.C. Spykman’s Terrible, Horrible Edie or Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea; of science fiction like Frank Herbert’s Dune; contemplative novels like Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead or wild west adventures like Guy Vanderhaeghe’s The Last Crossing; I think of a book like Heart of Darkness—which is essentially a sea yarn, but far transcends its original purpose.

Tell me about some of the books from your childhood that still resonates with you.
I’ve mentioned Terrible, Horrible Edie, but there are lots of others! I read like a demon, an addict, a sad case. All through our childhood travels my father would call from the front seat, “Put down the book! Look where we are!” One of my favourites, T.H. White’s Mistress Masham’s Repose, becomes a manual for living for Dolly, the abandoned child in my novel Good to a Fault.

Who are some of your favourite authors, Canadian or otherwise? What are some of your favourite Canadian books?
Of those still with us, Helen Oyeyemi, whose Mr Fox is one of the books of the year this year; among the dead, Penelope Fitzgerald always, for all her books, but my favourite is The Beginning of Spring. In Canada, Michael Ondaatje (The Collected Works of Billy the Kid remains my favourite, but The Cat’s Table is a beautiful, tender book); Guy Vanderhaeghe; Fred Stenson (particularly Lightning, his western set in Cochrane, Alberta, where he lives and I used to live); Lynn Coady (whose The Antagonist was shortlisted for the 2011 Giller Prize); Gil Adamson (her novel The Outlander but also her remarkable short stories and her recently reissued book of poetry, Ashland); and this year I loved Miriam Toews’s spare, heartfelt Irma Voth.

Do you have an all-time favourite book?
I think today I would say Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Beginning of Spring, for its skill and surprising delicacy, for the scene with the bear in the dining room, for the excruciating pain she puts her characters through and how the plot miraculously turns; but Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker is always standing close to the top, because the full-on experience of reading that book, diving down into broken thought and broken language and clutching at spars until you actually come to understand the new/old world, is like nothing else on earth.

Which writers would you say have had the greatest influence on your work and what, if any, are the books you return to time and again?
Everybody influences me. All of the above. Even if it’s not at all evident in my work! And I return to all the books mentioned above, and to every book I’ve ever loved. Rereading is a great joy. I’m very much enjoying the one consolation of getting older, that I can reread mystery novels by Michael Innes, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh and others with fresh pleasure because I’ve forgotten the plots by now.

What are you reading at the moment?
After a long fall of reading all brand new Canadian novels through the literary festival season here, I’m now rereading E.C. Bentley’s The Woman in Black and John Buchan’s Huntingtower; in new-to-me books I’m reading wonderful, eerie Barbara Comyns’s The Skin Chairs and Dan Vyleta’s The Quiet Twin. I’ve just finished the elegant Patrick Gale’s new novel, A Perfectly Good Man, which I loved.

In your opinion, is creativity or imagination something that can be taught, or is it inborn?
It’s inborn—we all have it. It’s taught—we all need to learn how to use it and free it and expand our use, and to trust it.

Next to reading and writing, what is (are) your grand passion(s) in life?
My dear husband and children; my friends, who are Legion and Lovely. Having been nomadic since childhood, one of the things I love best is a long car trip with no particular destination, either alone or with my family.

For better or worse, we are now in the age of e-books. What are your thoughts on e-books and e-book readers? Have e-book readers won you over? Or are you in the “ink-and-paper forever” camp? Or somewhere in between?
I’ll read any format, any time, anywhere. I read the back of cereal boxes, I read the tiny grey-print jokes that come out of Christmas crackers: I am a full on addict and will read any text available. But I’m still mostly reading physical books. I gave my husband a Kobo reader for Christmas, thinking he’d like it because he could make the print bigger; he thanked me but wanted a Blackberry Playbook instead, so I now have the Kobo. I like it very much for reading e-books from Project Gutenberg. Even though the screen is small, I do like reading on my iPhone with Eucalyptus, my favourite e-book software.

Do you think e-books will replace physical books one day?
Yes, for many titles. A lot of the books we read are information or junk food, to be consumed quickly and deleted from our directories. Others are treasures to be returned to, and there’s not much difficulty distinguishing between the two. We will hang on to beautiful physical books for a long time, I believe. The physical pleasure of reading a book is too good to give up, at least for those of us who learned to read before screens. But I think before e-books replace physical books there will be some changes in the technology. It’s not physiologically comfortable yet to read long passages of fiction onscreen, no matter how the screen and ink are arranged. And I’ve learned one important thing: don’t read in bed on your iPad. I fell asleep and dropped the iPad, and had a ridiculously swollen mouth for days and days. A book has never physically hurt me. Unless you count the long torture of writing one!

February 2012 Highlights

2012-02-01T01:26:00.000-08:00

Novels
1. The Detour (trans. from the Dutch by David Colmer) (Harvill Secker, 2012) / Gerbrand Bakker
2. The O’Briens (Pantheon, 2012) / Peter Behrens
3. The Greatcoat (Hammer, 2012) / Helen Dunmore
4. The Little Shadows (Hutchinson/Allen & Unwin, 2012) / Marina Endicott
5. The White Pearl (Sphere, 2012) / Kate Furnivall
6. Sarah Thornhill (Canongate, 2012) / Kate Grenville
7. Watergate (Pantheon, 2012) / Thomas Mallon
8. History of a Pleasure Seeker (Alfred A. Knopf, 2012) / Richard Mason
9. The Roundabout Man (Sceptre, 2012) / Clare Morrall
10. The Healing (Knopf Doubleday, 2012) / Jonathan Odell

11. Restoration (Ecco, 2012) / Olaf Olafsson
12. The Revelations (Faber & Faber, 2012) / Alex Preston
13. The Divine Comedy (Atlantic Comedy,. 2012) / Craig Raine
14. The House I Loved (St. Martin’s Press, 2012) / Tatiana de Rosnay

First Novels
1. The Darlings (Pamela Dorman Books, 2012) / Cristina Alger
2. No One Is Here Except All of Us (Riverhead, 2012) / Ramona Ausubel
3. Rocks in the Belly (Serpent’s Tail, 2012) / Jon Bauer
4. The Whores’ Asylum (Fig Tree, 2012) / Kate Darby
5. The Starboard Sea (St. Martin’s Press, 2012) / Amber Dermont
6. The Variations (Henry Holt, 2012) / John Donatich
7. A Good American (Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam, 2012) / Alex George
8. Shelter (Virago, 2012) / Frances Greenslade
9. The Whipping Club (T.S. Poetry Press, 2012) / Deborah Henry
10. Mountains of the Moon (Jonathan Cape, 2012) / I.J. Kay

11. Alys, Always (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2012) / Harriet Lane
12. The Fall (Headline, 2012) / Claire McGowan
13. Nacropolis (Faber & Faber, 2012) / Jeet Thayil
14. Care of Wooden Floors (HarperPress, 2012) / Will Wiles
15. The Bellwether Revivals (Simon & Schuster, 2012) / Benjamin Wood
16. The Golden Hour (NAL Trade, 2012) / Margaret Wurtele

Stories
1. Stay Awake (Ballantine Books, 2012) / Dan Chaon
2. What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank (Alfred A. Knopf, 2012) / Nathan Englander
3. Drifting House (Viking Adult, 2012) / Krys Lee
4. The White People and Other Weird Stories (Penguin Classics, 2012) / Arthur Machen
5. Light Lifting (Jonathan Cape, 2012) / Alexander MacLeod
6. This Isn’t the Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You (Bloomsbury, 2012) / Jon McGregor

Poetry
1. Sky Thick With Fireflies (Salmon Publishing, 2012) / Ethna McKiernan

Nonfiction
1. Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity (Random House, 2012) / Katherine Boo
2. A Card from Angela Carter (Bloomsbury, 2012) / Susannah Clapp
3. The Origins of Sex: A History of the First Sexual Revolution (Allen Lane, 2012) / Faramerz Dabhoiwala
4. Whatever It Is, I Don’t Like It (Bloomsbury USA, 2012) / Howard Jacobson
5. Even Tough Girls Wear Tutus: Inside the World of a Woman Born in Prison (Cell 7 Media, 2012) / Deborah Jiang Stein
6. Thinking the Twentieth Century (William Heinemann/Penguin Press, 2012) / Tony Judt (with Timothy Snyder)
7. New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Writers and Their Families (Viking, 2012) / Colm Tóibín
8. Rez Life: An Indian’s Journey Through Reservation Life (Grove/Atlantic, 2012) / David Treuer

Some Penguin Classics to dip your toes into ...

2012-01-23T07:07:00.000-08:00

The Power of YOU

2012-01-10T14:55:00.000-08:00

Renowned author and spiritual healer ANNE JONES is committed to her mission to bring healing within the grasp of everybody, writes SHANTINI SUNTHARAJAH

ANNE JONES’S pretty navy blue dress and delicate pearl necklace are in delightful contrast to her short, spiky silver hair. Despite the striking all-silver strands it’s hard to believe that Jones is 65; she radiates the high energy and joie de vivre you’d expect from a 20-year-old. “I’m cheerful, upbeat and I guess—adventurous,” she reveals, with a wide smile.

There is, however, an unmistakable undercurrent of gentle calm that flows through Jones’s palpably positive personality. She speaks at a relaxed pace that is at once energising yet soothing, and her direct gaze holds no hint of challenge. Jones is one of those rare people with the wonderful ability to make anyone she talks to feel like the only person in the whole world.

These are traits that are especially essential for someone who does what Jones does—help people heal emotional pain. “I channel energies that uplift and clear old imprints and memories that cause fear and pain. I also teach people to manage their emotions, thoughts and spiritual aspirations,” explains Jones. To those unfamiliar with the concept, her spiritual healing methods are likely to be hard to fathom and might even seem a little difficult to believe but some of what she does is rooted in science.

It’s a well-known fact that all elements and compounds are made up of molecules that vibrate and give off energy, which means we are all constantly surrounded by vibrations and energies. Jones believes these energies greatly impact our lives and certain types of pure energies, when channelled correctly, can have a tremendous, positive effect on the recipient. “High-level energy is the same vibration as unconditional love and will uplift spiritually, emotionally and physically.”

Like almost everyone else whose work crosses into the realm of the intangible, Jones has attracted the attention of two kinds of people: devotees and detractors. However, it appears that those who believe in her far outnumber the ones who do not. Jones is a successful author who has written six well-received books that detail the philosophies behind her spiritual healing practices and guide readers on how to use the information in their own life situations. The spiritual healer has a single clear intention that inspires her to write her books. “I want people to feel like they have some control about how they feel in their own lives. What I’m trying to do is to give them tools to help themselves.”

In her latest book, The Power of You, Jones discusses the innate power that resides in all of us. “The book is a guide that defines personal power, how we are when we lose touch with it, what prohibits us from utilizing it and how we can reconnect and activate it.”

Jones felt compelled to write the book after she endured two unsettling personal experiences. “My 90-year-old mother fell ill and became virtually disabled. Then my stepson became obsessed with ‘conspiracy theories’ he found on the Internet. He had a psychotic breakdown and ended up in hospital for an extended stay.” Jones found herself losing grip on her trademark composure. “At first, I felt completely overwhelmed. Then I discovered that I could regain my inner strength and empower myself by following a meditation that took me into my heart. Once I expressed my feelings and realised I had choices again, I felt good.”

Jones was contacted by a publisher to write a follow-up to her earlier book called Healing Negative Energies. “Gill Bailey of Piatkus approached me to write the book, so I looked at all the things that take away our power and how we can regain this incredible force that runs through us.” The result was The Power of You. “It’s there for us all—this personal power—but if we are in fear we are unable to activate or utilise it.”

The Power of You is a very personal project but it’s not the author’s favourite in the series of books she’s written. “The Ripple Effect is my favourite because it’s about personal spirituality. I love the idea of creating your own journey and making spirituality a personal experience.”

Although her books are found on the shelf marked “New Age,” Jones would rather they were stocked in a different section of the bookstore. “I prefer to think of my books as self-help, simply because ‘New Age’ tends to have whacky, far-out connotations.” Jones, who is British and resides in the UK, is more than familiar with this negative, usually Western, viewpoint although she’s begun to notice a welcome transformation.

“I believe that we are all moving personal spirituality and healing into the mainstream—so many people now accept or have tried Reiki, reflexology, aromatherapy and other alternative therapies,” she says. “Yoga and meditation are now commonplace in the West and many of my readers keep my books by their bed for guidance when they are troubled.”

If popular belief maintains that we’re likely to find spiritual healers with their heads in the clouds, Jones is proof that this stereotype is a misconception. Her regimented approach to writing makes all writers—save seasoned authors—appear somewhat frivolous.

“When I have a book to write I am very disciplined. I block off at least four hours at a time and decline invitations to travel for a few months.” Her strict schedule certainly works. Jones finished writing The Power of You in an astonishingly short period of time. “I took about four months, off and on, to write it, including editing time.” For her next book, the disciplined spiritual healer has moved away from the self-help genre. “I am in the middle of writing a novel that introduces ancient wisdom and symbols that I use in my healing.”

Jones is also a valued speaker who regularly gives talks and conducts seminars on healing energies and how they can be channelled to improve every major aspect of life such as relationships, work and emotional health. Her seminar destinations are as diverse as they are fascinating and she flies regularly to Norway, Greece, Mexico, Hong Kong and South Africa. Malaysia, which is on her regular seminar circuit, holds a special place in her heart. “I lived here for five years and I have many dear and close friends,” she explains.

In fact, Jones experienced what she describes as a spiritual awakening while she was in Malaysia. “I was relaxing on my bed one day when I heard a voice telling me to start healing.” Hearing a voice out of the blue might have frightened others but Jones felt like she had been waiting for that moment all her life. “I was a little in awe but very uplifted and excited about the prospect of healing. It felt very right—as though something that I had always wanted was given to me.”

The experience marked the start of a personal transformation and eventually changed the course of her life. “I am a more peaceful person now—I used to be an adrenaline junky!” confesses Jones. “That experience gave me a purpose, a focus and tremendous possibilities for fulfilment. There’s nothing like helping others to make you feel good about yourself. I feel positively alive and have had the most amazing connections to spirit that have given me so many answers to why things happen and the purpose of life.”

Jones has a recommendation for those who are curious but can’t shake of their doubts about the universal energies she works with and writes about in her books. “Keep an open mind, don’t dismiss it until you’ve tried it,” she advises. “If there is something I say that doesn’t resonate, then put it to the back of your mind—maybe one day it will be useful.”

Ultimately, the spiritual healer believes that overcoming past pain is a deeply personal issue. She has a philosophical attitude towards those who dismiss her work as nothing more than wishful thinking. Her message to them is simple: “Bless you, you will find your own way. I am here when and if you ever need me.”

Reproduced from the July-September 2011 issue of Quill magazine

January 2012 Highlights

2012-01-02T07:06:00.000-08:00

Novels
1. Hope: A Tragedy (Riverhead, 2012) / Shalom Auslander
2. The Last Nude (Riverhead, 2012) / Ellis Avery
3. Finders Keepers (Bantam Press, 2012) / Belinda Bauer
4. Wild Abandon (Random House, 2012) / Joe Dunthorne
5. The Flying Man (Headline Review, 2012) / Roopa Farooki
6. Believing the Lie (Hodder & Stoughton, 2012) / Elizabeth George
7. All Is Song (Jonathan Cape, 2012) / Samantha Harvey
8. Carnival for the Dead (Macmillan, 2012) / David Hewson
9. In the Orchard, the Swallows (Faber & Faber, 2012) / Peter Hobbs
10. A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty (Grand Central Publishing, 2012) / Joshilyn Jackson

11. Little Bones (Chatto & Windus, 2012) / Janette Jenkins
12. The Orphan Master’s Son (Random House, 2012) / Adam Johnson
13. The Translation of the Bones (Scribner, 2012) / Francesca Kay
14. Mr g (Pantheon, 2012) / Alan Lightman
15. How It All Began (Penguin USA, 2012) / Penelope Lively
16. The Flight of Gemma Hardy (Harper/HarperCollins, 2012) / Margot Livesey
17. The Flame Alphabet (Alfred A. Knopf, 2012) / Ben Marcus
18. Heft (W.W. Norton, 2012) / Liz Moore
19. Stolen Souls (Harvill Secker, 2011) / Stuart Neville
20. The Odds (Viking Adult, Jan 20-12) / Stewart O’Nan

21. The Street Sweeper (Riverhead, 2012) / Elliot Perlman
22. Come In and Cover Me (Riverhead, 2012) / Gin Phillips
23. The Man Who Rained (Atlantic Books, 2012) / Ali Shaw
24. An Honourable Man (Virago, 2012) / Gillian Slovo
25. The Winter Palace (Doubleday Canada/Random House Canada, 2012) / Eva Stachniak
26. At Last (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2012) / Edward St. Aubyn
27. The World We Found (Harper, 2012) / Thrity Umrigar
28. The Quality of Mercy (Knopf Doubleday, 2012) / Barry Unsworth
29. Sanctuary Line (MacLehose Press, 2012) / Jane Urquhart
30. A Good Man (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2012) / Guy Vanderhaeghe

31. Jack Holmes & His Friend (Bloomsbury/Bloomsbury USA, 2012) / Edmund White
32. An Available Man (Ballantine Books, 2012) / Hilma Wolitzer

First Novels
1. American Dervish (Little, Brown, 2012) / Ayad Akhtar
2. Running the Rift (Algonquin Books, 2012) / Naomi Benaron
3. Red Ruby Heart in a Cold Blue Sea (Viking Adult, 2012) / Morgan Callan Rogers
4. Summer (Abacus, 2012) / Tom Darling
5. The Report (Portobello Books, 2012) / Jessica Francis Kane
6. Tideline (Simon & Schuster, 2012) / Penny Hancock
7. The Art of Fielding (Fourth Estate, 2012) / Chad Harbach
8. The Ruins of Us (Faber & Faber, 2012) / Keija Parssinen
9. Broadway Baby (Algonquin Books, 2012) / Alan Shapiro
10. The Pleasures of Men (Michael Joseph, 2012) / Kate Williams

Stories
1. Married Love (Jonathan Cape, 2012) / Tessa Hadley
2. Drifting House (Faber & Faber, 2012) / Krys Lee

Poetry
1. The Death of King Arthur (Faber & Faber, 2012) / Simon Armitage
2. The Complete Poems (ed. Archie Burnett) (Faber & Faber, 2012) / Philip Larkin
3. The Mara Crossing (Chatto & Windus, 2012) / Ruth Padel
4. Almost Invisible (Knopf, 2012) / Mark Strand

Nonfiction
1. Ben Jonson: A Life (Oxford University Press USA, 2012) / Ian Donaldson
2. Life Sentences: Literary Judgments and Accounts (Knopf, 2012) / William H. Gass
3. Distrust That Particular Flavor (Putnam Adult, 2012) / William Gibson
4. The Man Within My Head (Alfred A. Knopf, 2012) / Pico Iyer
5. Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria (Granta Books, 2012) / Noo Saro-Wiwa
6. The Tender Hour of Twilight: Paris in the ’50s, New York in the ’60s: A Memoir of Publishing’s Golden Age (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2012) / Richard Seaver
7. Memory: Fragments of a Modern History (The University of Chicago Press, 2012) / Alison Winter

2012 Literary Highlights

2012-01-01T23:01:00.000-08:00

Novels
1. Americanah (Fourth Estate, 2012)/ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
2. Lionel Asbo (Jonathan Cape, 2012) / Martin Amis
3. Carry the One (Simon & Schuster, 2012) / Carol Anshaw
4. The Sins of the Father (Macmillan, 2012) / Jeffrey Archer
5. After Such Kindness (Tindal Street Press, 2012) / Gaynor Arnold
6. Hope: A Tragedy (Riverhead, 2012) / Shalom Auslander
7. The Last Nude (Riverhead, 2012) / Ellis Avery
8. The Gilly Salt Sisters (Grand Central Publishing, 2012) / Tiffany Baker
9. The Detour (trans. from the Dutch by David Colmer) (Harvill Secker, 2012) / Gerbrand Bakker
10. Stonemouth (Little, Brown, 2012) / Iain Banks

11. The Yips (Fourth Estate, 2012) / Nicola Barker
12. Toby’s Room (Hamish Hamilton, 2012) / Pat Barker
13. In the Kingdom of Men (Alfred A. Knopf, 2012) / Kim Barnes
14. The Yellow Emperor’s Cure (Overlook Press, 2012) / Kunal Basu
15. Finders Keepers (Bantam Press, 2012) / Belinda Bauer
16. The O’Briens (Pantheon, 2012) / Peter Behrens
17. Waiting for Sunrise (Bloomsbury, 2011) / William Boyd
18. The Chemistry of Tears (Faber & Faber, 2012) / Peter Carey
19. Telegraph Avenue (Harper, 2012) / Michael Chabon
20. The Twelve (Orion/Ballantine, 2012) / Justin Cronin

21. Talulla Rising (Knopf, 2012) / Glen Duncan
22. The Greatcoat (Hammer, 2012) / Helen Dunmore
23. Wild Abandon (Random House, 2012) / Joe Dunthorne
24. The Devil’s Beat (Doubleday, 2012) / Robert Edric
25. The Flying Man (Headline Review, 2012) / Roopa Farooki
26. Canada (Bloomsbury, 2012) / Richard Ford
27. Skios (Faber & Faber, 2012) / Michael Frayn
28. Broken Harbor (Viking, 2012) / Tana French
29. The Newlyweds (Knopf, 2012) / Nell Freudenberger
30. The White Pearl (Sphere, 2012) / Kate Furnivall

31. A Perfectly Good Man (Fourth Estate, 2012) / Patrick Gale
32. No Time Like the Present (Bloomsbury/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2012) / Nadine Gordimer
33. Believing the Lie (Hodder & Stoughton, 2012) / Elizabeth George
34. Sarah Thornhill (Canongate, 2012) / Kate Grenville
35. The Grief of Others (Clerkenwell, 2012) / Leah Hager Cohen
36. Arcadia (Voice, 2012) / Lauren Groff
37. Painter of Silence (Bloomsbury, 2012) / Georgina Harding
38. The Good Father (Doubleday, 2012) / Noah Hawley
39. Scenes from Early Life (Fourth Estate, 2012) / Philip Hensher
40. Carnival for the Dead (Macmillan, 2012) / David Hewson

41. Angelmaker (Alfred A. Knoph, 2012) / Nick Harkaway
42. Enchantments (Random House/Fourth Estate, 2012) / Kathryn Harrison
43. All Is Song (Jonathan Cape, 2012) / Samantha Harvey
44. In the Orchard, the Swallows (Faber & Faber, 2012) / Peter Hobbs
45. In One Person (Simon & Schuster, 2012) / John Irving
46. A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty (Grand Central Publishing, 2012) / Joshilyn Jackson
47. Little Bones (Chatto & Windus, 2012) / Janette Jenkins
48. The Orphan Master’s Son (Random House, 2012) / Adam Johnson
49. Another Country (Fourth Estate, 2012) / Anjali Joseph
50. The Vanishers (Doubleday, 2012) / Heidi Julavits

51. The Translation of the Bones (Scribner, 2012) / Francesca Kay
52. Flight Behavior (Harper, 2012) / Barbara Kingsolver
53. Capital (Faber & Faber, 2012) / John Lanchester
54. The Devil in Silver (Spiegel & Grau, 2012) / Victor LaValle
55. Various Pets Alive and Dead (Fig Tree, 2012) / Marina Lewycka
56. The Collective (W.W. Norton, 2012) / Don Lee
57. The Sugar-Frosted Nutsack (Little, Brown, 2012) / Mark Leyner
58. Mr g (Pantheon, 2012) / Alan Lightman
59. How It All Began (Penguin USA, 2012) / Penelope Lively
60. The Flight of Gemma Hardy (Harper/HarperCollins, 2012) / Margot Livesey

61. The Cutting Season (Serpent’s Tail, 2012) / Attica Locke
62. Under the Same Stars (Simon & Schuster, 2012) / Tim Lott
63. Truth Like the Sun (Alfred A. Knopf, 1012) / Jim Lynch
64. Why Men Lie (Random House Canada/Jonathan Cape, 2012) / Linden McIntyre
65. Watergate (Pantheon, 2012) / Thomas Mallon
66. Bring Up the Bodies (Fourth Estate, 2012) / Hilary Mantel
67. The Flame Alphabet (Alfred A. Knopf, 2012) / Ben Marcus
68. Thunder and Rain (Center Street, 2012) / Charles Martin
69. History of a Pleasure Seeker (Alfred A. Knopf, 2012) / Richard Mason
70. The Girl Who Fell From the Sky (published as Trapeze in the US) (Other Press/Little, Brown, 2012) / Simon Mawer

71. The Son (Random House, 2012) / Philipp Meyer
72. Pure (Turnaround Books, 2012) / Timothy Mo
73. Heft (W.W. Norton, 2012) / Liz Moore
74. The Roundabout Man (Sceptre, 2012) / Clare Morrall
75. Home (Knopf, 2012)/ Toni Morrison
76. Silver (Jonathan Cape, 2012) / Andrew Motion
77. Stolen Souls (Harvill Secker, 2011) / Stuart Neville
78. John Saturnall’s Feast (Bloomsbury, 2012) / Lawrence Norfolk
79. Mudwoman (Ecco, 2012) / Joyce Carol Oates
80. The Healing (Knopf Doubleday, 2012) / Jonathan Odell

81. Restoration (Ecco, 2012) / Olaf Olafsson
82. The Odds (Viking Adult, 2012) / Stewart O’Nan
83. The Street Sweeper (Riverhead, 2012) / Elliot Perlman
84. Come In and Cover Me (Riverhead, 2012) / Gin Phillips
85. The Queen’s Lover (Penguin Press, 2017) / Francine du Plessix Grey
86. The Revelations (Faber & Faber, 2012) / Alex Preston
87. The Divine Comedy (Atlantic Books, 2012) / Craig Raine
88. The Cove (Ecco, 2012) / Ron Rash
89. The House I Loved (St. Martin’s Press, 2012) / Tatiana de Rosnay
90. Umbrella (Bloomsbury, 2012) / Will Self

91. The Man Who Rained (Atlantic Books, 2012) / Ali Shaw
92. The New Republic (Harper, 2012) / Lionel Shriver
93. Yokhi (Simon & Schuster, 2012) / Indra Sinha
94. An Honourable Man (Virago, 2012) / Gillian Slovo
95. NW (Hamish Hamilton, 2012) / Zadie Smith
96. The Winter Palace (Doubleday Canada/Random House Canada, 2012) / Eva Stachniak
97. At Last (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 212) / Edward St. Aubyn
98. Wish You Were Here (Alfred A. Knopf, 2012) / Graham Swift
99. Secondhand Daylight (Corsair, 2012) / D.J. Taylor
100. The Road to Urbino (HarperPress, 2012) / Roma Tearne

101. Helsinki White (Putnam Adult, 2012) / James Thompson
102. Flight (Jonathan Cape, 2012) / Adam Thorpe
103. The Beginner’s Goodbye (Knopf, 2012) / Anne Tyler
104. The World We Found (Harper, 2012) / Thrity Umrigar
105. The Quality of Mercy (Knopf Doubleday, 2012) / Barry Unsworth
106. Sanctuary Line (MacLehose Press, 2012) / Jane Urquhart
107. Beautiful Ruins (Harper, 2012) / Jess Walter
108. The Deadman’s Pedal (Jonathan Cape, 2012) / Alan Warner
109. Jack Holmes & His Friend (Bloomsbury/Bloomsbury USA, 2012) / Edmund White
110. Back to Blood (Little, Brown, 2012) / Tom Wolfe

111. An Available Man (Ballantine Books, 2012) / Hilma Wolitzer

First Novels
1. American Dervish (Little, Brown, 2012) / Ayad Akhtar
2. The Darlings (Pamela Dorman Books, 2012) / Cristina Alger
3. No One Is Here Except All of Us (Riverhead, 2012) / Ramona Ausubel
4. The Green Shore (Simon & Schuster, 2012) / Natalie Bakopoulos
5. Rocks in the Belly (Serpent’s Tail, 2012) / Jon Bauer
6. Miss Fuller (Steerforth, 2012) / April Bernard
7. Red Ruby Heart in a Cold Blue Sea (Viking Adult, 2012) / Morgan Callan Rogers
8. A Land More Kind Than Home (Doubleday/William Morrow/HarperCollins, 2012) / Wiley Cash
9. Forgotten Country (Riverhead, 2012) / Catherine Chung
10. You Came Back (Grand Central Publishing, 2012) / Christopher Coake

11. The Whores’ Asylum (Fig Tree, 2012) /Katy Darby
12. Summer (Abacus, 2012) / Tom Darling
13. The Starboard Sea (St. Martin’s Press, 2012) / Amber Dermont
14. The Variations (Henry Holt, 2012) / John Donatich
15. The Panopticon (William Heinemann, 2012) / Jenni Fagan
16. Absolution (Atlantic Books, 2012) / Patrick Flanery
17. The Report (Portobello Books, 2012) / Jessica Francis Kane
18. A Good American (Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam, 2012) / Alex George
19. Shelter (Virago, 2012) / Frances Greenslade
20. The Book of Summers (Headline Review, 2012) / Emylia Hall

21. Tideline (Simon & Schuster, 2012) / Penny Hancock
22. The Art of Fielding (Fourth Estate, 2012) / Chad Harbach
23. The Whipping Club (T.S. Poetry Press, 2012) / Deborah Henry
24. The Snow Child (Reagan Arthur Books/Little, Brown/Headline Review, 2012) / Eowyn Ivey
25. The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry (Doubleday, 2012) / Rachel Joyce
26. Mountains of the Moon (Jonathan Cape, 2012) / I.J. Kay
27. Alys, Always (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2012) / Harriet Lane
28. Beyond the Ties of Blood (Pegasus, 2012) / Florencia Mallon
29. The Land of Decoration (Henry Holt/Chatto & Windus, 2012) / Grace McCleen
30. The Fall (Headline, 2012) / Claire McGowan

31. The Song of Achilles (Ecco, 2012) / Madeline Miller
32. The Book of Life (Picador, 2012) / Stuart Nadler
33. The Spider King’s Daughter (Faber & Faber, 2012) / Chibundu Onuzo
34. The Ruins of Us (Faber & Faber, 2012) / Keija Parssinen
35. In the Shadow of the Banyan (Simon & Schuster, 2012) / Vaddey Ratner
36. Signs of Life (Macmillan, 2012) / Anna Raverat
37. The Lifeboat (Virago, 2012) / Charlotte Rogan
38. Broadway Baby (Algonquin Books, 2012) / Alan Shapiro
39. The English Monster (Simon & Schuster, 2012) / Lloyd Shepherd
40. Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace: The Private Diary of a Victorial Lady (Bloomsbury, 2012) / Kate Summerscale

41. Nacropolis (Faber & Faber, 2012) / Jeet Thayil
42. The Age of Miracles (Simon & Schuster, 2012) / Karen Thompson Walker
43. Care of Wooden Floors (HarperPress, 2012) / Will Wiles
44. The Pleasures of Men (Michael Joseph, 2012) / Kate Williams
45. The Bellwether Revivals (Simon & Schuster, 2012) / Benjamin Wood
46. The Golden Hour (NAL Trade, 2012) / Margaret Wurtele

Stories
1. The Likes of Us (Parthian Books, 2012) / Stan Barstow
2. Married Love (Jonathan Cape, 2012) / Tessa Hadley
3. Drifting House (Faber & Faber/Viking Adult, 2012) / Krys Lee
4. Light Lifting (Jonathan Cape, 2012) / Alexander MacLeod
5. Vicky Swanky is a Beauty (McSweeney’s, 2012) / Diane Williams

Poetry
1. The Death of King Arthur (Faber & Faber, 2012) / Simon Armitage
2. What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank (Alfred A. Knopf, 2012) / Nathan Englander
3. The Complete Poems (ed. Archie Burnett) (Faber & Faber, 2012) / Philip Larkin
4. Sky Thick With Fireflies (Salmon Publishing, 2012) / Ethna McKiernan
5. The Mara Crossing (Chatto & Windus, 2012) / Ruth Padel
6. Love’s Bonfire (Faber & Faber, 2012) / Tom Paulin
7. Almost Invisible (Knopf, 2012) / Mark Strand

Nonfiction
1. Red Brick, Black Mountain, White Clay: Reflections on Art, Family, and Survival (Penguin Press, 2012) / Christopher Benfey
2. Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity (Random House, 2012) / Katherine Boo
3. A Card from Angela Carter (Bloomsbury, 2012) / Susannah Clapp
4. Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation (Faber & Faber, 2012) / Rachel Cusk
5. The Origins of Sex: A History of the First Sexual Revolution (Allen Lane, 2012) / Faramerz Dabhoiwala
6. Ben Jonson: A Life (Oxford University Press USA, 2012) / Ian Donaldson
7. Farther Away: Essays (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2012) / Jonathan Franzen
8. Life Sentences: Literary Judgments and Accounts (Knopf, 2012) / William H. Gass
9. Distrust That Particular Flavor (Putnam Adult, 2012) / William Gibson
10. The Man Within My Head (Alfred A. Knopf, 2012) / Pico Iyer

11. Whatever It Is, I Don’t Like It (Bloomsbury USA, 2012) / Howard Jacobson
12. Even Tough Girls Wear Tutus: Inside the World of a Woman Born in Prison (Cell 7 Media, 2012) / Deborah Jiang Stein
13. Thinking the Twentieth Century (William Heinemann/Penguin Press, 2012) / Tony Judt (with Timothy Snyder)
14. A Difficult Woman: The Challenging Life and Times of Lillian Hellman (Bloomsbury USA, 2012) / Alice Kessler-Harris
15. The Old Ways (Hamish Hamilton, 2012) / Robert Macfarlane
16. Such a Life (University of Nebraska Press, 2012) / Lee Martin
17. In the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2012 / Pankaj Mishra
18. God’s Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012) / Cullen Murphy
19. Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria (Granta Books, 2012) / Noo Saro-Wiwa
20. Country Girl (Faber & Faber, 2012) / Edna O’Brien

21. Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake (Random House, 2012) / Anna Quindlen
22. When I Was a Child I Read Books: Essays (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2012) / Marilynne Robinson
23. Joseph Anton (Jonathan Cape, 2012) / Salman Rushdie
24. The Tender Hour of Twilight: Paris in the ’50s, New York in the ’60s: A Memoir of Publishing’s Golden Age (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2012) / Richard Seaver
25. Unapologetic (Faber & Faber, 2012) / Francis Spufford
26. Essayists on the Essay: Montaigne to Our Time (University of Iowa Press, 2012) / Carl H. Klaus & Ned Stuckey-French (eds.)
27. New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Writers and Their Families (Viking, 2012) / Colm Tóibín
28. Rez Life: An Indian’s Journey Through Reservation Life (Grove/Atlantic, 2012) / David Treuer
29. Memory: Fragments of a Modern History (The University of Chicago Press, 2012) / Alison Winter
30. Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (Grove/Atlantic, 2012) / Jeanette Winterson

Footprints in the Sands of Time

2011-12-29T19:03:00.000-08:00

TINA KISIL grew up a loner in a brood of twelve. A misfit and a misunderstood child, her shyness often misconstrued as arrogance, she began observing people at a tender age and took refuge in the world of books. Forced to quit school at eighteen to help support her younger siblings through school, she was told by her mother to choose: be a nurse or a teacher. Since blood makes her faint, she chose the latter. After earning her teaching diploma, she dedicated the best 35 years of her life to her students. She now lives a quiet life in Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, where she catches up on her reading and tries to charm her backyard into a garden. She still finds refuge in the world of books.

Her first book, Footprints in the Paddy Fields (MPH Publishing/MPH Digital, 2010), is both a family portrait and a childhood memoir, set against the vanished world of bamboo huts on spindly timber stilts, a world where one’s prized possessions were makeshift farm tools and a buffalo or two, and where the dead were placed in stone burial jars. It documents a waning way of Malaysian life, one where, sadly, many Malaysians are not aware of. Those were the days when removing human heads was a sport, and the only mode of transport was a pair of good legs. In her memoir, Kisil takes the reader on a journey into a world very seldom seen; it is fascinating to see how the Dusuns in Sabah on the island of Borneo lived at a time when wealth was measured by the amount of rice a farmer harvested and a hard-working sumandak made a more alluring bride than her pretty sister. Written to preserve some of the old Dusun beliefs, customs and cultural practices that the author grew up with, this engaging and enlightening memoir is a delightful reminiscence of what it was like to be a child growing up in Sabah in the 1960s when Sabah was still known as British North Borneo.

Kisil thinks she is a little weird because she enjoys her own company and likes to think and ruminate about things. “I’m at the moment taking a short break after finishing my first book, Footprints in the Paddy Fields, and trying to read as many books as possible between cooking, washing and everything else a homemaker does,” she says. She is also polishing a story for a picture book, trying to tone it down so it doesn’t turn into a horror story for kids. She doesn’t like horror. She’d love to attempt a short story or two or a novella.

Interview by ERIC FORBES
Photograph courtesy of TINA KISIL

How do you find the time to read?
Even when I was working, I found the time to read. You need not finish a book in one sitting. Five minutes stolen here and ten minutes there can add up to a certain number of hours per week. I always have a book with me to read while I wait for my turn at the bank, post office, clinic, etc. Now that I’m retired, I’ve the luxury of time and I can read whenever I want to. I also read before turning in, usually around one in the morning.

Do you think reading matters?
I believe very much so. Besides being an enjoyable activity, reading fiction makes us aware of a bigger world and takes us to places we may never even dream of going to. Reading gives us countless opportunities to walk in other people’s shoes and to experience their emotions, their worldviews, etc. We learn to care for and to empathise with fictional characters. This helps us to understand the real people we meet, perhaps even become less judgmental and critical. We develop as social beings and we understand ourselves better.

What kind of books did you read when you were growing up? Were there any books that had a significant impact on you at that early age?
There wasn’t a wide choice of reading materials for children when I was growing up, way back when dinosaurs roamed the earth! I loved the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm. Enid Blyton was very popular then and I read many of her books although I wasn’t too fond of Golliwog, Noddy or talking toys as I was past the age for talking toys when I came across her books. I read most of Enid Blyton’s Secret Seven and Famous Five series. I remember thinking she was a brilliant storyteller.

When I was a little older I read the usual stuff girls read: Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, etc. At thirteen, I read Baroness Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel. It made such an impact on me that I remember the title to this day. I found an abridged version of it recently and plan to revisit it to see why it stayed with me all these many decades!

Who are some of your favourite contemporary writers? Why do you enjoy reading their books?
Contemporary? I don’t know if the writers I read are contemporary. When I check a potential read, I look at the blurb, flip through a few pages and decide whether to read it based mainly on the style of writing. I like books which tell me something new. Maybe that’s why I enjoyed Arthur Hailey’s novels. Reading his books was like watching a documentary on Discovery or National Geographic. I also loved Wilbur Smith and his sagas about powerful South African families amidst the wilds of Africa. After my teen years, I never liked mushy love stories. I don’t think I read more than a handful of Denise Robbins and Barbara Cartland—the equivalent of M&Bs during my teenage years.

I like Roald Dahl—Matilda is one of my favourites among his many books. I think Dahl’s Revolting Poems are outrageously funny! Recently I borrowed My Uncle Oswald from the library, thinking that it was similar to Matilda (and therefore skipped reading the blurb) and got the shock of my life! I’m still reeling like a drunk after that ride with Dahl. Enough said.

What are some of your favourite contemporary books? Why do you enjoy reading them?
I happen to like older works, especially stories about Asians such as those written by Han Suyin, Pearl S. Buck and W. Somerset Maugham. They tell about a different world, a different time. I liked Ha Jin’s collection of stories, The Bridegroom, and his sad love story of a novel, Waiting. I thoroughly enjoyed Dai Sijie’s Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress. (I’m especially drawn to books about the Chinese written by Chinese authors, such as Jung Chang’s Wild Swans, Ningkun Wu’s A Single Tear and Nien Cheng’s Life and Death in Shanghai.)

Why do I enjoy reading them? They transport me beyond my four walls and make me experience a wide range of emotions. I laugh and cry and marvel; I feel anger, hope, despair, horror, love and disgust. In short, I feel and am reminded I have a heart in my chest—not a piece of rock.

Do you have an all-time favourite book? Why do you enjoy reading it? Do you reread books you enjoyed the first time round?
I have new favourites all the time! But two favourites from long ago include Daphne du Maurier’s The Birds and Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth. Both have the ability to evoke such strong emotions. I always reread books I enjoy and can never bear to give them away.

Assuming you enjoy reading fiction, what are the elements in fiction that take your breath away? In other words, what do you think are the essentials of good fiction? What distinguishes the great novels from the merely good? (If you prefer reading nonfiction, tell me why. Perhaps you enjoy reading both fiction and nonfiction?)
I read both fiction and nonfiction. I find memoirs fascinating and I love their novel-like quality. I guess I’m curious about people and reading about them satisfies this curiosity. Before memoirs of ordinary people became popular, I preferred biographies and history to other genres. One of the first autobiographies I read was Christiaan Barnard’s One Life. I was hooked immediately and returned to the library for more.

For me, a great story must have believable characters who are neither saints nor devils. Everyone has some good and bad in different proportions in them. It is important that I care for the protagonist. A good plot is important as well as an easy-to-read style. I find long, unbroken paragraphs of descriptions tedious and prefer them to be woven into the narratives and dialogues. Scenes and characters from great novels keep coming back to haunt you long after you’ve finished the book.

What are you reading at the moment?
I’ve just finished Tracy Chevalier’s Girl with a Pearl Earring which I liked very much and I’m finishing Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. (I’m surprised that the novel has been around for over half a century!) I usually read two or three books at once, mixing fiction with nonfiction. It takes me ages to finish a book, especially when I like it tremendously because I tend to go over the bits I find beautiful or fresh, much like caressing them with my eyes.

What are your thoughts on the future of books, particularly on e-books and e-book readers? Do you think the sale of e-books and e-book readers will have a repercussion on the sale of physical books in a bricks-and-mortar bookshop? Do you think they will replace physical books one day?
I like books. I like the way they feel, the way you could flip through the pages, write notes in the margins, etc. I think many people my age find it difficult to visualise other forms of books such as e-books and e-book readers. I guess when e-book readers are more affordable and the price of downloading a story is a fraction of the price we pay for a real book, fewer people would buy books in the bookshop. Most readers, after all, just want to read the stories and it makes no difference whether they’re flipping the pages of a physical book or clicking a button on a piece of plastic. However, books may not disappear completely if they become another collectors’ item. On the plus side, more trees will be saved, it’s lighter to travel even if you’re ‘loaded’ with books, and there’ll probably be less clutter at home. I’m just wondering, what are we going to put in the libraries?

Footprints in the Paddy Fields is also available as an e-book
Reproduced from The Malaysian Insider of May 29, 2010

Immersing Oneself in the Deep Pool of Humanity

2011-12-23T19:02:00.000-08:00

ERIC FORBES talks to novelist KUNAL BASU about the relevance of literary fiction and how it helps us to navigate the rough seas of life

KUNAL BASU was born in Calcutta, India, but has spent much of his adult life in Canada and the United States. He has taught at the McGill University in Montreal, Canada, and has been a Professor of Marketing at Templeton College, Oxford University, England. Basu is the author of four novels, The Opium Clerk, The Miniaturist, Racists and The Yellow Emperor’s Cure. He has also acted in films and on stage, written poetry and screenplays, and has written and directed two documentaries. His first collection of short stories, The Japanese Wife and Other Stories, was published by HarperCollins India in January 2008. “The Japanese Wife,” a story from that collection, was made into a film by India’s celebrated director Aparna Sen, with Rahul Bose and Chigusa Takaku in the leading roles.

Define literary fiction and give examples of some books you consider to be works of literary fiction.
It’s hard to define literature just as it is hard to define art. A fictional piece of work that raises an individual’s aesthetic appreciation of life’s many facets would perhaps qualify as such. Its key distinction with popular fiction lies in its ability to probe a deeper consciousness within which the essence of humanity is revealed beyond the unfolding of simply a plot. Examples include War and Peace, Oliver Twist, Germinal, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Waiting for the Barbarians, and many, many more. Take J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, for example. While on the one hand it’s a brilliantly searing story about a powerful minority brutalising a whole society, it speaks as well to the evil that lurks within all of us no matter where we live.

What enjoyment do you get from reading such works?
For me, it creates an ‘out-of-body’ experience. It makes me connect, emotionally and cerebrally, with the wider humanity. Day-to-day life is, by definition, constricted to a specific context. I live in a small English town [Oxford] and rub shoulders with my neighbours and colleagues at the university. Virtual contact over the Internet creates an illusion of community. Yet it is fiction that truly panders to my romantic soul, allowing me to inhabit different characters and immerse myself in their own contexts. Fiction allows me to become truly omnipresent.

Name some of your favourite literary fiction and why you like them.
I was reared on a healthy dose of classics. Growing up in a house full of books (with a novelist mother and a publisher father), I read everything I could lay my hands on, sometimes without true comprehension. To their credit, my parents never discouraged me from reading anything. So [D.H. Lawrence’s] Lady Chatterley’s Lover was an early read alongside [Émile Zola’s] Nana and [Leo Tolstoy’s] Anna Karenina! Novels of romantic adventure appealed to me in my early years—the likes of The Count of Monte Cristo—and have tinged my palette. I read the vernacular [Bangla] voraciously as well. Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, the 19th-century Bangla novelist, is still my all-time favourite. Dickens’s descriptive brilliance, Dostoevsky’s inner landscapes and Hugo’s dramatic moments kept me awake many, many nights. But I have favourites among contemporary authors as well. Here are a few: Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera (it makes the most jaded of souls fall in love); Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians (it reminds me of the devil that we all possess within ourselves); Amin Malouf’s Samarkand (for a spectacular civilisational sweep that connects the East and the West); Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient (for infusing prose with poetry); and Marguerite Duras’s Lovers (for sheer playfulness).

Do you think that not liking literary novels is simply a matter of preference or does it imply a lack of discernment?
It’s a mark of superficiality. For many it could be lack of exposure as well. We are increasingly witnessing a dumbing down of sensibilities, stretching from early school years well into adult life. The world of reality TV, ‘laugh-a-minute’ and bathtub reads (e.g., chick-lit) is shaping our taste buds. Without sounding like an obscurantist, I view the late 20th and early 21st centuries to be inimical to the creative arts. It is becoming fashionable now to publicly confess that one doesn’t read books, just as it was once shameful to do so among decent folks around the world.

Who do you think literary novels are written for? Do you think most authors of such books have a particular demographic in mind?
Literary novels are written for those who aspire to a sensitive immersion in the pool of deep humanity. I don’t think most serious practitioners of literary fiction write with any audience in mind except their own selves. That’s what I do. In fact, the creative ethic runs exactly counter to the marketing ethic. The latter starts with the other—the ‘consumer’—trying to determine what they’d prefer to read, then work backwards to suggest to the author what he or she should write about. The creative person always starts with the inner voice and hopes that readers would appreciate what so appeals to him or her.

How important do you think it is for readers to read literary fiction? Why do you feel this way?
We are as a species sinking into the quicksand of superficiality and an all-embracing consumption ethos. Literature (and the Arts in general) is our only lifeline. If for nothing else, it’s vital for developing a well-honed intuition about oneself and one’s precious relationships. How would you navigate the rough seas of love, jealousy, hatred and tragedy without the compass of so many tales told by so many authors? It stands to enhance our sensations making for a more thrilling experience. I was once stranded in Paris without much money in my university days. Strolling around the city on an empty stomach, I’d be reminded constantly of Hemingway and A Moveable Feast. It helped to turn my mind from my stomach to my heart!

Retreating to write

2011-12-12T15:29:00.000-08:00

Editor JANET TAY heads for the highlands to beat writer’s block, only to discover distractions aplenty in paradise

ALL WRITERS WORK IN DIFFERENT WAYS. Some need absolute quiet, while others white noise is a must. Others borrow holiday cabins, country cottages, city flats, isolated bungalows, and even castles, so they can write. Most people don’t have the luxury of friends with extra, empty properties or time to get away. So writing is often done before or after one’s day job, after the end of the bustling day, after the children have gone to sleep, or just before the world awakes, before the children wake up to go to school.

When—often miraculously—you find yourself with time and a place to go to for a retreat, it’s an irresistible opportunity. I had been wrestling with the idea of a retreat for years, always making excuses for myself, thinking that it was an undeserved luxury and why couldn’t I just save some time and money instead and just write a little every day, in between work, in between meeting family and friends? Children do not occupy my time and I have no charge, young or old, in my care. An artist friend, who had been suggesting the idea of a retreat since a year ago, mentioned it again when I finally said to her: I think I’m ready.

What I had in mind was quite different from reality. Like the danger of writers who write because they are in love with the idea of writing, I was already deep in my fantasies, imagining an idyllic holiday more than an actual writing boot camp, which a retreat has a tendency to become and for some, what it actually is. I’m not saying there’s an instructor there with a whip shouting out orders. If there were one, it would be myself. And that’s the difficult part—I’m a terrible instructor. Discipline is also not in my nature; it has to be forced, cajoled, coaxed out. So as I was imagining quaint little budget hotels, clean with modern amenities, she suggested a spartan apartment in Bukit Tinggi, a mere forty minutes out of Kuala Lumpur, yet secluded and quiet enough to work.

If I had earlier imagined two artists (a painter and a writer) inspired by nature or stillness, hard at work for most of the day and exchanging (artistic) ideas at mealtimes, my fantasy was once again dispelled when my friend said she would probably meditate instead.

When she is deep in meditation, I do not speak to her and try not to make any noise. Even mealtimes are quiet, and she says to speak only in emergencies. We do not make small talk and I, not knowing the decorum and still struggling awkwardly with the foreignness of the act, try not to even make eye contact. Although it wouldn’t make a difference, as my friend says we will be invisible to each other, or at least try to be.

The first two days feel like a holiday. We settle in, and spartan though the apartment might be in most areas (there is no TV in the living room, there is no couch, only a dining table, there are no beds, only mattresses), the kitchen is well stocked, with a microwave and a fridge. I make endless cups of tea—the water up in the hills seems to taste different somehow—and enjoy the freshness of the icy cold water when I wash my face umpteenth times a day and put the heater on for the shower when it gets chilly, a luxury I had not expected. My friend is familiar with Bukit Tinggi so she brings me to her familiar eateries, mostly kopitiams with simple food and sundry shops to buy basic groceries—eggs, kaya (coconut jam), bread, even canned food.

We walk, we talk, we settle down. She dives immediately into her work. She has a paper to prepare, so when she’s not meditating for hours at a stretch, she sits at her desk to complete it. I too sit at the dining table with my laptop before me, thinking that in this quiet, chilly place, with fresh air and fresh water and almost zero distractions from family and friends, that the words will come rushing in, engulfing my head and hopefully my pages.

I was wrong. Like any other time, the discipline required comes from within. My mind has to settle itself, instead of waiting for external forces to settle it. There’s the whole day to work on my writing, instead of the schedule I’m used to, juggling other editing jobs and dissertation writing. I had looked forward to the conceived paradise of having absolutely nothing else to do but to write what I want to write.

As I pace about restlessly, making cups of tea that now remain undrunk and washing invisible dust off my face, I tell my friend I’m not as productive as I thought I would be. She does not understand: “Why not just be disciplined, sit down and do the work?” She’s right, of course, but the wild, flighty animal in my mind scratches itself, scratches me and begs to go home. It begs for television, for my usual routine, for an escape hatch when the writing is blocked.

I email friends and family, letting myself lament a little, but just a little, because it feels like a sin to complain about paradise. If on the first day I had banned even SMSes from family because I would be “busy working,” I now craved for them to distract me from my hostility against myself and my surroundings. I felt cheated even though nothing was ever promised to me, except the many assumptions my mind had made.

Once the mind accepts its fate glumly, there is nothing left to do but to make the best of it. It is not a holiday. You can take naps—or walk, eat or rest—if you want to. But when you’re not doing what the body and mind needs to be productive, be productive. Write, even when you don’t feel like it. For the first two days, without venturing very far to start a story from scratch or do some major rewriting, I do minor editing and frantically Google and read articles about publishing and writing and short stories by other writers, feeding on them like a cocaine addict. When I’m utterly stumped and frustrated, I go to my room, pick up my copy of East of Eden and try to let Steinbeck’s dense descriptions seep into my mind. I can only manage a few small chapters at a time, so I come out again to the living room to try to “write.”

The routine becomes like this: when I’m not writing, whatever else I do should be facilitating the writing process, whether directly or indirectly. If I’m not reading, I can take walks to clear the mind. I hear swimming is a great way to do this, but unfortunately I do not swim. Checking emails is fine, but obsessively doing it and praying someone will write is not.

I observe my friend, who, when meditating, is completely absorbed in it, the way it should be. Everything else, for this moment, for this retreat, is unimportant, except for the process on which she is focused. Her determination is effective medicine for me, and after a night of contemplating what must be done, without complaints, without self-pity and without second-guessing or self-doubt, I sit in front of my laptop—wherever it may be—and just write, as if it is the only thing left in the world to do.

Reproduced from the October-December 2011 issue of Quill magazine

December 2011 Highlights

2011-12-02T09:03:00.000-08:00

Novels
1. 1222 (trans. from the Norwegian by Marlaine Delargy) (Scribner, 2011) / Anne Holt
2. Mistaken (Soft Skull Press, 2012) / Neil Jordan
3. Murder in Mount Holly (Mysterious Press, 2011) / Paul Theroux

First Novels
1. One Hundred and One Nights (Back Bay Books, 2011) / Benjamin Buchholz
2. Out Of It (Bloomsbury UK, 2011) / Selma Dabbagh
3. Jubilee (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2011) / Shelley Harris
4. The Origin of Violence (trans. from the German by Frank Wynne, 2011) (Serpent’s Tale, 2011) / Fabrice Humbert
5. All the Flowers in Shanghai (William Morrow, 2011) / Duncan Jepson

Stories
1. The Artist of Disappearance (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011) / Anita Desai
2. The Uninnocent (Pegasus Books, 2011) / Bradford Morrow

Nonfiction
1. Memoir: An Introduction (Oxford University Press USA, 2011) / G. Thomas Couser
2. George F. Kennan: An American Life (Allen Lane, 2011) / John Lewis Gaddis
3. The Happy Life: The Search for Contentment in the Modern World (Chatto & Windus, 2011) / David Malouf
4. Traces Remain: Essays and Explorations (Allen Lane, 2011) / Charles Nicholl
5. An Honourable Englishman: The Life of Hugh Trevor-Roper (Random House, 2011) / Adam Sisman
6. The Poet’s Freedom (The University of Chicago Press, 2011) / Susan Stewart

Catchy Covers

2011-12-01T17:31:00.000-08:00

Malaysian publisher AMIR MUHAMMAD reveals the inspiration behind the bold eye-catching covers of his new imprint, Fixi

WHEN I STARTED a new book imprint, Fixi, for urban Malay pulp fiction, I knew I wanted the books to look bold and distinctive. This is because pulp fiction needs lurid, catchy covers.

My immediate inspiration for the covers was the Vintage Black Lizard label. I bought many of its books in the 1990s, especially its reprints of titles by my favourite crime writer, Jim Thompson. They all had posed, moody black-and-white photos of people, overlaid by the titles and author names in bold strips of colour.

So I knew I wanted photographs and bold colors and one-word titles. This goes against the trend of Malay fiction, which normally has illustrations in pastels. These are how the first seven covers came about; they are all designed by Teck Hee.

PECAH
Author: Khairulnizam Bakeri
Photographer: Danny Lim
This is inspired by the very first scene of Pecah, which is a bank heist conducted by men who cover their faces in purdah. Since the story has many flashbacks which gradually reveal the truth about what’s going on, the purdah is kept here as a metaphor for concealment. Also, the gun is to indicate the crime genre. Along the way, we were also inspired by the poster for the Robert Rodriguez movie Desperado.

KOUGAR
Author: Shaz Johar
Photographer: Danny Lim
Kougar is about a 40-year-old woman who has a thing for younger men. So the idea of appetite needed to be there. There is a scene where the protagonist Kisha eats an ice-cream sundae, so we tried to mock it up. But we ended up cropping out most of the sundae (you see some cream) to concentrate on the face.

CEKIK
Author: Ridhwan Saidi
Photographer: Danny Lim
Cekik is a postmodern, trippy kind of book totally unlike anything I have read by a Malaysian. The protagonist is a teenage boy who has a fetish for necks, and whose views on life are perhaps formed by his early experiences of watching porn. The idea of a woman strangled by VHS tape gets to the kinkiness right away, as does the effect of the image being ‘stuck’ in a film projector.

DENDAM
Author: Affifudin Omar
Photographer: Pang Khee Teik
Dendam is a tale of corruption and ambition in business and politics. The protagonist Khalil Gibran has a base in KLCC, so we wanted to use the towers as the backdrop. The initial idea was to have just the towers (like Salman Rushdie’s Fury) but it was decided that having a model worked better. Having the face subtly ‘sliced’ in two is also meant to show the distortion of his worldview.

KASINO
Author: Saifullizan Tahir
Photographer: Pang Khee Teik
Kasino is about a businessman who enjoys the finer things in life such as wine, women and the baccarat table. We wanted to convey unapologetic decadence. My initial idea involving a champagne glass didn’t work, so Pang suggested burning money! Luckily my RM100 notes weren’t really burned, just mildly singed.

JERAT
Author: Dayang Noor
Photographer: Nik Adam Ahmad
Jerat is a thriller set in the IT world. The protagonist is a woman who has lost her memory. This took quite a while to conceptualise because I wanted the cover to convey both the vulnerability of her amnesiac condition as well as the IT backdrop. Hence the final decision to have the model ‘mummified’ by computer cables.

NGERI
Author: Gina Yap Lai Yoong
Photographer: Nik Adam Ahmad
Ngeri is a college thriller about a serial killer who has difficulty distinguishing between movie fiction and murderous reality. This also went through many drafts because we did not want to give too much of the plot away, such as the gender of the murderer (or even the victims). So we decided on something as iconic as a movie teaser poster, where we are told that, yes, there will be blood.

More information on Fixi titles can be found at http://www.fixi.com.my/
Reproduced from the October-December 2011 issue of Quill magazine

Anne Zouroudi

2011-11-29T15:14:00.000-08:00

What I am Reading ...

2011-11-25T16:15:00.000-08:00

THE READING LIFE ... Marco Robinson

2011-11-22T00:46:00.000-08:00

ERIC FORBES talks to accomplished and acclaimed speaker, coach and breakthrough entrepreneur MARCO ROBINSON, the author of the bestselling Know When to Close the Deal and Suddenly Grow Rich!

MARCO ROBINSON, the bestselling author of Know When to Close the Deal and Suddenly Grow Rich! (Discern Publishing House, 2011), comes across as a very inspired and inspiring human being who lives to give people opportunities when they ask for help, or offer them lessons in a learning experience, which consequently empowers them to overcome their greatest challenges and attain their true purpose in life. “When someone tells me, ‘Marco, I read your book, and you changed my life,’ that’s an incredible justification that I am following my true purpose in life!” His response to any person who tells him the above is: “You changed your life because you made the choice to read my book and take action by following the principles outlined in the book! Kudos to you for having the courage to do that!”

Robinson is always humbled when he gets such feedback because “to be quite frank, I came from a place of nothing; I was a nobody, a nothing, a loser, and I know what it feels like to be trapped in that loser’s mindset.” He continues, “I had the great fortune of learning how to take control of my own mind and essentially my own thoughts, which has been my saviour and my greatest gift to others who are in or have been in despair.”

He savours and enjoys every moment of his life to the fullest, and is thankful that he is alive and able to help others optimise their potential and achieve their desires. “I thank God I have learned to receive all the love that comes along with that, which only compounds my strength to always give and serve my fellow human beings.”

PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY OF MARCO ROBINSON

How do you find the time to read with your hectic schedule?
I place the emphasis on reading as my highest “must do” every day. I don’t have to find time to read. I read before I go to bed at night, I read when I get up in the morning, and I read in-between. I read in my spare moments, and when I am writing I read more to clarify my research on the topic I am writing about.

Do you think reading matters?
I believe reading is the most effective way of programming our minds with information we can decode into usable applications for our life’s purpose, so yes, I think it matters more than any other pastimes.

What kind of books did you read when you were growing up?
When I was a kid growing up, I wanted to escape, and enjoyed so much the works of C.S. Lewis, such as the The Chronicles of Narnia, which still resonate with me today. Everything I read was fantasy, but the greatest book I ever read as a kid was J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.

Were there any books that had a significant impact on you at that early age?
I would say all of the stuff above, all the stories that came with an adventure. Those adventure stories inspired me to travel and see the world and eventually settle in Asia.

What are some of your favourite contemporary books? Why do you enjoy reading them?
I love Malcolm Gladwell, especially Outliers and The Tipping Point, because he makes you think, he stimulates you in places that allow your intellect to question [things] and grow, and shows you fascinating insights into why things happen the way they do, which leads to the truth, and revealing the truth is a passionate quest of mine. Other books of bravery and heroism still inspire me, such as those by John Grisham, Andy McNabb and so on.

Do you have an all-time favourite book? Why do you enjoy reading it? Do you reread books you enjoyed the first time round?
My all-time favourite books are Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich, Al Koran’s Bring Out the Magic in Your Mind and Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. I read Hill everyday because it reinforces my true defining purpose. I read Koran every few months because it inspires me to believe in myself. I read Tolkien to remind me that everything is against us and it is with the help of our friends that we can see the light.

What do you think are the essentials of good fiction? What distinguishes the great novels from the merely good? (However, if you prefer reading nonfiction, tell me the kinds of nonfiction you like and why. Or perhaps you enjoy reading both fiction and nonfiction?)
The elements of a great novel are primarily the story and the adventure (or adventures) within the story. The enrichment of the characters is also essential in terms of me never wanting to put the book down. A great work of fiction has you in the story with the characters, feeling what they feel, taking you to another world, another adventure, another emotional, soul-tingling experience. As for nonfiction, I love authors who reveal the ‘real’ truths behind ‘why’ and ‘how-to’ books, with a real practical sense, that can help readers grow and learn in ways that are easy for them to adapt into their lives.

What are you reading at the moment?
I am reading three books at the moment: Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich, Malcolm Gladwell’s What the Dog Saw, and Robin Sharma’s The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari.

What are your thoughts on the future of books, particularly on ebooks and ebook readers? Do you think they will replace physical books one day? Do you see yourself reading an ebook?
My thoughts are mixed on this because my ecological conscience wants me to save the planet; there’s too much wastage of paper, too many trees sacrificed. I love a physical book, I really do love the tangible texture of turning and smelling the pages as I read it, and I think if they can make reusable paper they will still exist far into the future. However, with the advent of Apple’s iPad and iPhone and Amazon’s Kindle reader, I believe most readers will adopt the electronic format, and I believe these technologies will allow people to use ebooks with more ease, making them friendly to the human eye and hand.

NOTE An updated edition of Robinson’s bestseller is out, with a new title, Close the Deal and Suddenly Grow Rich! (ISBN 9789834438951)

We can’t escape our past

2011-11-15T23:11:00.000-08:00

Novelist SAMANTHA BRUCE-BENJAMIN talks to ERIC FORBES about the inspiration behind her first novel, The Art of Devotion, a story set on a sun-drenched island in the Mediterranean from the turn of the twentieth century to the late 1930s

Author photograph by JIRAIR TCHOLAKIAN

GROWING UP IN SCOTLAND, Samantha Bruce-Benjamin was lucky to spend her summers in the Mediterranean, the landscape of which provided the backdrop for her first novel, The Art of Devotion. Born and raised in Edinburgh, where she lived until she completed her master’s degree in English Literature at The University of Edinburgh, she moved to New York after being accepted to study drama at the prestigious and renowned American Academy of Dramatic Arts (AADA). “I had studied with the Guildhall School of Speech and Drama since I was a child, and thought it might be interesting to explore further learning opportunities in New York, rather than London, as I had lived in America for several months when I was seventeen and loved it.” However, after only a term, the harsh realities of the acting world deterred her from continuing, as she found that she was far more interested in how plays were constructed from an authorial perspective than in the actual performance of them. She then decided to put her degree in English Literature to use and applied to Random House for a job in publishing.

Thus began her career as a book editor at Random House. She was lucky that her first job as an editorial assistant was at a prestigious literary imprint, Doubleday Broadway, where she got to work with such writers as Gore Vidal and Muriel Spark. “When you’re in the presence, however removed, from writers who have, justifiably, been lauded as geniuses, you learn a lot about how things should be done. I am grateful for the experience: it subsequently informed everything I ever attempted as a writer.” As she moved up the editorial ladder, she edited literary, historical and commercial fiction. A little bit of this and that crossed her desk, which was unusual as editors tend to specialise, but she was fortunate to be able to dabble in various genres.

Art of Ruthlessness
Samantha drew on her editorial experience when writing her début novel. “I think that what any former editor who becomes an author brings to the editorial desk is an understanding of how difficult the process of being published actually is and, as a consequence of that, a determination to be as easy as possible for an editor to deal with!” In fact, she was so happy that, despite a challenging publishing climate, she had managed to get her foot on the authorial ladder, that she simply wanted to enjoy the path to publication.

“The greatest lesson I learned as an editor that may have benefited my writing was the art of ruthlessness in terms of characterisation. A fundamental awareness of how to realise a novel to its maximum potential that begins, and arguably ends, in a negation of the ego on the part of the author and cold-blooded, dispassionate ruthlessness in terms of characterisation.” As an editor, she often witnessed books with great potential fail and, in returning to the reasons why, as all editors must, a familiar cause would present itself: the hero or heroine was often a thinly disguised, invariably exalted, depiction of the author. Many authors ruin their work by succumbing to authorial preciousness, interpreting editorial suggestions made to balance the character as a personal attack. “The objectivity necessary to remedy the flaws in characterisation proved lacking because they could not separate their own personality from the equation. In short, they believed the character and, by extension, themselves, to be flawless, despite idiosyncrasies that would prove off-putting to readers. As a consequence, coming up against this dangerous perception time and again ultimately proved the cautionary lesson I have never forgotten, which is why none of the characters in The Art of Devotion bear any resemblance to me. I am entirely dispassionate about all of them, and approach them as a reader might, judging them accordingly.”

As an editor, Samantha found herself working so closely on some novels that it was almost as if she had written them herself, which gave her the confidence to attempt a novel of her own. She took a year off from work to pursue her literary ambition, and wrote two pages a day for five months, and at the end of that period she had a first draft of her novel. “That was the beginning of it all. I’m lucky to be able to write full-time now, which is a dream come true.”

Getting Published
It took her three years, however, to get her manuscript published, but she wrote another novel during that time. Initially, she was represented by an agent in London, who sent out a first draft that was well received, but did not succeed in securing a publishing deal. She then started on her second novel, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that she had not served The Art of Devotion well by putting it aside. She therefore returned to it two years later, and completely revised the story over the summer of 2008. At that point, the manuscript went out on submission, and was sold to Simon & Schuster shortly.

Samantha, surprisingly, had no designs whatsoever on becoming a writer. During her university days, she wrestled with her prose style and was constantly consumed with self-loathing. She remembers ripping up half-written essays and starting all over again. However, in her final year at secondary school, “we were called upon to submit four short stories for our English exam, and they attracted some attention from the teachers.” That was the first time anyone had ever complimented her writing, but it didn’t register with her then. “I adored reading, but I had such admiration for my favourite authors that I had no confidence to try it myself; in fact, I wrote nothing creative until I arrived at Random House four years later.” It is surprising to her that she ended up pursuing this career path because now she cannot imagine ever finding such fulfilment in any other profession.

Typical Day
A typical day in Samantha’s writing life begins early in the morning. She starts writing at around 7:30am and that’s where she remains until around one in the afternoon, or longer. “For me, it’s all about discipline, although I do dither about a lot.” As she has written more, she has learned to be more forgiving of herself, and she recognises that some days are more creative or productive than others. “Even if I cannot find a thing to write, I usually generate an idea or feel so frustrated that I am impelled to try even harder the next day. What I have found, however, is that I am always, to some extent, writing, because I never stop thinking about the story I am working on.” Even when the computer is switched off and she is officially ‘finished’ for the day, the work continues, mentally.

Reviewers have compared The Art of Devotion to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. “I find it funny—but extremely flattering—that reviewers have drawn this comparison. The truth is that I did not consider the classic during the entire process of writing the novel.” It was only later when she had to come up with an epigraph for the front matter of the book that she thought to include the final line of Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, which seemed to encapsulate perfectly one of the central themes she had attempted to explore in her novel, that is, “each character’s inability to escape their respective past.”

On publication, however, she was given a review which favourably compared her to Fitzgerald, and, as a result of that, many have suggested that she was influenced by him. “Obviously, as Fitzgerald is my favourite author, and The Great Gatsby is my favourite book, he is an inspiration to me, but I did not make a conscious decision to attempt to replicate his narrative style: I would never have thought myself capable, for a start! It is fascinating how an author’s influence on a writer can filter into the work, unwittingly, almost by a process of osmosis.” All authors are the sum of the parts of their predecessors to which they add their own unique voices: “It’s a wonderful debt to owe to our literary forebears.”

Writing in Exile
Perception and exile are some of the dominant themes she explores in the novel. As a European living in New York, she often feels as if she is writing in exile, in that she is so far removed from the much-loved landscape of her youth. “As much as I enjoy living in New York, I have never considered it home, although I have lived here for over a decade.” So, in writing The Art of Devotion, she indulged in a game of mental travelling. “I wanted to revisit that Mediterranean locale, and re-examine its culture through a prism of detachment, which is why the four female protagonists in the novel narrate their experiences in the present, looking back to the past: all are exiled from the lives they once led.” Furthermore, she has a long-standing love of the sea and islands, such as those she has known in the Mediterranean, and they have always struck her as being governed, to some degree, by the whims of the Gods: “There’s something precarious about their unparalleled beauty, almost as if they could be consumed by the sea at any moment. Onto that stage, I wanted to place characters who, by their very nature and existence, inhabit a world in the late 1930s, from our contemporary perspective, that we know is inherently fragile; a world so rarefied and refined—of grace and favour and privilege—that no longer exists.”

Yet, within that brightly lit framework, she wanted to examine the shadows founded on two further themes: the nature of gossip and idolatry, which, she believes, are inexorably linked. “By creating a novel around four distinct voices and examining the same set of events from each different perspective, I was able to play with the idea of unreliable narrators and readers’ allegiances: the characters present themselves without authorial interference because there’s no third-person narration. All the reader knows is what they are told by the characters themselves, in their own voices, and it is entirely up to the reader to decide whom they choose to align their sympathies.”

Universal Emotions
She also wanted to examine universal emotions with which readers would readily identify: grief, love, devotion and each character’s divergent approach to them. Most crucially, there’s no authorial judgment throughout the story: “I want readers to believe what they choose, to align their affections accordingly, to agree or disagree with the characters, based only on their own perceptions. Yet, in subverting every single thing the reader believes to be the truth at the end of the novel, I also wanted to cast doubt over the blithe assumptions we ritually make: do we believe what we hear or trust what we know and, if so, why?”

As a reader and writer of fiction, Samantha believes that good fiction lies in the writing. “I can forgive any flaw of plot if the author’s voice or narrative style proves compelling.” She once had somebody influential counsel her, ‘Don’t bother about the writing. It’s not important. Just concentrate on getting the story right.’ She has never disagreed with anything more viscerally in her life. “For me, everything is about language. When I look back to my most beloved books, it’s not the artistry of the novel’s architecture or facts of the story that spring to mind when I consider why I love them, but those sentences, that, when recalled, seem to encapsulate the entire book and what it conveyed on first reading.”

On whether creativity or imagination is inborn or can be taught, she says, “As a former editor, I think that you can teach the tenets of plotting and pacing—the architecture of a novel—but the language, the ability to find and express ideas in unique and memorable ways, is something that I don’t believe can ever be taught.” For her, the interplay between the life of the mind and the way in which it translates itself into language on a page is an innate gift, unique to each writer. “I think there comes a point where language and plotting can be overworked, especially in workshop settings, hitting formulaic marks that detract from a piece of writing’s originality.” Flaws, she believes, are sometimes necessary to convey the author’s intent; sometimes they are what make a novel interesting. “I don’t think any author can score a perfect ten every time they set out to write a book.”

Samantha has completed writing her second novel, The Last Party, which focuses on the ‘last party’ of the summer season, held by a fabled society hostess in the Hamptons, as it unfolds in the moments leading up to the Great Hurricane of 1938, and is deep in the throes of editing it. And when she is not busy writing, reading or editing, she loves to watch the sea for hours, and all of her favourite films, over and over again. Beyond that, she likes to eat. “Especially meringue!”

Reproduced from the October-December 2011 issue of Quill magazine

Every Road Has a Destination

2011-11-08T18:31:00.000-08:00

Canadian novelist JUNE HUTTON talks about her first novel, Underground, and her long, seldom-smooth struggle to get her foot on the authorial ladder

THE ROAD TO PUBLICATION for a début novelist is seldom smooth. Mine was typically long and uneven. Perhaps that is thematically fitting, given the subject matter of Underground, a story about struggle, perseverance and personal victory. Al Fraser’s search for identity and purpose takes him from the mud of the Somme, through the parched Canadian landscape of the Great Depression and on to the burnt fields of Spain deep in the throes of civil war. In other words, a journey along one of recent history’s rougher roads.

Two distinct yet similar images were the story’s genesis. My father told me that his father had been buried alive in a trench at the Somme, and had to punch a fist through the dirt to signal rescue crews. To me, that fist was a powerful symbol of defiance. It said: I will not die. Later, a co-worker told me that her father had fought with Canada’s MacKenzie-Papineau Battalion in Spain. I was curious and began reading up on those soldiers, and found that their salute was a raised fist, a symbol of defiance against fascism. A lightning bolt of ideas began zapping between the two images of the raised fists. How could I connect them? What sort of man would fight in both wars, and why? The story grew from there.

Underground was many years in the making. Long before I began work on my novel, I was learning the craft of writing—as a journalist for five years and then a short-story writer for seven years. The novel itself, from early scratchings on paper to eventual publication, took another seven years.

During Underground’s infancy, I was teaching high school English part-time, struggling to squeeze in writing when I could—on a bus, while going for a walk, doing the laundry, preparing lessons. A thought would strike and I’d write it down before it was lost in the bustle of life. I carried a notebook with me wherever I went and it didn’t take long to fill one. From there, I moved to my laptop and began piecing scenes together. I would print copies and edit, then go back to the screen, then back and forth, repeatedly, until I was satisfied. When that happened I’d workshop it with authors Jen Sookfong Lee (The End of East, The Better Mother) and Mary Novik (Conceit), who are my friends and fellow members of the writing group SpiN (www.spinwrites.com).

For me, the most intensely creative stage of novel production is that beginning, after perhaps a draft or two, when I have a vague notion of where the story is heading, but am free to add whatever I want and just see what happens. At that point anything is possible. A new character can appear. Or an old one, disappear. The chronology can shift. The story can still move in unexpected directions.

My protagonist is purely fictional, though he represents many of the men of his generation whose lives had been shaped by war and deprivation. For that reason, I felt that Al Fraser had to be an ordinary guy, a worker, not a famous person from history. I wanted him in that mud, a common foot soldier fighting in deplorable conditions, and returning to a hard life back home, damaged by what he had experienced. His eventual acknowledgement of an unsavoury act he committed on the battlefield leads to his decision to go to Spain. War then becomes a means towards Al’s personal redemption. I used rising shrapnel as a physical symbol of that memory—the bits of war that he has brought back home with him—and this motif runs throughout the novel.

Other sub-themes emerged that connect to the overall theme of identity. Love, for one, which I wasn’t expecting. Also, the camaraderie among workers. Only after the novel was nearing completion did I realise that the camaraderie extends to men in war and on protest marches, too. But each of these is a world without women and, increasingly, as the story grew, so did Al’s longing for a female presence in his life, for love, as a means of becoming whole.

But the struggle to finish Al’s story was soon eclipsed by the struggle to convince the book industry it wanted the story. My husband and I had moved to Toronto, Ontario, for a few months for his work. Toronto is the publishing centre in Canada, so while I was there I decided to look for a literary agent. I phoned John Pearce of Westwood Creative Artists and described my novel to him. He asked me to send sample chapters, which I did. He then agreed to meet me, and asked me to bring the remaining chapters.

We met several times, in fact. During our last meeting the manuscript, bound with elastic bands, sat in the middle of the table. John had read it, liked it, but felt it needed more work. He was going to decline taking me on as a client. As he discussed the manuscript’s weaknesses, he nudged it across the centre to my side of the table. As I replied with its strengths, I nudged it back. Watching the bundle’s unsteady progress back and forth across the table was nerve-wracking. I often wonder if he noticed. I told him I was willing to keep working at it, and we discussed ways to improve it. A couple of times he picked the bundle up and my heart was in my mouth until he dropped it back down onto his side of the table. At last we reached an agreement, and John said he would have a contract drawn up and sent to me. It was summer and I was wearing flip-flops, not the usual attire for a business meeting, but I was ready to hop into the waiting car and begin our nine-day drive back across Canada and the United States to our home in Vancouver. It was a victorious return. I had persevered. I was represented. I knew publication was only a matter of time.

My journey was not over, though. Author Jack Hodgins, winner of many awards including the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (Canadian-Caribbean region), agreed to go over the manuscript with me and offer suggestions. John then asked me which publishers I was most interested in, and I named two, one of which was the small but award-winning Cormorant Books. Publisher and editor Marc Côté read the manuscript in one weekend, and by the Monday was on the phone to John saying he wanted to buy Underground.

We then embarked on the process of turning the manuscript into a novel. The time from the signing of the contract to publication was the standard two years. My manuscript was put through the usual process of extending, cutting, deepening, and in general, revising, revising, revising. There’s nothing like a book deal to sharpen the focus and fire up the creative juices. Again.

JUNE HUTTON is a former journalist and teacher whose short fiction has appeared in many literary journals in Canada. Her first novel, Underground, documents the events that led a Canadian soldier to fight in the Spanish Civil War. Hutton read from Underground at the Suzhou Bookworm in early 2011. She was in China to conduct research for a novel about the wild west of North America, Chinese immigrants, and opera. She lives in Vancouver, Canada. Check out her website at http://www.junehutton.com/.

Coordinated by ERIC FORBES
Reproduced from the October-December 2011 issue of Quill magazine

Nadir

2011-11-02T08:28:00.000-07:00

JUST WHEN I THOUGHT it was safe to go back in the water … I thought I had edited the worst book of my career when along comes another nightmare of a manuscript to break all previous records and haunt my every waking moment! (I was told that I must be paying for all the horrible sins I committed in my previous lives!) It’s amazing how far down we are willing to go when it comes to standards (or lack thereof)! With this pasar malam (night market) style of Malaysian publishing, I would rather scrub toilets than edit the crap that pass for manuscripts any day. Seriously.

November 2011 Highlights

2011-11-01T01:22:00.000-07:00

Novels
1. What the Family Needed (Sleepers, 2011) / Steven Amsterdam
2. The Night Strangers (Simon & Schuster, 2011) / Chris Bohjalian
3. The Prague Cemetery (trans. from the Italian by Richard Dixon) (Harvill Secker/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011) / Umberto Eco
4. Lost December (Simon & Schuster, 2011) / Richard Paul Evans
5. The Boy in the Suitcase (trans. from the Danish by Lene Kaaberbol) (Soho Press, 2011) / Lene Kaaberbol & Agnete Friis
6. The Printmaker’s Daughter (HarperPerennial, 2011) / Katherine Govier
7. Death Comes to Pemberley (Faber & Faber, 2011) / P.D. James
8. 11.22.63 (Scribner/Hodder & Stoughton, 2011) / Stephen King
9. How It All Began (Fig Tree, 2011) / Penelope Lively
10. Love and Shame and Love (Little, Brown, 2011) / Peter Orner

11. It’s Fine By Me (trans. from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett) (Harvill Secker, 2011) / Per Petterson
12. Lunch Bucket Paradise: A True-Life Novel (Heyday Books, 2011) / Fred Setterberg
13. Queen of America (Little, Brown, 2011) / Luis Alberto Urrea

First Novels
1. The Coward’s Tale (Bloomsbury, 2011) / Vanessa Gebbie
2. The House of Silk: The New Sherlock Holmes Novel (Orion, 2011) / Anthony Horowitz
3. The Sisters (St. Martin’s Press, 2011) / Nancy Jensen
4. The Devil All the Time (Harvill Secker, 2011) / Donald Ray Pollock

Stories
1. Somewhere Else, Or Even Here (Salt Publishing, 2011) / A.J. Ashworth
2. The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories (Scribner, 2011) / Don DeLillo
3. Before the End, After the Beginning (Grove Press, 2011) / Dagoberto Gilb
4. The Beautiful Indifference (Faber & Faber, 2011) / Sarah Hall
5. The Doll: The Lost Short Stories (William Morrow, 2011) / Daphne du Maurier
6. Tales of the New World (Black Cat/Grove Press, 2011) / Sabina Murray
7. The Corn Maiden and Other Nightmares (Mysterious Press, 2011) / Joyce Carol Oates

Poetry
1. The Angel of Salonika (Salt Publishing, 2011) / Vesna Goldsworthy
2. Armour (Picador, 2011) / John Kinsella
3. Selected Poems (Faber & Faber, 2011) / Christopher Reid
4. Across the Land and the Water: Selected Poems 1964-2001 (trans. from the German by Iain Gabraith) (Hamish Hamilton, 2011) / W.G. Sebald
5. The Rivered Earth (Hamish Hamilton, 2011) / Vikram Seth
6. Things to Say to a Dead Man: Poems at the End of a Marriage and After (Holy Cow! Press, 2011) / Jane Yolen

Nonfiction
1. London Under: The Secret History Beneath the Streets (Nan A. Talese, 2011) / Peter Ackroyd
2. Mrs. Nixon: A Novelist Imagines a Life (Scribner, 2011) / Ann Beattie
3. Stalking Nabokov (Columbia University Press, 2011) / Brian Boyd
4. Martin Amis: The Biography (Constable, 2011) / Richard Bradford
5. Blue Nights (Alfred A. Knopf, 2011) / Joan Didion
6. The Beauty and the Sorrow: An Intimate History of the First World War (trans. from the Swedish by Peter Graves) (Alfred A. Knopf, 2011) / Peter Englund
7. Civilization: The West and the Rest (Penguin, 2011) / Niall Ferguson
8. George F. Kennan: An American Life (Allen Lane, 2011) / John Lewis Gaddis
90. Life Upon These Shores: Looking at African American History, 1513-2008 (Alfred A. Knopf, 2011) / Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
10. Rome: A Cultural, Visual, and Personal History (Alfred A. Knopf, 2011) / Robert Hughes

11. A Point of View (Picador, 2011) / Clive James
12. Explorers of the Nile: The Triumph and Tragedy of a Great Victorian Adventure (Yale University Press, 2011) / Tim Jeals
13. A Convenient Hatred: The History of Antisemitism (Facing History and Ourselves, 2011) / Phyllis Goldstein
14. The New Granta Book of Travel (Granta Books, 2011) / Liz Jobey (ed.)
15. “Something Urgent I Have to Say to You”: The Life and Works of William Carlos Williams (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2011) / Herbert Leibowitz
16. The Ecstasy of Influence: Nonfictions, Etc. (Doubleday, 2011) / Jonathan Lethem
17. Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman (Random House, 2011) / Robert K. Massie
18. Jacques Barzun: Portrait of a Mind (Frederic C. Beil, 2011) / Michael Murray
19. On Rereading (Belnap Press/Harvard University Press, 2011) / Patricia Meyer Spacks
20. The Genius of Dickens (Gerald Duckworth, 2011) / Michael Slater

21. Higher Gossip: Essays and Criticism (ed. Christopher Carduff) (Knopf, 2011) / John Updike
22. The Least Cricket of Evening (University of Nebraska Press, 2011) / Robert Vivian
23. Stranger Magic: Charmed States & the Arabian Nights (Chatto & Windus, 2012) / Marina Warner
24. J.G. Ballard: Visions and Revisions (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) / Jeanette Baxter and Rowland Wymer (eds.)

Train Your Brain!

2011-10-24T19:02:00.000-07:00

Working memory expert TRACY PACKIAM ALLOWAY tells SHANTINI SUNTHARAJAH how she makes cross-training techniques for the little grey cells more accessible for everyone

“I REALLY ENJOY running barefoot.” This might sound like a declaration from an experimental athlete or an unpredictable free spirit. However, Tracy Packiam Alloway is neither a professional runner nor a head-in-the-clouds hippie. In fact, she couldn’t have a more down-to-earth day job. She is a teacher.

To be more precise, Alloway is a professor of psychology at the University of Stirling in Scotland. Every year, she leads hundreds of undergraduates through the intricacies of Psychology and is the University’s Director of the Centre for Learning in the Lifespan where she simplifies complex academic research on neuropsychology, developmental psychology, health and education for the general public.

The professor’s penchant for running sans shoes isn’t the only surprising thing about her. She has none of the characteristics routinely associated with established academics. Professors are frequently pictured as serious, perhaps bespectacled, older men and women who have the unfortunate tendency to intersperse their conversations with scholarly language and topics that are of little or no interest to anyone.

Alloway is the polar opposite of this general assumption. The petite 36-year-old mother of two little boys is vivacious, friendly and has a delightful habit of peppering her conversation with infectious laughs and friendly smiles. Plus, there isn’t a pair of spectacles in sight. There is, however, one important trait she shares with her studious peers: Alloway is a brilliant scholar. “I love learning and I’m always curious and interested in finding out more about everything.”

The young professor has a PhD in Cognitive Psychology from the University of Stirling and has conducted intensive research on working memory, which is essentially how the brain stores and manages information in order to tackle complex cognitive tasks such as reasoning, learning and comprehension. Alloway expertly explains it in easy-to-understand terms: “IQ is the knowledge that you learn. Your working memory is what you do with that knowledge.” She refers to working memory as the brain’s “Post-it” note. “You may read something and when someone asks you a question that’s related, you have to think about what you read and know how to use the information in your answer. Working memory is your ability to hold information in your mind and then manipulate that information mentally.”

Alloway is one of the world’s most respected authorities on working memory, particularly on how it impacts learning in children. In 2009, she won the prestigious Joseph Lister Prize, which is awarded by the British Science Association, for making her scientific research accessible to a wider audience. “I conduct a lot of research and studies on how children learn. I’ve worked with typically developing children, those who are gifted and the children who struggle with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), dyslexia and learning disabilities. It is my absolute passion.”

A sought-after speaker and world traveller, Alloway can be found on any continent at any given time. Her flight schedule for a particular month could include Brazil, Switzerland, the US and anywhere in between. Her expertise on working memory and her talent for simplifying academic papers littered with scholastic jargon means she is equally skilled at presenting a keynote address to academic professionals at an important conference or giving a personalised talk to teachers and parents who are intent on helping their children learn efficiently.

Despite her hectic schedule of teaching classes at the university and fulfilling speaking engagements, Alloway managed to squeeze in some time to develop a highly popular online learning programme called Jungle Memory with her husband Ross, also a university professor.

Jungle Memory allows children to dramatically improve their working memory and subsequently, their achievements in school. To date, the programme has close to 10,000 users from 30 different countries. “It’s so rewarding and inspiring when I receive emails from parents and teachers reporting the amazing progress they see in children who use Jungle Memory,” says Alloway with a wide smile. “I just received an email from a teacher in Canada telling me about a boy who’s moved up three reading levels after just eight weeks. That’s remarkable progress!”

Alloway’s own amazing progress to the heights of academic success is the result of a lifelong passion for knowledge. After some prodding, she modestly admits that she was a straight A student in school. “I’ve always loved learning,” confesses the former Assunta Primary School student. “I think it was also partly because of my mum who’s a teacher. She made learning enjoyable. We’d always play games at home to improve our knowledge, like we’d race to see who could recite the most number of capital cities in the shortest period of time.”

Alloway, who is the elder of two children, grew up in Malaysia. In her early teens, she moved with her parents and brother to Oregon in the US for three years. While Mum and Dad attended Bible College, the two Packiam children attended a local high school. “I was 13 at the time, which I suppose is a difficult age, but our family is really close and we did everything together. It was easy to adjust to life in a different country.”

Alloway’s journey to becoming a respected psychologist began at her high school in Oregon. “We had called an Early Careers Class and our teacher invited people who worked in various professions to speak to us.” The talk, given by a psychologist, captivated young Alloway. “I was impressed with the value of psychology and the potential of it. I know it sounds clichéd but I really felt inspired to help people by studying psychology.”

Although Alloway spends a great deal of her time writing about the subject that ignited her passion all those years ago, she never thought she’d see her name on the cover of a book. “I’ve published scientific articles in over 75 different journals in the course of my work, but I don’t really think of myself as an author,” she reveals, flashing another one of her bright smiles. “I suppose when I think of writing I think of fiction and I don’t think I’m a good fiction writer!” she adds, laughing.

This self-assessment may or may not be true but Alloway is undeniably a prolific writer and her non-fiction books are certainly well received such as the insightful Improving Working Memory published by Sage. In less than two years, the young professor had written and published four books on the subject of working memory. Her prowess as a writer attracted the attention of John Wiley & Sons, publishers of the well-known Dummies series of guidebooks. “They approached me in February last year. The book I wrote for them is basically a guide on how to improve your life from your brain to your toes,” explains Alloway.

In keeping with her incredible writing pace, Alloway completed Training Your Brain for Dummies between March and August of last year. The book hit bookstores in December 2010. “I like writing in the early morning. I finished the whole book by writing bits of it between 5 and 7 or 7.30am each day. Sometimes, I would pick it up again at the end of the day when the kids were safely in bed,” she says. Alloway reveals the secret behind her ability to juggle multiple tasks and responsibilities. “I try to be very organised…you have to be with kids! I work whenever I have the time; I just do it. I don’t really have the luxury of telling myself I’ll do it later.”

The meticulously systematic professor is currently working on another book with her husband. “It’s about working memory in relation to the different aspects of life and I’m very excited about it. We’ve already completed a few chapters and one chapter is about happiness.” Alloway and her husband use true stories and experiences to demystify the edicts of working memory. “We talk about Mario, one of the Chilean miners who was trapped underground for more than two months in 2010. He was known as the joker and kept his spirits up even when everyone else had given up hope,” says Alloway. “There is evidence to show that we use our working memory to keep a goal in mind and in Mario’s case, his goal was to focus on the positive. Staying happy requires working memory.”

Alloway writes her books about working memory with a very specific goal in mind. “I want the cutting edge information found in journal articles and research papers to reach the people who need it,” she says. “I want the parent with the child who has dyslexia or the teacher who’s handling a student with a learning disability to know what methods and practices work and what don’t.”

Alloway has never wavered from the reason she chose to study psychology. “I want to help people. I want parents to have access to information but I also want them to have access to the idea of hope.”

TRACY PACKIAM ALLOWAY, author of Training Your Brain for Dummies and renowned authority on working memory, offers three ways to train your brain:

1. Pick up a newspaper and choose a fairly common word like ‘find’ or ‘positive.’ Give yourself 30 seconds to scan that page and circle your chosen word as quickly as you can. If you train yourself to scan and pick up specifics really quickly, you can improve your focus and attention.
2. Get your friend to tap a rhythm on a table—maybe start with four or five taps and see if you can mirror that same rhythm. This trains your memory. The same part of the brain that is used to find order in rhythm is also used to remember information in order like the sequential digits that make up a phone number or a set of instructions.
3. Working memory can also be honed by remembering something backwards. You can make a fun game of it on a road trip. For instance, everyone in the car can compete to remember the backward sequence of the colours of five cars that pass or you could try to recite car number plates backwards.

Reproduced from MPH’s 105th Anniversary Issue of Quill magazine

Blood Reunion ... the adventures continue!

2011-10-23T16:22:00.000-07:00

An Obsession with Haruki Murakami

2011-10-21T06:18:00.000-07:00

Singaporean short-story writer O THIAM CHIN waits for October 25, 2011, with bated breath

ON OCTOBER 25, 2011, 1Q84, the highly anticipated novel by the great Japanese writer Haruki Murakami will be launched officially in English. It is one of the biggest highlights in the literary calendar this year, one that fans of the writer have been waiting eagerly for. This is his 12th novel, following After Dark, which was published in 2007.

1Q84 was published in Japan in May 2009 and was an immediate bestseller there. Its first print run sold out on the first day and it achieved sales of a million copies within a month. It has since sold over four million copies! With its phenomenal success, translation into various languages quickly went ahead, with the English-language publication rights secured by the US publishing giant, Knopf, and an October launch date was announced in January this year. Unlike the Chinese edition of the novel, which came out in 2010 in three separate volumes, the new novel is published in the US as a single volume, running to almost a thousand pages. (1Q84 is published by Harvill Secker in the UK.)

The title of the novel is a direct reference to George Orwell’s 1984, with a wordplay on the English letter ‘Q’ which is pronounced the same as the number nine (“kyuu”) in Japanese. To hasten the production of the English version, the publishers have resorted to two of his regular translators, Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel, to work simultaneously on the translation. This is the first full-length novel by Murakami that is written in the third-person.

The story of 1Q84 revolves around two main characters, Aomame (“green peas” in Japanese), a hired killer, and Tengo, a novelist and mathematics tutor, with the narrative moving between them in alternate chapters. Exploring an array of issues and themes that include family ties, religious cult, love and writing, it shows how their lives start to overlap with each other in a world that seems to get stranger and more surreal.

Already a huge buzz is generating among his fans, with the publication of an excerpt from the novel entitled “Town of Cats” in the September 5 issue of The New Yorker. In the story, Tengo visits his father at the hospice and confronts deep-seated issues from the past. In his interview with the magazine, Murakami said, “Whenever I write a novel, I have a strong sense that I am doing something I was unable to do before. With each new work, I move up a step and discover something new inside me. I don’t see this novel as a departure, but I do think it has been a major step in my career.”

I first got to know of Murakami when a fellow writer briefly mentioned him to me back in 2002. “What? You have never read him? You should,” he said with mock surprise. Being a slow, cautious reader, back then and even now, I chose one of the slimmest books in his oeuvre, South of the Border, West of the Sun.

The story, in which a man starts to question his life, after being reunited with his first love from high school, an enigmatic woman with a limp from polio in her childhood, has all the hallmarks of a Murakami novel: lonely, introverted characters struggling to keep their fragile individualism in the face of a suffocating, conformist society, and a strange, sometimes convoluted, plot that usually involves disappearance, death and disillusionment. In his hands, all things are possible. As his translator, Jay Rubin, once said, “It is not because he is writing about Japan that people love him … it’s about the moment to moment sensation of being in his world. Inside his head.”

Of course, Murakami isn’t the first Japanese writer I read when I first got interested in Japanese Literature—there was Yasunari Kawabata, Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, and Yukio Mishima—but somehow none of them came close to capturing my attention quite like him. The worlds he created, vastly different from the old masters of Japanese Literature, were darkly compelling, where hope and despair change like shifting elements of light and shadow, a world I could sink into, as an observer who kept his distance, much like his characters, living different, parallel lives very much like my own, yet so different in so many ways. The pleasure goes deep, like a drug, and perhaps, that’s why I keep going back to him.

And so began my love for his writings. There was a period in my life when my reading consisted solely of his works, as I slowly made my way through his oeuvre. When I began to write short stories in 2005, I held his short stories as a guide to show me what a truly great short story can do, to create an entire world, full and complete in itself. Even now, when I get stuck writing my stories, I’d pull out my dog-eared copy of Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, a collection of his best stories, from my bookshelf and read one of the stories, picking up an idea or two, and getting inspired all over again. His influence is all over my writing psyche, truth be told.

During the long wait, I have pre-ordered the book in early September (49 more days!), and started preparing the groundwork, to devote myself to the book. I’m slowly working through the pile of books on my writing table; I juggle about nine to twelve books at any one time; now, I’m down to two. With the release day approaching fast, and the anticipation building up to fever pitch, my hunger, and obsession, with Murakami, continues to grow and grow, as I wait to enter his head, into the strange world he has created in 1Q84.

O THIAM CHIN is a Singapore-born writer whose stories have appeared in several literary journals and anthologies, including World Literature Today, Asia Literary Review, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Kyoto Journal and the New Straits Times. His début collection of stories, Free-Falling Man, was published in 2006, followed by a second collection, Never Been Better, in 2009 (which was longlisted for the 2010 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award), and a third, Under the Sun. His new collection, The Rest of Your Life and Everything That Comes With It, has just been published.

Julian Barnes and His Man Booker Prize

2011-10-18T16:27:00.000-07:00

Outsiders on the ‘SEAN’: Depictions of Southeast Asia in Western Fiction

2011-10-15T21:03:00.000-07:00

Southeast Asia has been inspiring Western writers for hundreds of years. As the region has evolved socially and politically over the years, so have the themes and concerns of its fictions. From John Dryden to Alex Garland, from Joseph Conrad to Joan Didion, TOM SYKES attempts a summing-up of the canon despite its diversity

IN THE EARLY MODERN PERIOD, Europeans had a false conception of Southeast Asia as a land of permissiveness, exoticism and extravagance. The Portuguese adventurer Fernao Mendes Pinto found the people of Malacca, Patani, Sumatra, Aceh and Siam (now Thailand) not to be like this. Instead, he decided they were more tolerant, charitable and respectful than his fellow Westerners whom he castigated for their greed and violence. Even so, after resisting pirates in the South China Sea, he became one himself. These experiences are fictionalised in Peregrinacao, published in 1614 after his death.

John Dryden’s 1699 play Amboyna concerns the real-life slaughter of English traders by Dutch soldiers on the Indonesian island of Ambon. Writing at the beginning of the colonial era, Dryden portrayed the indigenes less charitably than Pinto, as one-dimensional, animal-like beings. The play was poorly received.

Heinrich Anselm von Ziegler’s 1689 Baroque adventure Banise the Asiatic is set in southern Myanmar and use travelogues written by Pinto as source material. In a rousing, happy ending, the hero, Banise, successfully defends the Pegu Empire from conquest by the evil tyrant Chaumigrem. In real life quite the opposite happened.

Dryden’s and Ziegler’s oversights are partly explained by the inaccessibility of Southeast Asian literature to Westerners hoping to understand and write validly about its culture. According to historians Robin W. Winks and James R. Rush, “no piece of South or East Asian fiction was available in a Western language until the eighteenth century.”

By the late 1800s, novels were addressing Western colonialism’s ‘civilising mission’ rhetoric, albeit in contradictory ways. William Carlton Dawe’s Hong Kong-based potboilers The Mandarin (1899) and The Yellow Man (1900) may have been attacked by contemporary critics for being ‘unpatriotic’, but there’s an ethnocentric streak to his characterisation. His non-white men are amoral and vicious, his women exotic but unattainable. Dawe warns against interracial relationships (“the love of the white for the yellow”) while salaciously describing it. Jack Curzon, or, Mysterious Manila (1898), by the American author Clavering Gunter, is also full of derring-do but set in the Philippines. Published in the same year that the United States wrested control of the islands from the Spanish, the novel has an undertone of American supremacism to it, not to say an unflattering take on the indigenes. As a contemporary reviewer put it, “an important part is also played by a semi-civilised Tagal native, who possesses in common with all his kind, so the writer assures us, a sense of smell equal to that of a bloodhound.”

The colonial adventure genre reaches its apotheosis in Joseph Conrad’s series of novels set in the Malay archipelago. The first, Almayer’s Folly: A Story of an Eastern River (1895), is about a Dutch trader in Borneo whose marriage to a half-caste girl is as disastrous as his harebrained schemes to make money. Lord Jim (1900) begins with a young British sailor abandoning a ship full of Muslim pilgrims from the Malay states. Jim redeems himself as a raja-style ruler of a fictional island in the South Seas, winning the hearts and minds of the inhabitants by defeating the tribal king Tunku Allang. This may seem like a thinly disguised celebration of colonialism, but Conrad’s outlook is more complex than that. Both Almayer and Jim are flawed antiheroes with questionable pasts and symbolise misgivings about the legitimacy of the imperial project.

The 20th century was perhaps the most eventful in the history of Southeast Asia. A world war, a cold war, decolonisation and revolution all appear in Western novels of the era, many of which cast a sympathetic eye over their subject matter. George Orwell’s Burmese Days (1934) tells of a British police officer in Myanmar with an affection for the indigenous culture and a distaste for the colonial administration he works for. Just as Orwell learned the language during his time in Myanmar, so Anthony Burgess became fluent in Malay while working as a teacher during the Malayan Emergency. He conducted painstaking research into its history and culture for The Malayan Trilogy (1956-9), intending to become “the true fictional expert on Malaya.” Graham Greene’s early Vietnam novel The Quiet American (1955) seeks to understand the Vietminh while critiquing American CIA intervention in the country. Greene was appalled when a slushy Hollywood adaptation of the novel tried to graft a pro-American, anti-Communist message onto it. In a comparable vein, Joan Didion’s cleverly experimental Democracy (1984) exposes the profoundly anti-democratic policies of the US in Indochina from the 1950s to the 1970s.

Of all the Western novels about the Pacific during World War II, James Clavell’s King Rat (1962) is perhaps the darkest. Based on the author’s incarceration in Singapore’s Changi Prison, the novel shocks with its representation of the squalid conditions, the barbarism of the Japanese guards and the Darwinian rivalry between the POWs themselves.

In recent years, Southeast Asia has come to occupy a different space in the Western psyche, as a tourist destination affording pleasures and experiences unavailable at home. The biggest-selling novel to engage with this is of course Alex Garland’s The Beach (1996). Richard is a seasoned backpacker in search of an authentic, off-the-beaten-track experience in Thailand. His discovery of an idyllic beach commune comes at the price of his own descent into madness and murder. Described as “Generation X’s first great novel,” The Beach is ultimately a meditation on how our perception of reality is mediated by so many fictions, from videogames to movies to commercial tourism itself. Also set in Thailand, Michel Houellebecq’s controversial Platform (2001) addresses the behaviour of Western sex tourists in Pattaya and other such resorts.

Southeast Asian society has changed radically over the years. Western fiction has tried to keep up with those changes, sometimes getting its depictions right, sometimes wrong. We can’t predict what the novels of the future will be like but we can be sure that the region will continue to feed the Western imagination.

Reproduced from MPH’s 105th Anniversary issue of Quill magazine

Writing the Sequel

2011-10-08T20:58:00.000-07:00

When you’ve finished a novel, should you move on to pastures new or use it as a basis for the next work? ELLEN WHYTE wonders

WHEN I FINISHED my romance story Blackmail Bride, I was plunged into uncertainty about the next step. Should I move on to pastures new or continue with Lucy and Jack?

There are plenty of excellent reasons for using one work as a platform for a series.

First, after you’ve spent hours dreaming up your characters, it can be hard to put them into storage. Not only is it wasteful, but characters tend to take on a life of their own, and you can’t help but dream about what happens next. This urge is so strong that even a new author playing about with old characters isn’t a stumbling block: it makes me buy stories like Pemberley: Or Pride and Prejudice Continued by Emma Tennant and watch The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

Second, publishers like sequels because they sell better. Not only do readers who loved the first story buy in because they want to see how your characters are developing, but new readers are more likely to plump for a book that’s part of a series than a stand-alone book. Somehow a series implies quality. The lure of the series is so strong that I still buy The Cat Who ... books by Lilian Jackson Braun on the strength of the first stories—even though the last half a dozen books have been dismally disappointing.

Third, if you’re really lucky, you can get a book deal for a series. That means advances, money in the bank, and fewer sleepless nights wondering if you’re being an idiot for following your dreams when you could be coining it as a therapist, lecturer, sales executive or whatever.

When I started Blackmail Bride, I fully intended it to be the start of a series. It makes economic sense that’s hard to refute. However, the main problem for the romance writer is that reusing main characters is tricky as you can’t have them falling in love all over again. The classic solution is to create new characters but to have your old hero and heroine making cameo appearances. So the “Welsh family saga” was born.

The thing is, I put the saga thingy on the book cover, and decided I’d worry about writing the sequel after. Getting new ideas has never been a problem, so it didn’t occur to me for a second that I might have writer’s block.

I didn’t either. The problem was that I had too many ideas of what could be done next. I wasn’t sure if I should keep the setting, or keep the characters.

I set Blackmail Bride in Scotland, in the mythical Bear’s Glen that I based on, one of my favourite places, Loch Lomond. Putting it in familiar territory meant very little research, which gave me the opportunity to practice the storytelling skills needed to keep readers entertained for 55,000 words.

In order to set myself up for potential sequels, I had the foresight to make my hero Jack a twin, so his brother Greg was all set to have his heartstrings tugged. I also introduced some minor characters like Jim, the Navajo academic turned writer, who could provide rich fodder for the future.

However, for the next book, I wanted to take advantage of my time in Sarawak. The land of the headhunters is exciting, mysterious, and I bet readers would love the idea of that exotic land. Although I lived there for a few years, introducing characters who are not of my own culture would mean more research and some careful writing.

I was hoping to keep that task manageable by building on the practical experience of writing Blackmail Bride.

I settled for moving Greg into Borneo, and leaving Jim for the next novel. Then I went to bed because that’s the place where I do my best thinking. To the casual observer it looks like I’m napping with the cats, but actually the brain is working overtime. Seriously. That occasional rusty sound is evidence that my mental gears are working, or that the cats are purry happy.

Anyway, during my inspirational lie-down, the plot for the next story unfolded without a problem. I got Greg to Borneo, and Emily, the heroine of the tale, popped into my mind practically fully formed. The minor characters, including the bomoh and the sexy bint, were born equally painlessly. I placed them all at the Red Hibiscus resort, and thereby got the title for the story: Black Magic and Mayhem at the Red Hibiscus.

And that’s where things got tricky. Suddenly I wondered if I should re-christen Greg, and turn this tale into a mystery with a romance subplot rather than a romance with a mystery subplot. I agonised over this for ages because both paths had tonnes of appeal. Worse, by the end of two days I had two outlines: one for a mystery and another for a romance.

The cats couldn’t advise me beyond a purr and an offer of a toy mousie, so I consulted my other half. He is not a writer, but he has a lovely incisive mind that’s good at weighing up the pros and cons of investment and experience.

“Build on the romance as it’s your principle investment and save the detective plot for another series,” he advised. “Finish Red Hibiscus, then start the detective. Then you’ll have two projects in hand, which will keep you fresh.”

The idea of working on two projects appeals because it has already worked for me. I have a secret completed book, Wildcat in Moscow, a rollicking romance that features Chelsea Moore, an artist by trade and eco-warrior by nature who falls in with Vladimir Voyeykov, a Russian business tycoon rumoured to be a member of the Red Mafia.

Wildcat in Moscow is far more robust than Blackmail Bride, and at 80,000 words it’s also longer. I wrote it in between edits of Blackmail Bride, and I’m dying to find a home for it. In fact, I liked Wildcat in Moscow so much, that I’m 30,000 words into the follow-up Summer in Moscow. This follow-up is also a closely guarded secret.

When I reminded my other half of the Secret Project, he wasn’t fazed. “So have three projects in hand! Once one takes off, you’ll need the others to keep readers happy. Writers can’t produce one book a year anymore, so figure on writing three or four.”

I’ve taken his advice but in moderation. For one thing, I have to balance book writing that pays poorly with commissions that buy the cat biscuits. In my free time I’m hard at work at Red Hibiscus, and plan to put that out at the end of the quarter.

I’m keeping Wildcat in Moscow back until I see how the other books are doing, but I’ve got the second half of Summer in Moscow simmering in the back of my mind and plan to continue work on that. Ideally, it will be finished at the end of this year. Then if all goes well with Blackmail Bride and Red Hibiscus, I can leverage those successes.

In my dreamtime I’m toying with a detective who can handle the mystery plot I’ve put aside. That seems to be turning into a short story, which I rather like the sound of. I could do with a project that involves just 5,000 words at a time.

In my best daydreams all these projects will take off in a big way, and I’ll be busy writing sequels for the next twenty years. The Welsh family will be at the top of the Amazon bestseller list, and everyone will know Chelsea Moore as well as they know Bella Swan and Elizabeth Bennet. Yes, it’s all pie in the sky. But a girl can dream, right?

Reproduced from the July-September 2011 issue of Quill magazine

What I am Reading ...

2011-10-04T07:30:00.000-07:00

October 2011 Highlights

2011-10-01T16:05:00.000-07:00

Novels
1. Until the Dawn’s Light (trans. from the Hebrew by Jeffrey M. Green) (Schocken, 2011) / Aharon Appelfeld
2. The Sense of an Ending (Alfred A. Knopf, 2011) / Julian Barnes
3. The Yellow Emperor’s Curse (Overlook Press, 2011) / Kunal Basu
4. The Night Strangers (Crown, 2011) / Chris Bohjalian
5. Ithaca (McClelland & Stewart, 2011) / David Davidar
6. Lightning Rods (New Directions, 2011) / Helen DeWitt
7. The Forgotten Waltz (W.W. Norton, 2011) / Anne Enright
8. The Marriage Plot (Farrar, Straus & Giroux/Fourth Estate, 2011) / Jeffrey Eugenides
9. Assumption (Graywolf Press, 2011) / Percival Everett
10. Lucky Break (Bloomsbury USA, 2011) / Esther Freud

11. The Lady of the Rivers (Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, 2011) / Philippa Gregory
12. Ed King (Alfred A. Knopf, 2011) / David Guterson
13. Nanjing Requiem (Pantheon, 2011) / Ha Jin
14. The Great Leader (Grove Press, 2011) / Jim Harrison
15. The Betrayal of Trust (Chatto & Windus, 2011) / Susan Hill
16. The Dovekeepers (Scribner, 2011) / Alice Hoffman
17. Of Beasts and Beings (Europa Editions, 2011) / Ian Holding
18. The Stranger’s Child (Knopf Doubleday, 2011) / Alan Hollinghurst
19. Perfect People (Macmillan, 2011) / Peter James
20. When She Woke (Algonquin Books, 2011) / Hillary Jordan

21. Swimming Home (And Other Stories, 2011) / Deborah Levy
22. The Virgin Cure (Knopf Canada, 2011) / Ami McKay
23. Damascus (Two Dollar Radio, 2011) / Joshua Mohr
24. The Wine of Solitude (trans. Sandra Smith) (Chatto & Windus, 2010) / Irène Némirovsky
25. Stolen Souls (Soho Crime, 2011) / Stuart Neville
26. The Cat’s Table (Knopf Doubleday, 2011) / Michael Ondaatje
27. The Impossible Dead (Orion, 2011) / Ian Rankin
28. Falling Together (William Morrow, 2011) / Marisa de los Santos
29. Cain (trans. from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa) (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011) / Jose Saramago
30. A Dublin Student Doctor (Doherty, 2011) / Patrick Taylor

31. Madame Bovary (trans. from the French by Adam Thorpe) (Vintage Classics, 2011) / Gustave Flaubert
32. Zone One (Doubleday, 2011) / Colson Whitehead
33. Letters from an Unknown Woman (published as Nourishment in the UK) (Arcade Publishing, 2011) / Gerard Woodward

First Novels
1. The Wandering Falcon (Penguin USA, 2011) / Jamil Ahmad
2. The Maid: A Novel of Joan of Arc (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011) / Kimberly Cutter
3. Hold Me Now (Freehand Books, 2011) / Stephen Gauer
4. Landfall (Fig Tree, 2011) / Helen Gordon
5. In the King’s Arms (McWitty Press, 2011) / Sonia Taitz
6. Tides of War (Henry Holt, 2011) / Stella Tillyard

Stories
1. God Bless America (Lookout Books, 2011) / Steve Almond
2. The Best American Short Stories 2011 (Mariner Books, 2011) / Heidi Pitlor & Geraldine Brooks (eds.)
3. Collected Folk Tales (HarperCollins, 2011) / Alan Garner
4. Life Times (Penguin USA, 2011) / Nadine Gordimer
5. Other Heartbreaks (Engine Books, 2011) / Patricia Henley
6. Collected Ghost Stories (ed. Darryl Jones) (Oxford University Press, 2011) / M.R. James
7. Men in the Making (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011) / Bruce Machart
8. Scenes from Village Life (trans. from the Hebrew by Nicholas de Lange) (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011) / Amos Oz
9. A Lovesong for India: Tales from East and West (Little, Brown, 2011) / Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
10. A Curious Dream: Collected Works (McArthur & Co., 2011) / Kate Pullinger

11. The Outlaw Album (Little, Brown, 2011) / Daniel Woodrell

Poetry
1. Strange Horses (Flambard Press, 2012) / Olivia Byard
2. The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry (Penguin, 2011) / Rita Dove (ed.)
3. The Bees (Picador, 2011) / Carol Ann Duffy
4. Grace (Bloodaxe, 2011) / Esther Morgan
5. Cusp (Seren, 2012) / Graham Mort
6. Memorial (Faber & Faber, 2011) / Alice Oswald

Nonfiction
1. The English Ghost: Spectres Through Time (Chatto & Windus, 2011) / Peter Ackroyd
2. The Best American Essays 2011 (Mariner Books, 2011) / Edwidge Danticat & Roger Atwan
3. In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination (Nan A. Talese, 2011) / Margaret Atwood
4. Is That a Fish in Your Ear?: Translation and the Meaning of Everything (Faber & Faber US, 2011) / David Bellos
5. What It Means to Be Human (Virago Press, 2011) / Joanna Bourke
6. Vanished Kingdoms: The History of Half-Forgotten Europe (Allen Lane, 2011) / Norman Davies
7. On Conan Doyle: Or, The Whole Art of Storytelling (Princeton University Press, 2011) / Michael Dirda
8. Ben Jonson: A Life (Oxford University Press, 2011) / Ian Donaldson
9. Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist (The Belnap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011) / Robert Douglas-Fairhurst
10. Eva Braun: Life with Hitler (trans. from the German by Damion Searles) (Alfred A. Knopf, 2011) / Heike B. Görtemaker

11. Crazy River: Exploration and Folly in East Africa (Free Press, 2011) / Richard Grant
12. Virginia Woolf (Thames & Hudson, 2011) / Alexandra Harris
13. Arguably (Atlantic Books, 2011) / Christopher Hitchens
14. The Language Wars: A History of Proper English (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2011) / Henry Hitchings
15. Socrates: A Man of Our Times (Viking Adult, 2011) / Paul Johnson
16. The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael (ed. Sanford Schwartz) (Library of America, 2011) / Pauline Kael
17. Thinking, Fast and Slow (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2011) / Daniel Kahneman
18. Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark (Viking, 2011) / Brian Kellow
19. Why Trilling Matters (Yale University Press, 2011) / Adam Kirsch
20. What is Madness? (Hamish Hamilton, 2011) / Darian Leader

21. Books: A Living History (Thames & Hudson, 2011) / Martyn Lyons
22. Wilfred Thesiger: The Life of the Great Explorer (The Overlook Press, 2011) / Alexander Maitland
23. The Gentry: Intimate Histories (HarperPress, 2011) / Adam Nicolson
24. Empire: What Ruling the World Did to the British (Viking, 2011) / Jeremy Paxman
25. Why Read Moby-Dick? (Viking Adult, 2011) / Nathaniel Philbrick
26. Jerusalem: The Biography (Knopf Doubleday, 2011) / Simon Sebag Montefiore
27. Pulphead: Essays (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2011) / John Jeremiah Sullivan
28. Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (Profile Books, 2011) / John Sutherland
29. Charles Dickens: A Life (Viking/Penguin USA, 2011) / Claire Tomalin
30. Dante in Love (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2011) / A.N. Wilson

31. Why Be Happy When You Could be Normal? (Jonathan Cape, 2011) / Jeanette Winterson
32. Lucking Out: My Life Getting Down and Semi-Dirty in Seventies New York (Doubleday, 2011) / James Wolcott

Bite-sized Morsels

2011-09-30T18:47:00.000-07:00

THE FOLLOWING EMAIL was sent to a senior editor of a publishing house in Kuala Lumpur. The email, with typos corrected, reads: “I can’t write very well, but I thought I’d like to write a novel. I’ve decided to write a novel about pirates, but I don’t know anything about pirates. Could you please email me information about pirates: their lifestyle, their eating habits, where they like to chill out, what they like to do during the weekends, what kinds of books they read, etc. so that I can start working on the novel? With much appreciation.”

A GOOD FRIEND OF MINE says that I have messed up his life for good. The day I met you, he says, I have read more books and spent more money on them than anything else in my life. This, indeed, is music to my ears!

AWARD-WINNING TRAVEL WRITER and novelist Colin Thubron’s new travel memoir, A Mountain in Tibet, transports you to the sacred peak of Mount Kailas in the Himalayas (“the most sacred of the world’s mountains—holy to one-fifth of the earth’s people”) and ponders about faith and death in this wondrous corner of the planet. This is a definite must-read for armchair travellers!

It’s Now the ANZ-Ubud Writers & Readers Festival 2011
JUST EIGHT WEEKS before the gala opening of the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival 2011, ANZ (through its subsidiary PT ANZ Panin Bank), a leading international bank in Indonesia, has stepped in to offer the Festival sponsorship that will see the event named as the ANZ Ubud Writers & Readers Festival 2011. The Australian and New Zealand Banking Group (ANZ Group) is renowned for supporting cultural, community and sporting events such as the Archibald Prize, Royal Flying Doctors and the Australian Open.

Festival Director and Founder Janet de Neefe says, “This is a happy, happy day for this, our eighth Festival. When our 2010 naming rights sponsor defaulted at almost the eleventh hour, we were devastated, but determined that Indonesia’s premier literary event would go ahead untarnished and proud. On the eve of launching what we believe is our most enthralling and inspirational program ever, we take great heart from knowing that ANZ, our newest and most generous sponsor, shares our aim to make a positive difference in people’s lives.”

“We are pleased to support the ANZ-Ubud Writers & Readers Festival, rated as one of the world’s top six literary festivals. The Festival also enables us to show our support for Bali and the development of Indonesian literature and culture. It is also a great proposition for our customers, especially our retail customers and credit-card holders,” stated ANZ CEO Indonesia Joseph Abraham.

All are invited to the ANZ-Ubud Writers & Readers Festival 2011 to celebrate the diversity of thought and breadth of vision represented by more than one hundred writers across all genres, across the globe, in recognition of its theme, cultivate the land within. Festival dates are 6-9 October 2011. For more info www.ubudwritersfestival.com

Penning the Orient

2011-09-29T17:45:00.000-07:00

Hong Kong author DAVID T.K. WONG’s pride in his Far Eastern culture shows in his dazzling, wonderful novels set in the Orient and beyond, writes KASHINI KRISHNAMURTHY

“LOVE is only as much as you are willing to sacrifice for it, the same goes with writing,” explains David T.K. Wong. This author of two novels and several short-story compilations was born in Hong Kong but spent his formative years in China, Singapore and Australia, and studied political science and journalism at the University of Stanford in America. All that travelling must have influenced Wong’s perception of life in both Eastern and Western cultures as his stories reflect a worldly balance where protagonists live in harmony with both.

As a young boy, Wong chose to read comics like Beano, Hot Spur as well as Chinese comics. These publications were famous for school stories lived out by drawn characters and hit newsstands once a week. This may have very well been the start of Wong’s exposure to storytelling. As he got older, he started to browse through the masses of books around the house, and despite not quite understanding the thick textbooks, a curiosity to decode these books was soon born. Wong also admired the wise-cracking tough guys and precocious women in Raymond Chandler’s detective novels. “We all go through phases. We all move on. Right now, I’m reading The Tao of Physics. There is so much in this world that I know nothing about and I want to know.” The book challenges conventional theories by demonstrating striking parallels between Oriental and Greek mystical traditions and the discoveries of 20th-century physics and Wong finds himself immersed in this book solely out of pure curiosity.

He always felt a burning desire to write, but understood that he needed to make some money for himself before he could do so. This explains why it took him 40 years of reporting, teaching and managing companies before he had the time to sit down and write. “But now I feel an internal satisfaction when I write and I write primarily for myself.”

When asked of the fundamentals of a good fiction novel, Wong explains, “When you want to write, you have to think whether you have anything to say. If you don’t, then don’t write. You must also find a way to write in an interesting way that will give the reader some sort of amusement or pleasure.

“You go through all these intellectual questions of what you want to do, and if at the end of the day, there is something that you want to share, then you start this long process of putting words down on paper.” He also explains that there is no perfect way to pen a novel. It is something that comes from within. “Read classics like Orwell and Kipling and observe their style of writing. I find that if you read too many contemporary novels, your mind tends to absorb their style of narrative, so always be aware when you write that what is coming out is personal.”

When quizzed about the future of publishing with the introduction of e-books and e-readers, he explained, “I have never seen, held or read an e-book so I don’t have an opinion on one. But what I do know is that if I wished to lie in a field with a girlfriend and read a poem to her, a book could document that memory. If I were to pick a daffodil and press it between the pages, that same daffodil would still be there 20 years later.” Wong’s home is also very much like his collection of books. Each painting, ornament or artefact tells a story of a memory, one he holds dear and wishes to revisit.

Wong’s latest book, The Embrace of Harlots, vividly explores the Orient, London and even the United States. He paints an amazing picture with carefully chosen words that most contemporary writers today lack. He has also spent a lot of time researching the era which his protagonists live in, thus giving accurate insight to one’s life in 20th-century Hong Kong.

“It started some time back that you’re not even conscious of. I was young and all I wanted to do was write, and I thought I would write and everyone would cloak me in glory but that never happened. Now that I finally have the time and silence to reflect, I managed to write The Embrace of Harlots in six years.

“The process may be long but I thoroughly enjoyed finding words that matched exactly how I felt about a character or situation. I was also very conscious to not adopt any other author’s writing style. I took particular care in ensuring that what I have written came from deep within me.”

Wong, who currently lives in Kuala Lumpur, is looking to start research on a book about his ancestors. He hasn’t decided if he will write this book as he explains that all truths must be told, unfavourable ones as well, and that could cause some discomfort to others. He continues to read and learn, absorbing as much knowledge as he can and always allowing his curiosity to get the better of him.

Reproduced from the July-September 2011 issue of Quill magazine

Connecting Through Words

2011-09-22T00:18:00.000-07:00

WENA POON discovers the international reach of Malaysian and Singaporean women novelists at the 2011 Hong Kong International Literary Festival

THE STRUGGLES of Malaysian and Singaporean authors to “break into” the global literary market has always been a favourite topic of discussion in this part of the world. We have long admired Tash Aw and Tan Twan Eng for their international success. But what about our women writers?

As a woman writer, I am heartened to discover the international accomplishments of two Singaporean women novelists, Meira Chand and Suchen Christine Lim, whom I caught up with at the Hong Kong International Literary Festival on March 8-18, 2011.

The three of us consider ourselves Singaporean, although we may not look or sound like we’re from the same country. Meira Chand was born in London in 1942 of Indian and Swiss parents, has lived in Japan and now lives in Singapore. Suchen Christine Lim was born in 1948 in Penang to a Hakka-Cantonese family, and spent most of her adult life in Singapore. I was born in Singapore in 1974 to a family of Teochew Chinese, and left after junior college for the US. We all speak with different accents, but with Singapore being such a small country, we knew each other and instantly connected at the festival.

While chatting with Chand and Lim, I realised that the three of us have actually broken new ground in the international fiction market, shattering the stereotype that still persists in Singapore that Singaporean literature has not really taken off.

Lim’s The Lies That Build a Marriage (2007), published by Monsoon Books in Singapore, is an extraordinary literary document, probably the first of its kind in Asia. The fictional stories were commissioned by Christian pastors who wished to heal families torn apart by the discovery of a homosexual child. Lim was invited to tour around Malaysia and Singapore to read these stories from the pulpit in the place of sermons, and the audience response was deeply moving.

I was surprised and proud to discover that Lim’s novels are taught in universities in the UK and US, as well as in Malaysia, the Philippines and Hong Kong. Our intrepid writer has also been honoured from Burma to the US, from Korea to Australia, as a writing fellow in various residencies. Very few people actually know that Lim is so well-represented globally.

Chand’s latest novel, A Different Sky (2010), published by an imprint of Random House in London, was voted Cardholder’s Book Circle Choice by UK bookstore chain Waterstone’s. It is set in pre-Independence Singapore and stars a multi-ethnic cast of Indians, Chinese and Eurasians struggling to find their place in a world of political conflict and racial prejudice.

This year, Chand’s short story, “The Pilgrimage,” was among 20 stories longlisted in a UK competition called The Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Award, the world’s biggest and most prestigious short-story prize. She was nominated alongside names like Hilary Mantel, whose Wolf Hall won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 2009.

Very few people in Singapore even knew about this and it wasn’t reported in the Singapore media. Ironically, in the US and UK, Chand was making waves, on and off Facebook!

The year 2010 has been an extraordinary year for me. I wrote a novel about Spanish bullfighting, starring an American college girl who wants to become a matador. It came out of a project suggested by a Singaporean Chinese theatre director. Published by Salt Publishing in London, Alex y Robert was adapted by the BBC into a ten-episode miniseries on Radio 4’s Book at Bedtime. It is currently being promoted by bookstore chain WHSmith for all its bookstores across the UK.

In the same year, I beat 300 mostly British and American writers to win the UK’s Willesden Herald Short Story Prize, a small but much coveted international award which has been famously described by past judge Zadie Smith as a prize which is “only about good writing”.

Again, all this wasn’t reported in the Singapore media. Imagine my embarrassment whenever I go back to Singapore and hear people lament, “Maybe one day our Singaporean writers would achieve international recognition.”

So we have not yet won the Man Booker Prize. Yet it’s important that the Singapore and Malaysian literary community know about what the three of us have done so far, so that we continue to believe in our local writing scene. No more should we bemoan that “our English isn’t good enough” or “our books don’t sell” or “our writers are not good”. We’re already there. We have broken into the international scene, and we will continue to sally forth. I want you all to come along for the ride!

Singapore and Malaysia, being small countries, can be viewed as a single literary writing force. We already publish each other’s authors. There is strength in numbers.

Detractors often question why we should care about breaking into the international market.

We should never slavishly seek foreign approval of our books. Yet the international reach of the Singapore-Malaysian voice is critical for outsiders to understand who we really are, culturally, artistically, and intellectually.

Every time I am discouraged, I think of Jimmy Choo. If a Chinese Hakka shoemaker from Penang can create something that drives London and New York fashionistas insane, we can do it. Yes, we can!

And what do we write about? Anything we desire. It is 2011. We no longer have to write about geishas and bound feet and family dynasties and political oppression. The doors are wide open now and Asian literature will go wherever Asian writers and publishers want to take it.

“You know you are living in a global and interconnected world,” begins a Spanish book reviewer in his Spanish-language blog, “when a Singaporean writer living in New York is writing about Spanish bullfighting.”

For decades we had to read Western novels in our classrooms. It’s about time they read something we wrote, to see the world from our point of view. After all, we are already writing in English. “Only connect,” said E.M. Forster in Howards End. Who do you think he was talking to? Yes, you!

Everything we write can be understood by million of readers in the US, UK, Ireland, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, as well as Malaysia and Singapore. So, write on. What are you waiting for? People are waiting to hear our stories.

WENA POON is a Singapore-born novelist and short-story writer who lives in the United States. She holds degrees in English Literature and Law from Harvard and is a practising attorney. She is the author of Lions in Winter, The Proper Care of Foxes and Alex y Robert.

Reproduced from MPH’s 105th Anniversary issue of Quill magazine

Making the brave leap to fiction

2011-09-15T05:17:00.000-07:00

ERIC FORBES talks to former lawyer M.J. HYLAND who has made a courageous and successful leap to fiction with three critically acclaimed novels, one of which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2006

Photographs © Rory Carnegie

M.J. HYLAND was born in London to Irish parents in 1968 and spent her early childhood in Dublin. She studied English and Law at the University of Melbourne, and practised as a commercial lawyer for seven years before taking the leap to fiction. She considers herself a mediocre lawyer at best and took a half-hearted approach to the profession. “I knew I wanted to write stories and my consciousness was torn, split, divided. When I was in the office, writing letters of advice, or letters of demand, or preparing witness statements for court hearings, I wanted only to rush home to finish reading Kafka or Flannery O’Connor.” However, she reiterates that she loved studying the law and believes that if she had stayed in the profession, she would have taken the road to academia. “I taught law briefly—criminal law—and, of the seven years I spent in the law, this was the most enjoyable time. I liked teaching law very much. But I quit not long after my first novel, How the Light Gets In, was published.” Her first novel, How the Light Gets In, was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and her second, Carry Me Down, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2006 and won both the Encore and Hawthornden Prizes.

Hyland knew exactly what she wanted to do with her life when she had her first short story published during her final year in high school. “One of my teachers typed it up and sent it off to a magazine—and I knew then that I would be a writer,” she says. But she did not have any sane or rational grounds for knowing this. “I had very little discipline and my character wasn’t compatible with the job. A writer, especially a novelist, needs extraordinary patience, a supreme doggedness, and, of course, the writer must stick to a single idea for a long time, and hold his nerve. He must sit in one place and assiduously move words around on the page, and he must do this hermetically. When I was in my late teens, and through all of my twenties, I was far too distracted, too drunk, too stupid, too jumpy, too impatient, and worse, I had no stamina for the craft.”

Her latest novel, This Is How, is an unsettling psychological exploration of an outsider at odds with the world and an intense meditation on the nature of guilt and redemption. It has a murderer as the protagonist-narrator of the story. “The idea for This Is How comes from Tony Parker’s wonderful book of interviews, Life After Life: Twelve Interviews with Twelve Murderers.” She read the interview—upon which the novel is loosely based—in 2004, and she made a note in her notebook: Must write next novel about a gratuitous criminal act, and must set the story in a seaside boarding house (though there’s no seaside boarding house in the original story). And then, in late 2005, she began writing in earnest. “I wanted to write something in the territory of Albert Camus’s The Outsider and Peter Handke’s The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, and, of course, André Gide’s The Vatican Cellars.”

It took Hyland three years of slogging it out to get the mild-mannered psychopath Patrick Oxtoby’s voice in tune, and for a long time the book didn’t work at all. “It had no traction, no pulse, the images were too dilute and fancy; there were too many characters, too many redundancies and it was full of falsehood (both in terms of character motivation and movement). For several years, Patrick wasn’t credible.”

One of her abiding preoccupations at the time of writing the story was to argue with (and perhaps against) Jean-Paul Sartre’s notion of radical freedom, and to explore Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s response to Sartre. “Of course, none of this thinking is apparent on the surface of the story. It shouldn’t be.”

Hyland was also keen to see how much emotional effect she could create with her seemingly unaffected economical prose. “The impulse here was to create a fictional world stripped of artifice; a plain authenticity of tragedy; an apparently artless and ‘true’ first-person account, and I wanted to make the author invisible.” She also wanted to explore moral confusion and to resist diagnosis or pathology. “I wanted to skate on the very thin ice of an unsympathetic narrator and yet find a way to make it difficult for the reader to judge Patrick, to round him off, to make a sensible neatness of his world. I wanted a moral mess.” Like life, she says incisively. “I wanted to make both condemnation and pity difficult. I also wanted to evoke an idea—in vivid and dramatic terms—of platonic love between men, and the nature of our neglect of freedom, and loneliness and ... well, the list of themes is too long to go into.”

In This Is How, she also explores the relationships between prisoners in a claustrophobic environment, and the fact that many convicts are much happier within the cloisters of the prison walls than without. What attracted her to the idea of setting the story in this enclosed world? “If it can’t happen in a cave, then I’m not interested. I’ll always put my characters in close proximity, and the prison cell is a fantastically claustrophobic and appealing set for drama.”

The death penalty has been a subject of much debate and controversy over the years. I ask Hyland what her thoughts are on this: “I think—if you’ve read the novel—you’ll know that I’m not only against the very idea of the death penalty, but I want to show, in dramatic terms, how easy it might be for somebody to be falsely accused, and how it pays to see the shades of grey; to stretch to compassion. Have you seen Errol Morris’s The Thin Blue Line? It’s a wonderful documentary, a case study, a case in point. And I’m very pleased that organisations like Reprieve do what they do. If I had more guts, if I was a little less selfish, I’d take a year or so out of writing and go to the US and work for Reprieve. Small, guilty donations and my feeble attempts in fiction to make my point against the absurd absolutism and futility of the death penalty don’t seem enough.”

Hyland, who lives in Manchester, teaches a class in creative writing at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester. In what way does teaching influence her work as a writer, I was curious to know. “I’m not sure that teaching influences my writing in any direct way, but I’m sure it doesn’t do it any harm. While this isn’t true for many writers, I like the way talented students remind me why I bother; the way their unabashed passion, their excitement, reminds me this is a pretty blessed way to spend a life. To read, to love the art of conjuring vivid fictional worlds, and to write stories, and get paid to do it.”

There is much depth and richness in Hyland’s writing despite her unaffected prose style, and in This Is How, she has succeeded in creating a character, though unlikeable in many ways, you still find yourself rooting for. She is one of those writers who keep getting better with every new work they put out. And we look forward to her next one with bated breath!

Reproduced from MPH’s 105th Anniversary issue of Quill magazine

Portrait of a Social Commentator

2011-09-08T22:13:00.000-07:00

Photographer DR OOI CHENG GHEE talks to MARY SCHNEIDER about his early work and how it culminated in Portraits of Penang: Little India, a volume of black-and-white photographs documenting a fast-fading way of life

Photography by OOI CHENG GHEE

SOMETIMES we discover our passions in life while engaged in the most mundane of activities. Renowned Penang photographer Dr Ooi Cheng Ghee’s interest in photography was piqued while sitting at a bus stop in the late 1960s.

“As a medical student at the University of Malaya in Singapore (now known as the National University of Singapore), I had to catch two buses to get to the main campus. While waiting for my connection, I would often look at the camera shop across the road from the bus stop. One day, out of curiosity, I wandered over to take a look in the window. I was immediately drawn to a Praktica camera and I knew I had to learn more about it.

“After graduating in 1969, I sold everything I had, except my clothes and a few books. I had about 300 Singapore dollars, which was a lot of money then. I went to Orchard Road and asked for the best camera my money could buy. I ended up getting a Nikkormat, which is still in working order today.”

Early influences
Upon returning home, Ooi joined the Photographic Society of Penang and honed his skills by taking photographs of family and friends, sunrises and sunsets, and the local flora and fauna.

“Family members always oblige you,” he says with a smile. “But after 10 years with the society, I was tired of taking salon-type pictures and was ready to do something on my own. So in 1978, I submitted a portfolio of 12 pictures to the Royal Photographic Society in London and was immediately accepted as an associate.”

At that time, Ooi was influenced by a number of photographers. “When I first saw American Paul Strand’s work and how he used his photographs to effect social awareness, I began to question what I’d been doing. Then there was Lewis Hine, the photographer and sociologist who taught Strand. Hine was the first photographer to advocate against child labour and used his photographic essays to change public opinion and influence a change in the US government. They both had a purity of approach, emotion and thought—there wasn’t money in photography back then so their motivation wasn’t commercial.”

Little India
Ooi’s desire to raise social awareness through his photography coincided with an ambiguous period in Penang’s development. “In 1979, we were industrialising; factories were popping up and people were moving away from the city centre into new townships,” he recollects. “Penang had lost its free port status and people were migrating to the suburbs. When I first walked down the streets of Little India after an absence of 20 years, I felt as if I were in another country. Many roads were deserted. Houses were abandoned. It was quite different from the Little India I knew as a kid.

“As I walked the streets, the whole spectrum of life unfolded before me. I saw the rituals of the people who had stayed behind, their code of ethics, how they took care of the place, their trades, and so on. I knew I had to record it before it disappeared forever. After that, whenever I had an hour or so to spare, I’d drop by the enclave, walk around, observe and take photographs. “I used a Leica, a small unobtrusive camera that doesn’t make a lot of noise. I think it’s one of the best cameras ever made. I used only one lens. Sometimes, I would get very close to a subject, maybe two to three feet away, take my camera out and just shoot. It was all very casual.”

Long silence
When Ooi finished shooting Little India that year he had taken more than 4,000 photographs and enthusiastically set about generating interest in his social essay.

“No one was interested in an unpleasant subject,” he recalls. “It was also too early for my photographs to be regarded as a record of some importance. Still, the endeavour taught me much about photography and my neighbourhood.”

Undeterred, Ooi began work on his next photo essay, which focused on Koay Jetty, one of the eight original clan jetties built along the George Town waterfront.

Shortly after, his house was broken into and three of his cameras—including his beloved Leica—were stolen. Demoralised by his loss and the lack of interest in his essays, he decided to take a respite from photography. For the next 20 years he devoted himself to his work as a doctor and his family—he and his wife Hor Leng have two daughters and a son.

Although he spent more time with his family, he never really gave up photography. He continued taking some pictures and kept track of what was happening. “Between 1980 and 2000, there wasn’t much change; just the same old thing packaged in a different way. Then I attended a photography exhibition in Penang in 2004. I immediately saw the progress and change that photographers had been making. Not long after, I bought my first digital SLR camera and began experimenting with it.”

The spark had been reignited.

Little India revisited
Ooi’s renewed interest in photography also gave him the confidence to dust off his old photographs when people began expressing interest in his earlier work. However, it took him five years to select and prepare the 160 prints that appear in Portraits of Penang.

“They had not aged too well and many of them were blemished,” he explains. “It would have been impossible to print my photographs using old photographic methods.”

Ooi is hard-pressed to pick his favourite photographs. “Possibly the series on betel nut workers,” he says, after a brief pause. “Penang is named after the betel nut, yet there are few records of the industry. Most people express a preference for a specific picture because of how they’re related to it rather than what it tells.”

Observing and listening
Although Ooi’s youngest daughter recently graduated from university and many of his responsibilities are now behind him, he still practices medicine at his clinic. “I continue to work because I enjoy my practice and like to be with people,” he says. “I also think my work has helped me become a better photographer. One of the first things I learned as a doctor is the importance of observing, listening and paying attention to details.

“Anyone with an interest in photography must realise the importance of learning to see things. The Malaysian education system is such that people read to understand words, but nobody teaches us how to see. Seeing is a skill in itself. Learning photography by example is a tedious old method. Young photographers must learn to free their minds, be brave enough to make mistakes and change their mindsets. It’s also important to take photographs because you’re interested in the subject matter, not because other people like it.”

When not at his clinic, Ooi likes to read. His favourite author is John Berger, who is known for both his fiction and non-fiction. “His writing can make your life difficult,” he says with a chuckle. “He’s very imaginative, and cleverly combines fantasy and reality. I’m currently reading Orhan Pamuk’s My Name Is Red, a fascinating novel about conflicting painting styles in 16th-century Turkey. I make time to read. I’m quite a disciplined person. Two days a week I run five miles, three days I play tennis, and one day I play table tennis. My life is quite routine.”

Looking ahead
His dream project is to take a month off every year for the next 10 years photographing billboards throughout Malaysia because they depict the contemporary lifestyle accurately. “To me there’s nothing that documents the way society lives better than billboards.”

Reproduced from MPH’s 105th Anniversary issue of Quill magazine

September 2011 Highlights

2011-09-01T15:32:00.000-07:00

Novels
1. Birds of Paradise (W.W. Norton, 2011) / Diana Abu-Jaber
2. Last Man in Tower (Alfred A. Knopf, 2011) / Aravind Adiga
3. The Picture Book (Portobello Books, 2011) / Jo Baker
4. Lost Memory of Skin (Ecco, 2011) / Russell Banks
5. On Canaan’s Side (Penguin USA, 2011) / Sebastian Barry
6. Everything Happens Today (Europa, 2011) / Jesse Browner
7. Feast Day of Fools (Simon & Schuster, 2011) / James Lee Burke
8. Ragnorok: The End of the Gods (Canongate, 2011) / A.S. Byatt
9. The Affair (Bantam Press, 2011) / Lee Child
10. The Grief of Others (Riverhead, 2011) / Leah Hager Cohen

11. The Kingdom of Childhood (Mira, 2011) / Rebecca Coleman
12. Death of Kings (HarperCollins, 2011) / Bernard Cornwell
13. I’ll See You in My Dreams (McClelland & Stewart, 2011) / William Deverell
14. The Cold Eye of Heaven (Atlantic Books, 2011) / Christine Dwyer Hickey
15. The Little Shadows (Doubleday Canada, 2011) / Marina Endicott
16. Nightwoods (Random House/Sceptre, 2011) / Charles Frazier
17. River of Smoke (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2011) / Amitav Ghosh
18. The Lady of the Rivers (Simon & Schuster, 2011) / Philippa Gregory
19. King of the Badgers (Faber & Faber, 2011) / Philip Hensher
20. The Map and the Territory (trans. from the French, La Carte et le Territoire, by Gavin Bowd) (William Heinemann, 2011) / Michel Houellebecq

21. Requiem (HarperCollins Canada, 2011) / Frances Itani
22. Child Wonder (trans. from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett and Don Shaw) (Graywolf Press, 2011) / Roy Jacobsen
23. Hand Me Down World (Bloomsbury USA, 2011) / Lloyd Jones
24. Chango’s Beads and Two-Tone Shoes (Viking Adult, 2011) / William Kennedy
25. A Man of Parts (Penguin USA, 2011) / David Lodge
26. The Retribution (Little, Brown, 2011) / Val McDermid
27. Light From a Distant Star (Crown, 2011) / Mary McGarry Morris
28. A Cruel Bird Came to the Nest and Looked In (Bloomsbury, 2011) / Magnus Mills
29. 1Q84 (trans. from the Japanese by Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel) (Harvill Secker, 2011) / Haruki Murakami
30. Headhunters (trans. from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett) (Harvill Secker, 2011) / Jo Nesbø

31. The Golden Hour (Quercus, 2011) / William Nicholson
32. The Cat’s Table (Jonathan Cape, 2011) / Michael Ondaatje
33. Tell It to the Trees (Knopf Canada, 2011) / Anita Rau Badami
34. The Secret of Pain (Corvus, 2011) / Phil Rickman
35. Glass (Coffee House Press, 2011) / Sam Savage
36. Cross Currents (Penguin USA, 2011) / John Shors
37. There But For The (Knopf Doubleday, 2011) / Ali Smith
38. The Taste of Salt (Algonquin Books, 2011) / Martha Southgate
39. Noon (Faber & Faber, 2011) / Aatish Taseer
40. The Barbarian Nurseries (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2011) / Héctor Tobar

41. I Married You for Happiness (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2011) / Lily Tuck
42. The Winters in Bloom (Atria Books, 2011) / Lisa Tucker
43. The Quality of Mercy (Hutchinson, 2011) / Barry Unsworth
44. A Good Man (McClelland & Stewart, 2011) / Guy Vanderhaeghe
45. American Boy (Milkweed Editions, 2011) / Larry Watson

Novellas
1. Train Dreams (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2011) / Denis Johnson

First Novels
1. The Art of Fielding (Little, Brown, 2011) / Chad Harbach
2. You Deserve Nothing (John Murray, 2011) / Alexander Maksik
3. The Song of Achilles (Bloomsbury, 2011) / Madeline Miller
4. The Night Circus (Doubleday/Harvill Secker, 2011) / Erin Morgenstern

Stories
1. The Necessity of Certain Behaviors (University of Pittsburg Press, 2011) / Shannon Cain
2. Rome Tales (trans. from the Italian by Hugh Shankland) (Oxford University Press USA, 2011) / Helen Constantine (ed.)
3. Mennonites Don’t Dance (Thistledown Press, 2011) / Darcie Friessen Hossack
4. The Granta Book of the African Short Story (Granta Books, 2011) / Helon Habila (ed.)
5. The Journey Prize: The Best of Canada’s New Writers (McClelland & Stewart, 2011) / Alexander MacLeod, Alison Pick and Sarah Selecky (selected by)
6. New Selected Stories (Chatto & Windus, 2011) / Alice Munro
7. The Book of Life (Reagan Arthur/Back Bay Books, 2011) / Stuart Nadler
8. Blueprints for Building Better Girls (Simon & Schuster, 2011) / Elissa Schappell
9. This Will Be Difficult to Explain and Other Stories (Hamish Hamilton Canada/Penguin Canada, 2011) / Johanna Skibsrud

Poetry
1. Loudness (Seren, 2011) / Judy Brown
2. Profit and Loss (Jonathan Cape, 2011) / Leontia Flynn
3. Midnight Lantern: New and Selected Poems (Graywolf Press, 2011) / Tess Gallagher
4. The Casual Perfect (Faber & Faber, 2011) / Lavinia Greenlaw
5. The Back Chamber (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011) / Donald Hall
6. Selected Poems (ed. Martin Amis) / Philip Larkin
7. Handwriting (Jonathan Cape, 2011) / Michael Ondaatje
8. Heavenly Questions (Bloodaxe Books, 2011) / Gjertrud Schnackenberg
9. Confer (Bloodaxe Books, 2011) / Ahren Warner
10. Kindertotenwald (Knopf, 2011) / Franz Wright

Nonfiction
1. Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2011) / André Aciman
2. The History of England: Volume I: Foundation (Macmillan, 2011) / Peter Ackroyd
3. The Inner Man: The Life o J.G. Ballard (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2011) / John Baxter
4. Is That a Fish in Your Ear?: Translation and the Meaning of Everything (Particular Books UK, 2011) / David Bellos
5. Fiction Ruined My Family: A Memoir (Riverhead/Penguin USA, 2011) / Jeanne Darst
6. Just One Catch: The Passionate Life of Joseph Heller (Biteback, 2011) / Tracy Daugherty
7. The Table Comes First: Family, France, and the Meaning of Food (Quercus, 2011) / Adam Gopnik
8. Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane (W.W. Norton, 2011) / Andrew Graham-Dixon
9. Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness (Simon & Schuster, 2011) / Alexandra Fuller
10. Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution (Little, Brown, 2011) / Mary Gabriel

11. The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (W.W. Norton/Bodley Head, 2011) / Stephen Greenblatt
12. Virginia Woolf (Thames & Hudson, 2011) / Alexandra Harris
13. All Hell Let Loose: The World at War 1939-1945 (HarperPress, 2011) / Max Hastings
14. Hemingway’s Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934-1961 (Alfred A. Knopf, 2011) / Paul Hendrickson
15. Arguably: Essays (Twelve, 2011) / Christopher Hitchens
16. Whatever It Is, I Don’t Like It (Bloomsbury, 2011) / Howard Jacobson
17. A Short History of England (Profile Books, 2011) / Simon Jenkins
18. The End: The Defiance and Destruction of Hitler’s Germany, 1944-1945 (The Penguin Press, 2011) / Ian Kershaw
19. The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China (Picador, 2011) / Julia Lovell
20. Disordered World: Setting a New Course for the Twenty-first Century (Bloomsbury, 2011) / Amin Maalouf

21. The Last Pre-Raphaelite: Edward Burne-Jones and the Victorian Imagination (Faber & Faber, 2011) / Fiona MacCarthy
22. Winter King: The Dawn of Tudor England (Allen Lane, 2011) / Thomas Penn
23. Driving Home: An American Journey (Pantheon, 2011)/ Jonathan Raban
24. Leningrad: Tragedy of a City Under Siege 1941-44 (Bloomsbury, 2011) / Anna Reid
25. Connemara: A Little Gaelic Kingdom (Penguin Ireland, 2011) / Tim Robinson
26. The Unexamined Orwell (University of Texas Press, 2011) / John Rodden
27. The Elizabethans (Hutchinson, 2011) / A.N. Wilson

A Tale of Struggle and Survival

2011-08-24T15:19:00.000-07:00

ERIC FORBES talks to Canadian filmmaker, screenwriter and début novelist SHANDI MITCHELL about how growing up in the wide open spaces of the Canadian prairies inspired her to be a novelist

AWARD-WINNING Canadian filmmaker and screenwriter Shandi Mitchell’s short films have been screened at many international film festivals. She spent her childhood on a military base in the Canadian Prairies and now makes her home in Nova Scotia on the east coast of Canada, with her husband and their dog. Her first novel, Under This Unbroken Sky, delves into the lives of two immigrant Ukrainian families consumed by the new land they yearn to possess during the Depression in the 1930s.

Congratulations on winning the 2010 Commonwealth Writers’ First Novel Prize (Canada and Caribbean) for your first novel, Under This Unbroken Sky. What was it like winning such a prestigious international literary prize?
Pretty darn fine. It’s wonderful having your work acknowledged, but the competition of art is always uncomfortable. You hope your book will be welcomed into the world, but you never imagine such an embrace. The great reward was meeting writers and readers from around the world and listening to their stories and global views.

Could you tell me a bit about your family history? Where were you born? Have you always lived in this part of Canada? What was it like growing up in this part of the world?
I was born in Chatham, New Brunswick, moved to Alberta when I was three, and then moved east to Nova Scotia when I was seventeen. The western prairies were the geography that imprinted on me. When I return there now, that immense sky can bring tears to my eyes.

Growing up on a military base made me an anxious kid who projected a tough exterior. I felt apart from the civilian world and also separate from the military culture. This likely shaped me to be an observer. I was curious about life beyond the lines of boundary. I went through a chameleon phase moving in and out of the lives of others, trying on different lives. But I was only ever a visitor.

I spent a great deal of time at my aunt and uncle’s farm. There I discovered a love for the natural world and the freedom to explore. It taught me self-reliance, hard work and a respect for those who seldom share their stories.

Now, I live near the sea. It possesses a different raw power, but I am still drawn to wide open spaces.

When did you know you were going to be a writer? Was it something you had always set your heart on?
As a child I always wrote—horribly, but I did write reams of poems and short stories, which to my chagrin are still in my mother’s possession. I was also an obsessive reader, but the idea of being a writer didn’t enter my consciousness. Writing was not a profession that had any reality, merit or value in the world that I lived in. The epitome of success was to attend university, secure a high-paying job, marry and start a family.

I chose to study English and Theatre in university, which did not result in a high-paying job. I stumbled into film, but, alas, found myself drawn to independent filmmaking (again, not lucrative). I was writing screenplays and making shorts, and about six years ago I began writing poetry and short stories again. It was my secret pleasure that didn’t require budget or financing approval. It was my place to play.

One of the character sketches evolved into what I called a “long story.” I had written a hundred and fifty pages, before I dared to admit that it was a novel. Only after it was published, did I call myself a writer. Even so, I have much more to write before I can comfortably use the word.

Recently, I had a call from my mother informing me that a cousin could get me a good job at a call centre, so the writing career is still in question!

What do you enjoy and dread most about your life as a writer?
What I enjoy most is the same thing that I dread: living inside my head.

What’s a typical day in your writing life like?
Coffee, feed and walk the dog, make contact with family, deal with domestic tasks that I can no longer ignore (laundry, dishes, cleaning the dog pen), try not to pace while waiting for my husband to leave for work, another half hour of avoidance, read the news, check emails (if I don’t expect anything that will require my attention), and finally off to the computer. If it’s a good day I hope to be inside a story for three or four hours. Then there may be a couple of hours of research and I’ll jot down ideas as to where I will be going next. I do try to disengage for the evening, but often find that story questions continue to churn and follow me into my sleep.

Was it difficult getting your first book published? Did you experience the usual difficulty in finding an agent or a publisher for it?
I don’t have a heroic story of rejection and triumph. I sent the first fifteen pages of the manuscript to two respected agents. One passed because they didn’t believe it would have a market in the US or UK. The second asked to see the entire manuscript, said yes, and then promptly sold it simultaneously to Canada, US and UK.

I read that your novel was inspired by a tragic event in your family’s history. Would you like to tell me a bit about this?
When I was eighteen, I was told that my grandfather hadn’t died of the flu in the 1930s. My family history unravelled and I set out to piece together the facts. What began as a personal search evolved as I discovered that part of my country’s history had also been erased or forgotten. I wondered about histories disappearing in a mere seventy years and a country’s reluctance to look back. I wanted to know about the blood and bones that my privileged life had been built upon. And, I suppose, I wanted to give voice to a generation that didn’t have the freedom to speak.

Did you know where you were going with the novel as you were writing it?
Yes and no. I had an end point that I knew I wanted to reach and I had a start point. Before I begin, I usually have a final image or scene in mind. I tend to map a rough outline, in which I set down a few guideposts and then I set the characters loose. How the characters get to those posts, I try to leave it up to them. And sometimes, the characters surprised me. They took on a will of their own and it felt as though I were writing behind them, just trying to catch the words. In several scenes, I found myself pulling back, seeing too late where a character was heading and not wanting to go there, but I had to get out of their way and allow them to do what they must.

What are some of the themes you dealt with in it? Were you conscious of these when you first set out to write the story?
I was interested in breaking points and the razor’s edge of life and death. As I fell into the characters’ lives I started to hear questions of freedom, pride, aloneness, madness and secrets.

Was there much research to do?
Set in the 1930s and spanning two countries, there was a great deal of research I had to do. My initial research though is broad and general. I try to catch a sense of the time, place, values, and social and economic conditions. I collect historical facts and often work from photographs, first-person accounts, documentaries and archival documents. But fairly quickly I want to sketch the setting and drop my characters into it. When the characters do something that demand detailed research that’s when I go deeper.

As you were writing the novel, how did you know when the manuscript is completed? Do deadlines determine this or do you feel a sense of confidence that there is no way you can improve on the story any further?
I’m not sure if it ever feels complete. There comes a point in the story where I can think of nothing more I can do. The characters have given me all of themselves. Then the editors come in and we find new places to poke, but rarely about story details. I don’t show my work until I believe the story is whole. Eventually, there are the eye-bleeding line edits and then I swear that I will never look at the manuscript again. It is done, done, DONE! But when the publishers come for it, they have to pry it from my hands. And I will probably make several more calls, to change “the” to “a”, etc.

What kinds of books did you read when you were growing up?
I tend to read books that have been deemed great either by time, by critics, or by readers. As a young child, I wanted dark fairy tales and fables. I wanted the stories to feel dangerous and pursue me off the page. As a pre-teen and teenager, I was drawn to books I was forbidden to read because of the subject matter: John Steinbeck, Günter Grass, Vladimir Nabokov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, J.D. Salinger, Ernest Hemingway, Yukio Mishima ... books that seemed to hold some secret about humanity that was being kept from me.

At some point, I realised I was reading only male authors. I wondered where the female voices were? And then I discovered Flannery O’Connor, Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, Margaret Laurence, Joyce Carol Oates, Dorothy Parker, Doris Lessing, and many others.

In university, I realised that I was studying only British and American voices and began to look around the world. These past five years, I have found myself searching contemporary writers and looking back to Canada to hear the new voices.

However, I honestly can’t attest to a singular book that changed my life. They have each contributed to my perception of myself and the world.

Who are some of your favourite Canadian authors?
Michael Ondaatje, Steven Galloway, Alice Munro, Miriam Toews, Alistair MacLeod, Sue Goyette, Joseph Boyden, among others.

And do you reread books you enjoyed the first time round?
I sometimes go back and look for passages. I suspect that in another decade I will pick up books that have not left me and look at them again with older eyes. But for now, there is always something new calling to be discovered.

Do you read nonfiction?
No, though I do enjoy documentaries.

What are you reading at the moment?
I am writing now and I don’t read on days when I am writing. I don’t want to be influenced, nor do I want to be discouraged by my inadequacies. The last books I read were Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin, Henning Mankell’s Italian Shoes, and Nicole Krauss’s The History of Love.

In your opinion, is creativity or imagination something that can be taught, or is it inborn?
I think creativity and imagination can be freed, but I believe we are born with our passions.

Do you have a favourite short story or short-story collection?
The latest collections that have wowed me are Salinger’s Nine Stories and Daniyal Mueenuddin’s In Other Rooms, Other Wonders.

It has been said that literary novels lack plots. Do you think literary novelists should put more emphasis on plot and less on stylistics? Why do you think there’s a perceived divide between popular and literary fiction?
I don’t know what to contribute to this debate. Plot generates from the characters for me. I have no qualms with a quiet, internal plot. But I’m also up for a story that pulls me forward with tension and apprehension. I’m not engaged by literary works in which the stylistic acrobatics dominate at the cost of human insight. I can appreciate and admire the construct and envy the technique, but I prefer to feel the story as a whole, rather than be forced to intellectually spar with the writer.

I suppose the divide between popular and literary fiction is the depth of the story’s theme. But I don’t know that popular is to the exclusion of literary. I want fine writing. I personally want to feel something, whether that is from within the story or my response to the story or its form. I don’t want to be lied to. I want to be shown something or taken somewhere that I have never considered. Novelist Rana Dasgupta’s wish for his young daughter as she discovers fairy tales and fables is that she be awestruck. That’s what I want. I want to be awestruck.

One Leg Too Few: Modern British Satire

2011-08-16T23:33:00.000-07:00

TOM SYKES pays tribute to the British satirists whose unconventional language of laughter helped a country lighten up ... a little

WHAT DO YOU regard as being quintessentially British? Many people’s answer would be a conservative institution such as the Royal Family. However, for me, something more subversive springs to mind: our sense of humour. In the space of 50 years, British satire has journeyed from university backrooms to mainstream TV and film studios. On the way there, it destroyed deferential attitudes to the establishment and helped make Britain a more liberal and tolerant place. Not bad an achievement for people who wrote sketches about one-legged Tarzans.

Although literary satirists such as Swift and Pope were around two centuries ago, the story of the modern form begins at Cambridge University in the early 1960s. Peter Cook was a bright, suave modern languages student with a talent for reducing entire rooms of people to laughter. While president of the Footlights Club, a theatrical group that has turned out many comedy heroes, he formed the influential revue Beyond the Fringe with jazz pianist Dudley Moore, doctor and actor Jonathan Miller and Alan Bennett, who would go on to a distinguished literary career. Beyond the Fringe smashed the conventions of live comedy with innovative musical numbers, absurdist monologues and madcap sketches, and took aim at sacred targets: Shakespeare, classical music, the army, the clergy, the police and, most controversially, politicians.

Cook’s impressions of the then Prime Minister Harold Macmillan prompted the kind of moral outrage that rock and roll had caused in the US just a few years before. No comedian—no one—had ever mocked the powerful in quite this way before.

Beyond the Fringe shaped the comedy landscape of Britain. Its success allowed Peter Cook to set up Private Eye magazine—still going strong today—and the Establishment comedy nightclub in London which hosted legendary performances by Lenny Bruce and Barry Humphries. The revue also paved the way for the birth of TV satire. The topical That Was the Week That Was (TW3) ran on the BBC between 1962 and 1963, fronted by the now-esteemed broadcaster David Frost, whom Peter Cook personally despised. Indeed, when Cook was asked in an interview, “What is your greatest regret?” he replied, “Saving David Frost from drowning.”

Nonetheless, TW3 served as a training ground for future members of perhaps the most important British TV comedy ever, Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Over 47 episodes, five films and numerous books and records the Pythons were every bit as barbed as Beyond the Fringe, though they added a surreal dimension to satire. They experimented with the visual possibilities of television, then still a young medium, Terry Gilliam’s pop art animations juxtaposed with zany locations, fake credit rolls and sudden fragments of slapstick. Skits recognised the world over include The Lumberjack Song, The Dead Parrot Sketch and The Ministry of Silly Walks in which John Cleese’s elastic-like legs bend and twist in unimaginably strange ways.

At around the same time, satire was penetrating the music scene. The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band confounded the four-piece pop group format of the time by having at least eight members playing odd instruments such as the gazoo, tuba and ukulele. On stage they were a bizarre combination of rock, performance art, cabaret and music hall. Their lead singer was the eccentric, ginger-bearded Vivian Stanshall who was as good a wordsmith as he was a frontman. The Bonzos turned establishment themes—empire, public schools, Oxbridge, sport, etc.—on their heads but also sent up the counterculture they were part of. In the Paul McCartney-produced I’m the Urban Spaceman (1968), Stanshall parodies the psychedelic argot of the time:

In the canyons of your mind
I will wander through your brain
To the ventricles of your heart, my dear
I’m in love with you again!

The Bonzos’ song, “Cool Britannia” (1967), was an ironic swipe at Britain’s newfound status as pop culture capital of the world:

Cool Britannia
Britannia, you are cool
Take a trip!
Britons ever ever ever
Shall be hip

Thirty years later, the phrase “Cool Britannia” was exploited by Tony Blair’s New Labour government to appeal to young voters. Had they still been together then, the Bonzos would have mercilessly lampooned that.

The next significant wave of satirists came in the early 1980s under the rubric of ‘alternative comedy’. Some, like Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie, had graduated from the Cambridge Footlights. Others, like Alexei Sayle, Ben Elton and Dawn French, learned their trade on London’s stand-up circuit.

By the end of that decade, Chris Morris was working as a local radio DJ with a taste for pranks such as pumping helium into the newsroom during accident reports. Moving up to first BBC Radio 4 and then BBC TV, his oeuvre got more sophisticated. Morris took the surrealism-meets-caustic send-up formula and ran with it, mixing Dadaist euphemisms (example, for life-threatening injury read “quadrospazzed on a lifeglug”) with a savant’s grasp of the mechanics of modern broadcasting. He had a particular talent for using sound montages and psychedelic news-graphics to estrange and provoke the viewer.

Indeed, a record number of them complained about a 2001 episode of his series Brass Eye. Condemnation from MPs and the gutter press followed. The crowning scene from that episode is when a genuine member of the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) is asked to judge whether a series of fake artworks are obscene or not. It quickly transpires that there is no guiding logic whatsoever to the BBFC as their man flounders over increasingly silly images. Just at the moment when satire was becoming respectable with primetime programmes such as Have I Got News For You, Morris had proven it was still possible to shock post-Cook, Python et al.

The story of British satire ends in a way that symbolises how the nation has changed. Those enfants terrible who so piqued the authorities are now some of the most famous and well-loved people in Britain today: Stephen Fry, John Cleese, Sir David Frost, Michael Palin, Sir Jonathan Miller and Alan Bennett. Peter Cook and Vivian Stanshall both died too young to be re-branded as national treasures, and we can only guess at whether one day Chris Morris will receive a knighthood. It seems unlikely at the moment, given that he recently directed a film farce about Al-Qaeda terrorists in the North of England.

Reproduced from the July-September 2011 issue of Quill magazine

The Taste of Simple Contentment

2011-08-08T16:51:00.000-07:00

KENNY MAH discovers the simple joy of tucking into a plate of the deliciously spicy and evergreen nasi kandar

2001, The English Gardens, Munich, Germany
It’s summer. Our T-shirts are starting to stick to our bodies as we carry the dishes and the plastic containers deeper into the trees. Our skin is getting browner, a light sheen from our sweat and the sunblock. There is no breeze at all, just the rays from above. We don’t wear shades; we weren’t going to miss this beautiful day.

My friends and I—a tiny Benetton ad flying the colours of our host Deutschland, Italy, Denmark, Greece, the United States and of course, Malaysia—are having a picnic in the park. It’s summer, nothing unusual about this. Well, other than the fact that instead of barbecuing burgers and hotdogs, we’re having nasi kandar.

And just in case you are wondering, the answer is no. Nasi kandar isn’t a native Bavarian dish.

1987, Bayan Lepas, Penang
“You’ve never had nasi kandar before?” my grandfather asks me. “How awful.”
I nod, in agreement. Though, all things considered, I don’t really have any basis for my concurrence, considering I had no idea what it was. Food, probably. I am eight years old. The world’s my oyster, if my mom could ever manage to get me to eat one.

Distracted grumblings on my mom’s deficiencies in having my palate properly instructed aside, my grandfather tells me he’s very glad he brought me along with him on this trip up north. If I haven’t had nasi kandar before, he assures me, then Penang’s definitely the place to have it.

“Do you know why?”

I shake my head.

With an excited gleam in his eye of someone who’s about to share A Very Big Secret, my grandfather leans over and whispers in my ear ...

“Because nasi kandar was invented here! In Penang! Here!”

Of course, my grandfather is partly deaf so this whisper had as much volume control as a trumpeting bull elephant drunk on toddy.

Cue my turn, as the dutiful grandson, to perform my filial task and ask, “Tell me the story, Ah Yeh. Tell me the story of how nasi kandar was invented, please?”

I am rather hungry at this point and would rather eat this mysterious nasi kandar, whatever it is, than discover its origins, but you have to humour your elders. Especially if they are paying for the meal.

“Well, if you insist. This is the story of nasi kandar ...”

1884, Georgetown, Penang
The grand hotel stands tall and gleaming white. A sentinel looking out on the Straits of Malacca. The guests are almost entirely British, so the hotel is decked out in the precise manner that is expected of it. In time to come this will be known as the colonial style, but for now, its Armenian owners, the quartet of enterprising Sarkie Brothers, they know it only as the style that brings in money.

The brothers call their little goldmine, the Eastern Hotel, but none of the labourers they employ to build its twin, the future Oriental Hotel, knows either of these names. Why would they? They are illiterate, after all.

This is a job, nothing more. None of them will step inside the hotel once it’s complete. Now it’s only brick upon brick. They lay down the foundation. They work all morning and by noon, they are hungry. No carefully sliced pieces of cold roast for them. No chilled glasses of sparkling white wine. No endless sets of coordinated cutlery on pristine white tablecloth. For them, it’s down to basics.

Until the nasi kandar man arrives. An Indian Muslim, a strapping chap who deftly navigates the sporadically arranged wooden planks that provide the path to the workers while somehow preventing his wisp of a sarong from undoing itself and creating a mishap in more ways than one. Then there’s the minor challenge of balancing the mangrove pole upon both shoulders, a heavy pot balanced in a basket at each end.

He finally reaches his hungry customers, sets his pole or kandar down, rewraps his faded sarong which has seen better days, and gets down to the business of feeding them. From one pot, plate after plate of hot, steaming white rice. And onto these plates, ladles of spicy curry and meat from the other pot. Scoop, ladle, repeat.

And soon, the sounds of the future being constructed have given way to the amiable silence of a brotherhood of men eating their lunch with their fingers. The taste of nasi kandar is the taste of simple contentment.

2011, Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman, Kuala Lumpur
The line is starting to wind around the block, getting longer by the minute. A couple of Australians in front of me, from their accents, sport reddish tans under their short shirtsleeves. A gaggle of office workers behind me are gabbing away happily in Malay and Hokkien. Looks like we got here just in time. It’s lunchtime.

This is one of the many great houses of nasi kandar in Kuala Lumpur. One of the older ones, one of the few that hasn’t been transformed into a sprawling chain of restaurants spread across the country. This shop remains small, housed in its original location. They certainly haven’t swept the ceiling for cobwebs in a decade or two.

Still, the changes are there. Gone are the sarongs and the kayu kandar—the pole that gives the rice dish its name. All that’s left of the nasi kandar man is a portrait iconised in the shop’s signage.

The place is air-conditioned now. Uniformed waiters with bristly, moustachioed smiles now wear hygienic little caps as they bustle about taking orders for drinks, which are almost always a limau ais (iced lime) or a teh tarik.

And at the end of the queue, not unlike a pot of gold at the foot of the rainbow, are countless choices of delicious dishes: fish head curry, lamb korma, masala crabs, fried chicken and fried fish roe, beef rendang, spicy brinjal and ladies’ fingers, prawn sambal, soy sauce beef, dry curried bitter gourd, mutton curry, cuttlefish, catfish and cockles.

We make our choices and the server adds them to our plates, not forgetting to flood the mounds of rice with a generous splash from every curry pot. The mix is quite messy but tastes marvellous.

Nasi kandar used to feed poor immigrant workers from China and India. Today, it is a feast for everyone.

2001, The English Gardens, Munich, Germany
A picnic is supposed to be a social activity, a time for getting together and sharing stories and foods. We share what sustains us, what feeds us. And sometimes our food is our story.

I shared the idea for a nasi kandar picnic with my summer university mates last week and everyone loved the concept. We all bring something from our own countries and we’ll all share everything. Apostolis has some horiatiki, a Greek salad of tomatoes, feta cheese, olives, cucumber and red onion in an olive oil dressing. Maria offers some of Germany’s best sausages—from the pork-and-marjoram-flavoured Nürnberger Bratwurst to the delicate yet hearty veal-based Weisswurst.

The two Mikes from Chicago make us laugh when they turn up with French fries and Chicken McNuggets from the local McDonald’s. Thor brings beer—not Danish beer, but the best Bavarian beer Deutschmarks can buy—deliciously cool Paulaner Weißbier. Manuel wraps things up with some smoky rolled pancetta and also, prosciutto from Parma.

And me? I cooked rice, of course. Pure steamed white rice, kept piping hot in the rice cooker pot. Let’s not forget a Chinese-style chicken-and-potato curry and some Indian lamb masala curry. Just like the real nasi kandar man would, I ladled plenty of both curries over the rice and we ate it with the odd assortment of foods that we all had brought. Not quite the same as what is found back home, but who’s to say it isn’t right?

I persuade some of them to try scooping up the curry-soaked rice with their fingers. Some manage to get a few grains into their mouths before bursting out into laughter. I think of my grandfather and my first nasi kandar meal we shared, and I know this is how it’s supposed to feel.

This is the taste of real nasi kandar, the taste of simple contentment.

Reproduced from the July-September 2011 issue of Quill magazine