Month: December 2011

Notable reads for 2011

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I’ve been wondering whether to jump on the “Best of” bandwagon and, if I did it, how to do it. Then today I read Lizzy Siddal’s (love that name!) list and decided that I’d follow her lead and use categories rather than go for a simple Top Ten (or whatever) which always feels fraught. I know Lizzy’s not the only one to use categories but hers was the one that inspired me today.

However, for my categories I’m going to use book reviewer cliches since, of course, I never use them in my reviews!

Some mosts

  • Grittiest: Joyce Carol Oates’ Beasts for confronting sexual predation on multiple levels.
  • Most thought-provoking: André Gide’s The immoralist for, well, making me think.
  • Most rivetting: Lloyd Jones’ Hand me down world because even though I guessed the set up fairly early on I still wanted to know how it was going to play out.
  • Most haunting: Horace Walpole’s The castle of Otranto. What else? Case dismissed.
  • Most lyrical: Alan Gould’s The lakewoman for its mesmeric, poetic, romantic sensibility.
  • Most unflinching: Mario Vargas Llosa’s no-holds-barred The feast of the goat about the last days of the Trujillo regime … it was an apposite read given the events of the Arab Spring
  • Most powerful: That would have to be the power couple, Franklin and Eleanor: An extraordinary marriage, by Hazel Rowley
  • Most poignant: Jay Griffiths’ A love letter from a stray moon for being fiery, passionate and poignant all in one.

And, to be fair about it, a couple of leasts

  • Least epic: Jane Austen’s The Watsons. After all, how could an unfinished Jane Austen come even close to being epic?
  • Least nuanced: Howard Jacobson’s The Finkler question, though perhaps there’s nothing more nuanced than the substitution of “Finkler” for “Jew”?

There aren’t many Aussie books in this list, but that’s because I focused on Aussie highlights in this week’s Monday Musings. To include them again would be like double-dipping, wouldn’t it?

And now over to you … what were your most notable reads for 2011?

Oh, and Happy New Year to you all … may the reading gods smile kindly on you in 2012.

Ana Menéndez, Celebrations of Thanksgiving: Cuban offerings

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I love food and I enjoy reading about food. I particularly enjoy reading about food – and food traditions – from other cultures. And so, when Ana Menéndez’s story popped up on the Library of America last month I made a note to read it. The last piece of food writing that I read from LOA, John Duncan’s “A Virginia barbecue”, was also an example of travel writing. This piece, though, could also be described as immigrant literature: in it Menéndez describes her Cuban family’s Thanksgiving celebrations and how it changes over time as they become more American.

Menéndez commences by describing her how Cuban family celebrated Thanksgiving – what they called Tansgibin – with black beans and rice, fried plantains and yucca. They didn’t know, she said, that they were being “ethnic” or trendy” in eating this food! It’s all about perspectives, eh? She then describes how, as their stay in America lengthened, they went about transforming the meal. For Cubans that meant making pig (or roast pork) the central feature, rather than turkey.

The pig is marinated in mojo” which she describes as

the most important part of the equation and families lived and died by their mojo recipes. Today you can buy a strange chemical syrup in bottles labeled “mojo” – of which the best one can say about it is that it’s another sad example of the banality of exile.

To digress a little, this reminded me of my recent trip to Japan. Our host at a ryokan we stayed at told us that, traditionally, each family would have its own Miso Soup recipe but that now people tend to buy the instant variety in the supermarkets. He, however, wasn’t talking about “the banality of exile” but of the impact of commercialisation (and modernisation). It’s not only immigration, then, that sees cultural practices decline. Anyhow, on with the story …

The whole business, she writes – the preparing of the “mojo”, the digging of the pit and the preparation of the grill for the pig, the men tending to the meat with the women preparing the rest of the meal – was a ritual, and, more importantly, “a happy, bantering gathering”. In fact, she describes herself as

one of the few women of my generation who does not consider the kitchen a chore or an affront to my independence, but rather a place of warmth and sustenance.

I take her point – to a point! But that’s another story.

Menéndez then describes how, little by little, change occurred. Someone brings a pumpkin pie (breaching the wall, she says), then comes the cranberry sauce, and a stuffing … and the final blow, the pig is replaced by the turkey. Not only are there concerns that the pig might be unhealthy but it starts to seem like “an embarrassing extravagance, a desperate and futile grasping after the old days”. Our author admits to liking the change. As the younger member of the family, she had become annoyed by

my family’s narrow culinary tastes – which to me signaled a more generalised lack of curiosity about the wider world.

Fascinating how food (and attitudes to it), as she says a little earlier in the article, prefigures change. And yet, change doesn’t come easily. Her family didn’t know how to cook turkey so, what did they do? Well, they cooked it like they cooked their pig. And then they would bestow their best compliment on the cook: “This tastes just like roast pork”!

I enjoyed the article … it provides much food (sorry!) for thought. Even in my own Christmas celebrations I love to find a balance between maintaining family traditions – so that the meal feels like Christmas and not just another festive event – and injecting some change (or difference) each year so that the tradition doesn’t become stale. How much tricker though this challenge is for immigrant cultures. What do you keep? What do you let go? And why?

At the end of the article is her recipe for Mojo … so if you’d like your turkey next year to taste like pork (or, at least, Cuban), you can look it up (in the link below).

In addition to writing pieces like this, Menéndez has written two novels, Loving Che (2004) and The last war (2009). Before them, she published a short story collection, In Cuba I was a German Shepherd, which was a 2001 New York Times Notable Book of the Year.  LOA’s notes tell us that her overall theme, as in this story, is the experience of exile. I wonder if any readers here – Americans particularly – have read her? I’d love to know what you think.

Ana Menéndez
“Celebrations of Thanksgiving: Cuban offerings”
First published: US Society & Values, 9 (4), July 2004
Available: Online at the Library of America

Banana Yoshimoto, The lake (Shadow Man Asian Literary Prize 2011)

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Shadow Man Asian Literary Prize 2011 Badge
Image created by Matt Todd of A Novel Approach

When I saw that Banana Yoshimoto‘s novel The lake was shortlisted for the 2011 Man Asian Literary Prize I knew that it would be a high priority for me to read, because I like Japanese literature and I have read and enjoyed Yoshimoto (her novel Kitchen) before.

The first thing that struck me, however, as I started reading the book was a case of reading synchronicity. Roy’s The folded earth, the first book I reviewed for our Shadow Man Asian Literary Prize 2011 project, is about a young woman grieving the death of her husband. In The lake, the protagonist, Chihiro, also a young woman, has just lost her mother. And, in further synchronicity, both women meet men who impact their lives. This is not unusual, of course, but the thing is that in both books there is a sense of mystery surrounding these men. However, this is where the similarity ends: the mystery in The lake has nothing to do with the death of Chihiro’s mother. Rather, it relates to something the man has experienced, something that has clearly damaged him.

So, what is the plot? It is basically a romance. The first line of the novel is:

The first time Nakajima stayed over, I dreamed of my dead mom*.

Chihiro, our first person narrator, then flashes back to tell us about her background, her somewhat unusual life with her bar-owner mother and businessman father who never married due to his family’s objections. Chihiro is around 30, but this is, really, a coming-of-age novel because she doesn’t yet feel grown-up:

I’m still a child. I still need my parents, and yet, I suddenly feel I’m walking alone.

Into this solo life comes a young medical student, a “puzzling young man”, Nakajima, who lives in the apartment opposite hers. They first communicate non-verbally across the dividing space. Gradually Chihiro feels she is falling in love with Nakajima, but she is not sure, partly because he’s odd, uneasy, something he admits to but can’t (yet) explain. However, it is through learning to accept Nakajima, to not push him but simply to care for him, that Chihiro starts to grow up. At first she wants to have fun – “I didn’t want to deal with weighty matters” – but she comes to realise that she needs him, and senses that he is “the one”. All this develops before we know what happened to Nakajima. Plotting the story through Chihiro’s description of their developing relationship puts the focus less on what happened in the past – though we certainly want to know – and more on how two young “kind of weird” people might move together to a good future.

Now, here’s the rub. Do I let on what happened to Nakajima? The blurb inside the jacket hints at what it is, so perhaps it’s ok to. However, I think I won’t. All I’ll say is that the lake – to which Nakajima takes Chirihiro half way through the novel – and the brother and sister (Mino and Chii) living there are important to the resolution. Chii is bedridden and mute but she can foretell the future and she does this through Mino. This adds a supernatural element to the story, which works well enough for me though I’m not sure what it specifically adds to the novel (except perhaps a sense of “otherness” to the atmosphere?)

The more important question to ask is why has this novel been longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize? Is it more than a nicely written coming-of-age love story? Well, the mystery and its impact on Nakajima, Mino and Chii is a significant one, but that, from the way the story is told and how the plot is resolved, doesn’t seem to be the main point. It is clearly about grief, trauma and recovery, but I think this might be overlaid with the struggle in Japanese society, particularly for the current young generation, to not follow the norm blindly. Nakajima and Chihiro did not have “normal” upbringings. This means that, whether they like it or not, they symbolise nonconformity – and must, consequently, make active decisions about where to next. Freedom is not, I understand, a high value in Japanese society … but it is an issue that comes up regularly in the book. Chihiro’s parents aren’t, through family expectations, free to marry. The mystery surrounding Nakajima relates to a loss of freedom. In her work as a muralist, Chihiro’s only demand is the freedom to paint what she wants and, when that is threatened by a sponsor wanting her to incorporate an enormous logo into her mural, she intelligently but resolutely conducts a campaign to encourage him to change his mind.

Late in the novel, when talking about his experience, Nakajima says:

When you’re in a state of homogeneity, you’ve lost yourself.

Beyond loss and childhood trauma, then, it is the ongoing things like homogeneity, lack of freedom, the push to be normal that challenge Yoshimoto’s characters. But this is a quiet, lyrical book rather than a feisty one. It recognises that life involves “dull repetition of the same old thing” peppered by those “little leaps of your heart to put a splash of colour in the world”. Have I fully understood this novel? I’m not sure that I have … but I did enjoy reading it and thinking about the issues Yoshimoto seems to be exploring.

Matt of A Novel Approach and Lisa of ANZLitLovers, on our Man Asian team, have also reviewed it and are worth reading for their different takes.

Banana Yoshimoto
The lake
(trans. by Michael Emmerich)
Brooklyn: Melville House, 2011 (orig. Japanese ed. 2005)
188pp
ISBN: 9781933633770

* An American translation. We would say “mum”!

Monday musings on Australian literature: My AusLit wrap up for 2011

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Here we are at the end of another year and I’ve decided that, rather than list my top Aussie reads for 2011, I’d list my AusLit highlights of the year. I apologise in advance that it’s going to be all about me – that is, the links will be to posts on this blog. After all, we are talking about my AusLit highlights. Here they are in no particular order:

Meanjin‘s Tournament of Books

This year Meanjin decided to emulate the Morning News’ Tournament of Books with the express aim of raising consciousness about Australian women writers. I don’t know how well they achieved this aim but next week’s Monday Musings will be about other AusLit-related initiatives so perhaps it’s all part of momentum building. Meanwhile, if you missed the discussion here, click on my Tournament of Books tag and you will find the 6 posts I devoted to the topic.

Having cried wolf, book cover

Having cried wolf, book cover (Courtesy: Affirm Press)

Affirm Press’s Long Story Shorts

Affirm Press is one of Australia’s wonderful small independent publishers. In 2010 they published the first of the six books in their Long Story Shorts project which involved commissioning emerging writers to produce short story collections. This year I reviewed the final three books and was impressed by the writing, the gorgeous production and the publisher’s commitment. May there be many more such collections and even more opportunities for emerging writers in 2012 and beyond. Hats off to Affirm Press!

Prime Minister’s Literary Awards panel

The Prime Minister’s Literary Awards are relatively new on the Australian literary awards scene but they’ve made a splash, partly because the prizes are comparatively lucrative. There are plans next year to add a Poetry prize and roll the Prime Minister’s Australian History Prize under the banner. This year, I attended, on the day of the announcement, a panel discussion with some of the winners and shortlisted authors. It was a real treat to hear (and see) the authors firsthand … but I have yet to read this year’s fiction winner, Stephen Daisley’s Traitor. Last year’s winner, Eva Hornung’s Dog boy, though, well demonstrates the calibre of the awards.

Miles Franklin Award

This year’s winner was That deadman dance by Kim Scott. Not only is it a beautifully written and thoughtful book but it’s a rare win for an indigenous author – and that has to make it a 2011 highlight.

Poetry

Readers of this blog know that I like to review poetry occasionally, though I am by no means an expert. I reviewed two special books of poetry this year, special because of the women who produced them and for the quality of their poetry. Ginny Jackson’s book The still deceived was published posthumously after she’d worked hard to complete it while terminally ill with cancer. Her poem, “Getting off the bus”, contains some of the most poignant lines I’ve read about dying. Nora Krouk’s Warming the core of things was published the year she turned 90. I used two lines from one of her poems in our family Christmas card this year. I should read and review more poetry!

Sydney University Press’s Charles Dickens set

Sydney University Press has been doing great work in recent years re-publishing Australian literary classics, several of which I’ve reviewed on this blog. However, this year they published another “treasure”, Charles Dickens’ Australia: Selected essays from Household Words 1850-1859, edited by Margaret Mendelawitz. It’s a five-volume set of articles relating to Australia from Charles’ Dickens periodical, Household Words. The periodical is available on-line, another example of the pluses of electronic communication, but to have someone else do the work of sifting out those articles of relevance to Australia and then sort them into thematic volumes is a perfect example of value adding.

Monday Musings guest posts

When I commenced my Monday Musings series nearly two years ago I planned to include the occasional guest post but for various reasons I haven’t organised many to date. However, there were two this year and they were highlights for me – and not just because I didn’t have to write them! They were informative posts: Louise wrote on some Aussie Children’s Lit creators, and Guy Savage wrote on Max Barry. Both were passionate posts on topics dear to the heart of their writers – and both taught me some things I didn’t know. There’ll be more guest posts next year.

Meeting Alan Gould

Alan Gould is a local (to me) poet, short story writer and novelist, and he was shortlisted last year for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards for his beautiful, mesmerising novel, The lakewoman. My reading group was lucky to have him attend our discussion of his book earlier this year. It was a treat to be able to ask questions about the genesis of what is an intriguing book and to discuss our reactions to it. Gould was gracious in sharing his ideas with us, and we hope he got something out of the discussion too. He should be better known.

Top Aussie post of the year – Red Dog

WordPress provides some excellent blog stats, including your top posts (by number of hits). You can ask for your top posts to be listed by specific time frames – 7 days, 30 days, year, and alltime. I decided to check for my top post over the past year and was surprised to find that it was my review of The Red Dog (Movie and Book). I posted it in August and it is so far ahead of the next top ranked post that it will be my top post for the calendar year. The movie was based on a book written by Louis de Bernières about a legendary dog of the Pilbara. It’s a slim book and is not great literature but the film has done astonishingly well at the box office. I say “astonishingly” because Australian films often do not attract good audience numbers, which worries our film industry. Red Dog, though, bucked that trend and showed filmmakers that Australian audiences will go to Australian films (sometimes, anyhow!). I would hate this movie to start a spate of similar movies in the hope of cashing in on audience interest, but it was good to see a film that appealed to Aussies. I hope we see more – and varied ones – in 2012.

And finally …

Thanks to everyone who has read, commented on and/or “liked” my blog over the last year. I may not know you all but I sure appreciate your visiting me here. I wish you all happy reading in 2012 … and, meanwhile, would love to hear of your blog or literary or reading highlights of the year.

Shadow Man Asian Literary Prize 2011: Reviews from the week December 18-24

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Shadow Man Asian Literary Prize 2011 Badge

Image created by Matt Todd of A Novel Approach

Happy Holidays everyone who is celebrating this weekend … May you receive many books and the time to read them!

I have taken a quick break from my festivities to bring you Week 6 of our Shadow Man Asian Literary Prize 2011 longlist reviewing project. It has been quiet on the reviewing front this week, for obvious reasons. And yet, I have bumper crop of reviews for you because of the addition of a new member to our team, Mark of Eleutherophobia. Welcome Mark. We discovered that Mark had read and reviewed several of the books on the longlist so it seemed sensible – if not downright useful! – to ask him to join us. And so, here are this week’s reviews – all Mark’s:

  • Jamil Ahmad’s The wandering falcon (Pakistan). This book has been loved by all our reviewers so far, and Mark is no exception. A pre-Taliban story that sounds like a must for all of us.
  • Rahul Bhattachariya’s The sly company of people who care (India). A debut novel that follows an India cricket journalist to Guyana, and Mark calls it “bewitching”.
  • Mahmoud Dowlatabadi’s The colonel (Iran). Mark describes this as an important book that represents “a despairing and as yet unheard plea to the Iranian people”.
  • Yan Lianke’s Dream of Ding Village (China). Although it’s a gruelling tale, says Mark, with perhaps some contrivance, he also thinks it is “a remarkable and unforgettable book”. Hard to go past that eh?
  • Anuradha Roy’s The folded earth (India). Mark liked this more than the rest of us to date, though we did all enjoy much about it, particularly the writing. Mark calls it “a beautiful book that will not leave you until long after the final page”.
I had hoped to bring you my review of Banana Yoshimoto’s The lake, but that will have to wait until next week … Meanwhile, on with the festivities!

Whither literary manuscripts in the digital age?

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Have you experienced the thrill of seeing original manuscripts by your favourite author or of a favourite book? I certainly have … the most memorable for me, of course, being some pages from Jane Austen‘s Persuasion. But such personal thrill isn’t the only value to be gained through having access to original manuscripts. Scholars love to analyse the progress of a writer’s work to better understand the work and/or the writer. Where would Charles Dickens or TS Eliot scholars be, for example, without the manuscript of, say, Oliver Twist or The wasteland? Marie-Thérèse Varlamoff and Sara Gould writing for UNESCO say

As a visit to the manuscript department of any of the great national libraries of the world will testify, the hand-written manuscript can reveal much more about the life and state of mind of the writer than any electronic document can ever do. Marcel Proust’s “paperoles“, the small pieces of paper which his servant wrote under dictation because he was too ill to write himself, contain many handwritten corrections in the margins, and are of major importance for all those who study the genesis of Proust’s literary creation. Victor Hugo’s splendid handwriting and the amazing and powerful drawings he used to draw in the margins of the pale blue paper he favoured, are similarly full of historical significance.

But, things are changing … we are now in the age of electronic (or digital) communication … and it’s not all bad …

Digitisation has been a boon for scholars. Sure, the ideal will always be to see an original manuscript, but that’s not always possible … and in these cases a digitised (scanned) version will often do the job. I love the fact that I can see Ezra Pound’s annotations on TS Eliot’s original manuscript (typescript) of The Wasteland on my app. For a scholar, a digitised version of an author’s manuscript will often suffice at the start of his/her research even if later on the original must be sighted. Digitised versions of manuscripts are regular features now of museum displays with touch screen and other technologies added in to enhance the experience. We take all this for granted. We expect to have access to anything we want in digital version …

But, along with the pluses come the minuses as Marie-Thérèse Varlamoff and Sara Gould continue:

How can the successive versions of a novel for example, or the progression or changes in an author’s thoughts, be studied in future, when the only permanent record may be a diskette containing the final version. No draft, no hesitation, no drawings or doodles. No doubt either that those who will study literary history or the genesis of a book will be at a loss.

Enter Max Barry. On his blog recently, he described how he has retained the whole edit history of his novel Machine man, which means readers can “browse to any particular page and see how it evolved from something to nothing”. He gives examples on his blog of how he worked on this novel and how the edit history looks. Click on this link to go to an example page. In the date bar above the text you’ll see a little arrow pointing to V2 (that’s Version 2 of course). Click on that to go to Version 2, and you will see a similar little arrow for V3 … and so on. Once you’ve mastered that, you can read the final serial version of the novel on the blog and, whenever the spirit moves you, you can click on a tiny icon at the top of the page to bring up and explore the entire version/edit history.

This is what libraries (archives/museums) now need (want) to collect … and this is what they’ll be challenged to preserve into the future. No longer will the challenge be to stop the ink from fading and the paper from deteriorating. No, it will be migrating the file so that no information is lost and so that the hardware and software of the day will be able to read documents produced under obsolete technologies. The principle is the same: collect, preserve and make available a writer’s work and process. The practices for achieving this with electronic/digital documents, though, is a whole new ball-game, and one that libraries (et al) are facing right now.

Max writes:

I’m not sure what use this is to anybody, other than for exposing my writerly fumblings in an even more humiliating manner than I’ve already done. But it was POSSIBLE, so I have DONE IT.

Librarians and researchers know what use this is … and we thank writers like Max Barry who take the management of their work so seriously.

Monday musings on Australian literature: Guest Post from Guy of His Futile Preoccupations

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Monday Musings’ Guest Post no. 3 comes from Guy Savage of His Futile Preoccupations. Guy started commenting on my blog very early on and endeared himself to me by giving me the nickname of Gummie. That is a very Aussie thing to do – or is it English? Guy, you see, is an expat Brit living in the USA. (At least I think I’ve got that right.) I quickly discovered that Guy had an interest in and knowledge of things culturally Australian and we have shared some interesting conversations about Australian authors and films over many posts here and there. He is also interested in the classics, including authors like, oh, Jane Austen for example. His other interest – he’s a man of many talents – is crime fiction and film noir, and he writes with great flair on things criminal! Do check out his blog. You won’t be disappointed.

But, on with the post. Guy stunned me when, commenting on my very first Monday Musings, he named Max Barry as his favourite Aussie writer. Max Barry, who is he? Well, today Guy is going to tell (me) us … read on …

Max Barry 2006

Max Barry 2006 (Courtesy: dejahthoris, via Wikipedia, using CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported)

Max Barry: One of Australia’s National Treasures

Ok, I’ll admit it. I’m not rational about Max Barry. I’d like to say that I’m his number one fan, but that makes me sound as though I’m ready for psycho-therapy, and anyway, if you make a trip to Max’s website and sign up as a member of Max’s Posse (currently at 5785 and climbing), you’ll see that he’s his own number one fan. So instead I’ll land on the safer statement that I’ve been a fan of this Australian author for 10 years. Born in 1973, Max Barry is a young writer, and there’s going to be a lot of great books coming from his home in Melbourne. I suspect that he’s better known outside of Australia, but I’m basing that on the fact that Gummie hadn’t heard of Max Barry before I mentioned him, and she’s my barometer for all-things-to-do-with-Australian-culture.

Yes it’s been ten years since I first came across Max Barry in 2001 via an out-of-print copy of his first book, Syrup, a brilliantly funny novel which satirizes marketing and consumerism. Actually I’d better back up a bit here–the book, published in 1999, was attributed to Maxx Barry in a continuation of the marketing idea. Max says he added the extra X:

because it seemed like a funny joke about marketing, and I failed to realize everyone would assume I was a pretentious asshole.

Syrup is the story of an unlikely hero, Scat, a marketing graduate from Iowa who moves to L.A. He devises a marketing plan for a new drink called Fukk and plans to sell his idea to Coca-Cola, but before he can seal the $3 million dollar deal, Scat’s roommate, Sneaky Pete, in a wickedly funny backstabbing move of corporate theft, claims the copyright.

Syrup is one of the funniest books I’ve ever read, and when I concluded the novel, I was troubled that I’d found it purely by accident. I took the book’s out-of-print status rather personally, and buying about a dozen copies, I sent them out to anyone who was still speaking to me and urged them to read the book. Without exception, everyone who got one of those copies of Syrup loved the book.

Barry’s second novel appeared in 2003. Jennifer Government is an alternate-reality vision of globalization in which most countries are nakedly dominated by corporations rather than by governments. Corporate employees take the name of the corporation they work for as surnames, and schools are sponsored and controlled by corporations intent on raising the next generation of avid consumers. This is a novel in which corporate competition has become so fierce that consumers become stiffs in a guerilla marketing campaign guaranteed to hype sales of crappy new tennis shoes. Jennifer Government is a remarkably intelligent and prescient novel, for some of the fictional dire social conditions Barry created no longer seem quite so futuristic in the post-boom gloom.

Barry’s 2006 novel Company again placed the individual in the middle of corporate nastiness. This novel, set in Seattle, explores the shady dealings of the Zephyr Holdings Company, and when Stephen Jones from the Training Sales Dept. begins to ask a few awkward questions, he finds himself catapulted into management. In this novel, Barry blends the nonsense rules of corporatism with the naturally absurd results, and consequently, this is a perfect depiction of the insanity of life within the corporate machine.

This year Barry published his fourth novel, Machine Man–the story of corporate scientist Charles Neuman, employee of Better Future, who accidentally loses a leg in an industrial accident. Charles’ discovery that the replacement leg is better than the original sets off a chain of events in which Charles decides to improve himself limb by limb in a grimly hilarious skewering of corporate culture.

Over the years, Barry’s novels have been optioned for film and disappointingly several projects have not gone beyond the blue sky phase; I was rather excited at the news that Steven Soderbergh and George Clooney’s Section 8 films optioned Jennifer Government, but so far nothing on that score. But someone out there has noticed the Vast Talent that is Max Barry and 2012 will see the release of Syrup from director Aram Rappaport. Max Barry flew to America and watched the filming and even got a small cameo role.

Ok so Max Barry has written four novels–two of which are the funniest books I’ve ever read, and now it looks as though he’s about to get some long delayed-global recognition, but there’s a lot more to this author that makes him exceptional. Max has also taken control of his own marketing–albeit that no-one was interested in Max back when his first novel was out-of-print, but any new author out there could learn a thing or two from Max. Max has maintained an active website since 1999 and keeps in touch with his fans (and I’d like to think we’re a little nuttier and stranger than the average readers) via an e-newsletter. In 2004, Max converted his website to a weblog where he shares his news. On the site, you can check out NationStates, a game designed by Max to help market Jennifer Government:

NationStates is a state stimulation game. Create a nation according to your political ideals and care for its people. Or deliberately oppress them. It’s up to you.

Max even has a few videos up on youtube. But if you want to get a taste of Max’s wonderful sense of humour, check out his weblog where you will see comments about nasty critics in a piece called Things Critics Do That Piss Me Off . Here’s Number 3:

#3: Spots Plot Holes That Are There

Max Responds: Shut the fuck up! Go write your own novel, you hack!

And on the Q& A subject of whether or not Syrup is based on Max’s sordid period of employment with Hewlett-Packard:

That’s a filthy lie. Why, if HP was like Syrup, it would be a seedy den of politics and corporate back-stabbing, brimming with sexual tension. That is absolutely not true. There was very little sexual tension.

Actually, HP was a great place to work and taught me a lot about how companies function. I worked with some tremendously talented salespeople, most of whom used their powers for good instead of evil.

As a reader of crime fiction, I’ve noticed that many crime writers tend to take a different type of approach from other so-called literary authors that leaves no room for ivory tower elitism. Not only do many crime writers maintain extremely active blogs (thinking Max Allan Collins, James Sallis, Duane Swierczynski here), but there’s also a high level of reader involvement. Duane Swierczynski (Severance Package, The Wheelman), for example, is even organizing a Philadelphia bus trip January 2012 to the grave site of author David Goodis (Dark Passage). Crime writers don’t seem to feel the need to distance themselves from fans; perhaps they’ve even learned that maintaining a place for readers to check to see what they’re reading and writing is actually a good thing, or there again perhaps they’re tougher than their average readers, and they’re not scared to get within punching distance. Whatever the reason behind this internet-author-reader-relationship, this is the sort of proximity I see in Max Barry–there’s an innate humility in this writer that makes me, as a reader, cheer for his success. He’s an Everyman who’s worked in mind-numbingly boring, demeaning jobs, and he just happens to have the talent to write about his experiences which become, in turn, our experiences. He’s not just a writer who produces a book once in a while; if you’re a fan, you’re involved. We’ve been with Max through his disappointments and his successes, through the birth of two children (to clarify, Max’s wife, Jen  gave birth–not Max), and when Max wrote a serial called Machine Man, newsletter subscribers got to read chapters and give feedback. When Max landed a book contract for Machine Man, we even voted on the choice of cover.  It makes me feel all warm and fuzzy just thinking about it…. Sniff…

… and you’ve made us all warm and fuzzy with your passionate post Guy. I recently bought Company – I just have to find time to read it! Meanwhile, readers here might like to check out Book Around the Corner’s reviews of Syrup and Company and Guy’s own reviews of Jennifer Government, Company, and Machine man.

Shadow Man Asian Literary Prize 2011: Reviews from the week December 11-17

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Shadow Man Asian Literary Prize 2011 Badge

Image created by Matt Todd of A Novel Approach

Week 5 of our Shadow Man Asian Literary Prize 2011 longlist reviewing project and we’re moving along with quite a bumper crop of reviews this week  …

  • Haruki Murakami‘s IQ84 (Japan) by Matt of A Novel Approach. Matt, a student of Japanese literature, has mixed feelings. He calls it unwieldy, though he also admits that he’s not a Murakami fan.
  • Anuradha Roy’s The folded earth (India) by Fay of Read, Ramble. Fay, like Matt and me, admired the writing but had reservations about the whole.
  • Kyung-Sook Shin’s Please look after mother (or Mom, depending on your version) (Korea) by Lisa of ANZLitLovers. Lisa didn’t like it as much as Stu and Matt did from our team. I guess that’s one that she won’t have to worry about choosing from!
  • Banana Yoshimoto‘s The lake (Japan) by Lisa of ANZLitLovers. She’s not overly impressed by it, stating that this “tale of adolescent introspection dressed up as a surreal mystery looks very slight indeed”. I liked Kitchen, the first (and only) Yoshimoto book I’ve read, but that was a long time ago now. I look forward to seeing what I think about The lake which will be my next read for the project.

And, of course, if you missed it, I did finally manage my first review for the project this week: Anuradha Roy’s The folded earth.

Anuradha Roy, The folded earth (Shadow Man Asian Literary Prize 2011)

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Anuradha Chenoy (Jawahar Lal Nehru University,...

At last I’m posting my first review for our Shadow Man Asian Literary Prize longlist reviewing project. The book is The folded earth  by Indian writer Anuradha Roy.  Like many others, my first reaction when I saw this book listed was to wonder whether Anuradha was another name for Arundhati Roy – but it isn’t. She is, however, used to readers confusing her – and now that we have cleared that up, I will get on with my review.

The folded earth is Roy’s second novel. It’s a contemporary story about a young Hindu woman, Maya, who marries a Christian man, Michael, thereby angering both her parents and his. Consequently, when Michael dies, mountaineering, after only 6 years of marriage, she has no family to turn to for support. Grief-striken her solution is to move to Ranikhet, the nearest town in the Himalayan foothills to where he died. The novel chronicles her life in that town – the work she does, the friends she makes. It’s a fairly simple plot, though there are some complications: there’s the mysterious Veer who comes and goes and with whom she develops an uneasy relationship, and there’s the backdrop of conflict as the impending elections bring into focus Christian-Hindu tensions. There are also some references to real people – to the romantically involved Nehru and Edwina Mountbatten, and to the legendary big-cat hunter Jim Corbett.

The main appeal of the book for me was the evocation of village life through its colourful characters. They include Ama, the  stereotypical but nonetheless believable wise village woman; Charu, her lovelorn but resourceful granddaughter; Mr Chauhan, the officious Administrator; Diwan Sihab, the eccentric would-be biographer of Corbett and generous landlord to Maya; Puran, the simple cowherd; Miss Wilson, the austere principal of the Catholic school at which Maya works. And of course, Maya, herself, who is the first person narrator of the novel. These characters come alive and we care about them, even Mr Chauhan who, with his attempts to beautify Ranikhet (“In foreign countries I have heard people have to pick up even their dog’s … waste from roads”), provides light comic relief. He is not totally benign though, as he is also behind one of the book’s cruellest moments when his henchmen torture Puran.

I also enjoyed the writing. Roy’s descriptions of the foothills and seasonal changes bring the landscape alive:

… I stood looking at the mountains, which had risen out of the monsoon sky. Clouds were piled high at their base so that they floated in mid-air, detached from everything earthly. Something in the quality of the light made the peaks appear translucent, as if the molten silver sky were visible through them.

Her descriptions of people and their relationships are often spot-on, such as this of a new relationship:

We were too new and fragile, too skinless to be exposed to daylight just yet.

Roy explores some of the changes confronting the region, particularly in relation to religious difference, education, and the role of women. Should women be educated, and if so how much? (Ama, for example, would like to see Charu educated so that “she won’t let a man get away with treating her badly” but not so much that it will stop her getting a husband.) How do hardworking villagers comprehend the seasonal influx of wealthy travellers? Here is Ama again:

Travelling is all very well […] But it’s for people with money to burn and nothing better to do but eat, drink and idle. Why go walking up and down hills for pleasure? We do that everyday for work.

Social conflict and change are real issues in this neck of the woods!

And yet, despite these positives, the book doesn’t quite hang together, mainly, I think, because it doesn’t know what it is. Is it about coming to terms with grief, an ideas novel about political tensions in contemporary India, a mystery about Michael’s death, a hymn to the Himalayan region (in the face of encroaching urbanisation), or all of the above? I suspect Roy intended all of these but the book is a little too disjointed, a little too unfocused to quite pull it off. The politics seem important but are mostly a sideline to the personal stories. For the political ideas to have impact they needed to collide in some major way with the characters rather than form a backdrop as they do here. There is a mystery about Michael’s death but Roy doesn’t build or sustain the tension well, and when the true story comes out it’s neither surprising nor particularly powerful. There are references to the destruction of the natural world, to humans making “anthills out of the mountains”, to “the distant past of the forests when the shadow of a barasingha’s horns flitted through the denser woods”, but the ideas are not fully integrated into the story.

I’m not sorry to have read it, however. It’s not a ground-breaking book and it doesn’t fully cohere, but there is a lot to enjoy – the writing, the exotic (to me) setting, and the characters, for a start. I don’t imagine this will be my top-ranked book in the longlist but neither would I discourage people from reading it.

From the team: Matt (A Novel Approach) had similar reactions to mine, and Fay (Read, Ramble) also had reservations.

Shadow Man Asian Literary Prize 2011 Badge

Image created by Matt Todd of A Novel Approach

Anuradha Roy
The folded earth
London: MacLehose Press, 2011
257pp.
ISBN: 9780857050441

Monday musings on Australian literature: Australian Gothic (19th century)

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A few months ago I wrote a post on Horace Walpole‘s The castle of Otranto which is regarded as a pioneer in the Gothic novel tradition. I thought then that it would be good to explore how the Gothic translated to Australia where we have no castles in which the supernatural can rattle and clang. Australia though had (and has) plenty to inspire a Gothic imagination: strange unforgiving nightmarish landscapes, weird vegetation and imaginary creatures. Moreover, Australia was colonised by the British in the late 18th-early 19th centuries, the time when Gothic novels were at the height of their popularity in Britain.

Barbara Baynton 1892

Baynton 1892 (Presumed Public Domain, via Wikipedia)

Consequently, many of Australia’s 19th century writers did incorporate the Gothic into their writing, and today I’ll list just few (but it will be little more than a list as I’ve been away the last two weekends and am playing catchup in pretty much every aspect of my life.)

The following are just some of the authors whose writings are regularly included in Gothic anthologies or in discussions of an Australian Gothic tradition:

  • Barbara Baynton
  • Marcus Clarke
  • Henry Lawson
  • Rosa Praed (who, like Ada Cambridge, is not as well known as she should be, which is something I have been planning to – and will –  rectify)
  • Price Warung.  I reviewed his Tales of the early days, a couple of years ago. One of the tales, “The Pegging-Out of Overseer Franke”, is commonly included in Australian Gothic anthologies. It tells the story of revenge against a cruel overseer of convicts … and explores the fine line between definitions of man and beast when cruelty and revenge become the modus operandi.

19th century Australian writers didn’t always need the supernatural to convey horror, evoke fear and portray disjunction between desire/hope and harsh reality. They had the forbidding Australian landscape, the threat of becoming lost in or being destroyed by that landscape, and the harsh unyielding authority of colonial male power. Who needed castle ghosts in this situation? This is not to say that the supernatural never appeared in Australian writing, but that this writing could, and often did, convey a Gothic sense of horror and dread through the concrete realities of 19th century Australian life. It’s fascinating to see what happened to the Gothic tradition in the second half of the 20th century (in, say, the work of Elizabeth Jolley) but that is a topic for another day.