A Christmas gift from the Quasi-Boyfriend

Merry Christmas! I’m just back from a family vacation in Penang, and surprise, surprise, I’m only halfway through Waverley…

Anyhow, I got to hang out with Mohan while doing some last-minute shopping yesterday. (I’m calling him my quasi-boyfriend because I’m not entirely sure where our relationship’s headed.) But we’re still giving each other presents – he sent me an awesome ice cream maker for my birthday, for example, which has boosted his boyfriendly credentials no end.

And since we decided to exchange gifts a trifle prematurely this afternoon, I can report that he’s done well once again, proffering a work by the 2013 Nobel Literature Prizewinner Alice Munro:

It is of course a little crazy that it’s this Canadian lady, not the formidable and phenomenal Atwood, who’s won the prize. But as someone who’s currently working on a short story collection, I can’t complain if the genre of the short fiction gets a boost.

My gifts to Mohan were similarly literary: a discount copy of the early American gay novel The City and the Pillar by Gore Vidal and a copy of Orlando, the Marmalade Cat: A Seaside Holiday, by Norfolk writer/illustrator Kathleen Hale. He somewhat spoilt the trend by also giving me a slushie-maker.

(Honestly, I’m touched, but I have no great love for slushies. Not sure how I’ll make use of it.)

I’ve also made use of the Yuletide season by composing a list of the best of what I’ve read in world literature thus far – it’s only natural, after all, to use this site as a space for recommending books rather than assessing them one by one. Too late for gift recommendations this year – but perhaps it’ll be valid for many more years to come!

Book 139, Northern Ireland: "Death of a Naturalist" by Seamus Heaney

One of the great things about having access to a university library is the fact that I can read a lot of poetry in its original collections, not in Compleat Works or Selected With Annotations stuff. I kinda wanna see how a writer's oeuvre was originally presented to the public, warts and all.

The Spirit Level is of course widely available - but after I'd picked it up, I realised:

1) I might've read it before, back when I first started getting curious about Heaney.

2) It wasn't actually written while Heaney was living in Northern Ireland (where he did in fact spend the first thirty-three years of his life).

3) I just wasn't connecting with the poems. 

Call me shallow, but the pieces in The Spirit Level all seemed messy and disperse and referring to incidents and people I wasn't familiar with, which is in itself not an unfamiliar sensation during this project. But I do want to honour great writers by saying nice things about their work, and to have a good time reading myself.

So I've decided to go back to the volume that started everything off: Heaney's very first collection, published by Faber and Faber back in 1966:

It's easy to like Death of a Naturalist. Most of these poems are these wonderfully earthy things, reflecting on what it means to be a poet who's grown up in the country as the son of a farmer, hence you've got schoolkid classics like Digging, wherein he imagines himself digging with his pen into his heritage, just as his forefathers dug with their spades for potatoes. Also the scary frogspawn of the titular poem, his mother's dairy alchemy in Churning Day, the tragedy of a child's death in Mid-Term Break, the assumption of adulthood and responsibility around the horse-plough of Follower. And of course the weird Thomas Wyatt-esque loss of innocence in Blackberry-Picking, another piece we kept on seeing on our literature worksheets, and which someone told me actually referred to the Eucharist.

All very sensual, all very real, all very lovely on the ears and accessible. In fact, quality actually goes sideways towards the end of the book when we just start getting fluffy love songs and nature poems, whose depth can in no way compare to the stuff in the first half. But if I'd wanted depth, I'd have gone with The Spirit Level, no? My own damn fault for being stupid and impatient.

Since we're on the topic of Northern Ireland, however, we've gotta mention The Troubles. And though the violence only peaked in the seventies (during which time Heaney wrote works like Wintering Out, which I personally find a tad forgettable), we do actually have a threatening yet thoroughly human figure of a Protestant activist whose "fist would drop a hammer on a Catholic" in The Docker. "Oh yes, that kind of thing could start again", the poet says, and sure enough it did.

Things have been peaceful enough since the nineties, thank god, and I'm planning to visit Belfast next year. Still, it did drive Heaney to Dublin, where he spent the rest of years until his death in April (which I shamefully didn't remark upon in this blog). What's the relationship between Northern and Republic of today? I've heard of people switching nationalities just to get their university fees slashed. Will find out through travel, not literature, I dare say.

Anyhow, Singapore's experiencing troubles of its own right now. Not sure how I could (should?) turn that into literature.

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Representative quote: 

"From A Potato Digging"
III.

Live skulls, blind-eyed, balanced on
wild higgledy skeletons
scoured the land in "forty-five,"
wolfed the blighted root and died.

The new potato, sound as stone,
putrefied when it had lain
three days in the long clay pit.
Millions rotted along with it.

Mouths tightened in, eyes died hard,
faces chilled to a plucked bird.
In a million wicker huts
beaks of famine snipped at guts.

A people hungering from birth,
grubbling, like plants, in the bitch earth,
were grafted with a great sorrow.
Hope rotted like a marrow.

Stinking potatoes fouled the land,
pits turned pus into filthy mounds:
and where potato digger are
you still smell the running sore.

Next book: Sir Walter Scott's Waverley, from Scotland. Or shall I do Robert Burns?

Book 132, Iceland: "Independent People" by Halldór Laxness

And I've finally finished this book! Despite early declarations that I'd be opening my European journey with this Nobel Prize-winner's masterwork, I honestly had my doubts - tried reading the collected Viking poetry of the Poetic Edda, but realised pretty soon that its obscure references were just gonna make my head hurt.

Reason I tried switching over to that book was because I wasn't having such a great time with this one. Sure, my friend Dmitri loved it, and I rather liked the opening paragraph too, with its invocation of the curse of the cannibal witch Gunnvor who has cursed the land in collaboration with the demon Kolumkilli (who is, according to Wikipedia, actually Saint Columba).

But then we enter the real world, and there isn't a single character to empathise with. Bjartur of Summerhouses, our newly debt-free peasant farmer protagonist, is an absolute bull-headed asshole with his desire to be an Independent Person, spouting Icelandic poetry on the spot to show off his cleverness and refusing helping hands from anyone. Meanwhile, his new wife Rosa is always mooning around and doing nothing in her depression - sure, she's enduring horrible squalor and hardship in the dump of a farm she's stranded in, but she just lies there sleeping in instead of actually struggling. [SPOILER ALERT!!!] When she died in childbirth, I thought, well, good riddance. [SPOILERS END.]

It's only in Part Two that we start getting some likeable characters - Bjartur's second wife and kids and mother-in-law, who have to suffer under the affable tyranny of their pioneer dad who deprives them of schooling and meat and milk. There's a particularly moving dramatisation of his daughter Asta Sollija's sexual awakening, the shame and desire wrapped up in this, and her severely compromised liberation in the end. Not a comforting closure at all: everything's about the doom of striving to be independent under unfair capitalist structures, and the sheer stupidity of idealising the lives of oppressed peasants (which quite a few Icelandic writers did!).

There's also an awful lot of nationalism wrapped up in this - the whole story is set around the 1890s to the 1920s, at the very birth of the Icelandic independence movement. But economics forms the centre of the tale: debt bondage, the rise of cooperatives, the financial boom caused by demand for Icelandic mutton and wool during World War I, the bust and the labour strikes that came afterwards. Shades of the prosperity of the Cod Wars followed by the 2008 economic crisis - cycles of riches and poverty, loans and mortgages, comfort and cold.

So yeah, this is a pretty interesting book in terms of the info and ideas presented. But while the cover blurbs talk about writers loving it for its sardonic wit et cetera, I'm just not that much of a fan. It's just another rambling epic novel of the common man. So what?

I'm actually pretty disappointed, because there's so much else in lit that Iceland should have to offer - they say that one out of every five persons there has written a book. And the country's pretty trippy as well - visited back in 2005 with my sister, and I'd love to go back. Maybe I will when I'm doing my UK course.

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Representative quote: In foreign books there is a holy story which tells of a man who was fulfilled by sowing his enemy's field one night. Bjartur of Summerhouses' story is the story of a man who sowed his enemy's field all his life, day and night. Such is the story of the most independent man in the country. Moors; more moors. From the ravine there came an eerie echoing rumble as the headstone crashed its way down, and the bitch sprang to the brink and stood there barking wildly.

Next book: James Joyce's Ulysses, from Ireland.

And the Nobel goes to…

I know I’m late on the uptake and all, but I did want to say a little something about the Chinese novelist Mo Yan winning the Nuo Bei Er.

It’s come out of the blue for most people. Folks were putting money on Haruki Murakami, that Japanese wunderkind of mildly surrealist, disaffected hipster fiction.

And while I would’ve been perfectly happy if any Asian writer had won the prize, I’m actually rather happy that Mo Yan won out.

Y’see, back in ‘05, I did my Comp Lit BA thesis on Gabriel García Márquez and Mo Yan, so I had to do a bunch of reading up on both of ‘em – ingesting what books I could, either in their original language or in translation.

So I’ve a bunch of the laureate’s works: Red Sorghum; The Republic of Wine; The GarlicBallads; Shifu, You’ll Do Anything For A Laugh; Big Breasts and Wide Hips (not my favourite, and the translation corrupted the plot somewhat), and the one I focused on in my thesis, 41 Bombs. (As yet untranslated, to my knowledge.)

Reason I chose him was because his work’s been specifically compared to Gabo’s before: he too uses techniques of magical realism, attributing his inspiration directly to the Colombian master – though it’s not slavish imitation by any means; coming across One Hundred Years of Solitude was merely a licence to go ahead and be true to his own folk tradition of tall tale-telling, same way as Gabo was liberated by Kafka.

Mo Yan’s most famous work is Red Sorghum, which was made into the groundbreaking Chinese New Wave film of the same title by Zhang Yimou. The ‘90s were actually the heyday for Chinese novelists, between perestroika and the invasion of TV and blockbuster film. So he’s actually been on the Nobel watchlist for some two decades. Give him the 8 million krona; he’s waited long enough.

But that’s not the only reason why I’m glad he beat Murakami. I mean, look at the Japanese guy’s works: they explore the world of middle-class jazz aficionado Gen X-ers, revisiting so many old tropes that you can actually play Bingo with his books.

(Disclaimer: I’ve only read Sputnik Sweetheart and Dance Dance Dance in full, both of which I enjoyed.)

Mo Yan, on the other hand, is the son of Shandong farmers. He writes in peasant Mandarin (this is why I was able to read his works), and is enjoyed by a broad base of proletariat countrymen as well as by East Asian Studies majors in Stockholm.

He’s come a long way since the nostalgia of Red Sorghum. He’s documented the crazy collectivist/industrial/capitalist transformations of his nation, from famine to gross excess, utilizing a dazzling range of realisms and surrealisms to get past the Communist Party’s censors – god, you should check out the Faulknerian stream-of-consciousness at the end of Republic of Wine. He changes, just as China does.

So basically, we’ve got a populist peasant with a penchant for experimentation, versus an ageing hipcat who’s stuck in a rut. Also, China’s never had a Nobel for lit before. Who’re you gonna pick? (Also helps that Mo Yan's using his leverage to say nice things about Liu Xiaobo.)

And sure, sure, Murakami’s populist too. Give it to him another year. He'll live.

By the way, I've set up my poll for my Japan book on the right. Any Harukists who're mad at me can sentence me to finishing 1Q84.

Book 101, Myanmar: "Letters from Burma" by Aung San Suu Kyi

I'm in Southeast Asia again! Literally (flew home this morning) and bloggularly! Just in time to attend PinkDot tonight, where I'm manning the booth for IndigNation.

Speaking of human rights, I read this baby on the plane. Terribly fortuitous time to be covering such work, I thought, given the recent release of The Lady, not to mention the actual release of the Lady herself.

But the collection of essays begins oddly, more like a travelogue than a document of human rights violations: she describes a pilgrimage to Thamanya in Karen State to visit the holy teacher U Vinaya: the bumpy Pajero ride at dawn, the history of the district and the delights of eating vegetarian food at his monastery.

The letters weren't written during a period of house arrest at all, you see: they date from a one-year period from late 1995 to 1996 when she'd been recently released after incarceration for six years (she would later be held for nine more years, some in actual prison). Each one was published as a weekly column in a Japanese newspaper, and indeed she frequently makes direct reference to her Japanese audience, discussing their aesthetics of purity, their rapid economic development, her objections to their nation's investment in Myanmar despite its undemocratic regime.

I had fears at first that this was going to be another upper-class, spiritual encomium to the nation, not unlike Treasures of the Thunder Dragon. But of course the Lady weaves details of NLD's struggle for democracy amidst the charming descriptions of the Thingyan water festival and the changing of the seasons. To explain inflation, she gives us a mouthwatering account of traditional fried rice breakfasts, with meat, prawns or eggs, then reveals that today even the eggs are no longer affordable to many families, let alone the meat and prawns.

And then, of course, history invades the story. University riots cause further arrests among the NLD, blockades in front of her house and the houses of her co-leaders, the infamous incident where government-paid thugs fire into the windshield of her departing car.

The miracle of course is that there is so much good humour she describes in her accounts: how the gatherings each week at her door and the comedy performances at the NLD celebrations are threatened by violence and arrests and kangaroo trials, and yet people continue to turn up, laughing and singing so merrily that even the government spies start to join in. It makes me think of the cheerfulness at SDP rallies in Singapore, but we've never lived under as desperate conditions as the Myanmese (I will continue to use "Myanmar" until there is an official change; it is the word I have grown up with and I believe political realities deserve recognition).

One final note: I've occasionally played devil's advocate by pointing out that Aung San Suu Kyi is not in fact extraordinary in her endurance; that many of her fellow activists in Myanmar have suffered far worse than she. She's privileged by her parentage, her class, her ability to speak English, her sex, her beauty, her marriage. But she knows this. She recognises the terrible effect of incarcerations on the families of the politically imprisoned, and admits that she worries little about her own children, growing up guarded by the human rights protections of Europe.

I honestly don't know if she'd be an effective president of a democratic Myanmar, but truth is, reading this book gives you a sense that she's a great leader already - intelligent, compelling, but never vain, never less than compassionate.

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Representative quote: Visitors to my country often speak of the friendliness, the hospitality and the sense of humour in the Burmese. Then they ask how it is possible that a brutal, humourless, authoritarian regime could have emerged from such a people. A comprehensive answer to that question would involve a whole thesis but a short answer might be, as one writer has put it, that Burma is indeed one of those lands of charm and cruelty. I have found more warmth, more wholehearted love, more tenderness, more courage and more caring concern among my people, as we hope together, suffer together and struggle together, than anywhere else in the world. But those who exude hate and vindictiveness ad rave about annihilating and crushing us are also Burmese, our own people.

Next book: Sunthorn Phu's The Story of Phra Abhai Mani, from Thailand.

Book 97, Bangladesh: "Selected Short Stories" by Rabindranath Tagore

As you know, Tagore was an amazing poet: made the Europeans swoon with his Gitanjali. (Left me a bit ho-hum, to tell the truth: I am not a truly mystical soul.)

I'm here to report that he was also a master of the short story form. These pieces are some of the first literary short stories ever written in Bengali, composed while he was looking after his ancestral states in East Bengal (now Bangladesh) in the 1890s, reflecting on the nature of Indian village life which he'd seldom encountered in Calcutta and Sussex. The intro says that he was only driven to write these 'cos the magazine editors wanted 'em - a lot of critics back then didn't like 'em, in fact; said they were unrealistic, overwrought.

The way I see it, they're wonderful admixtures of poetry, realism and fantasy - and, yes, fantasy: he has Poe-like horror pieces like The Hungry Stones and Skeleton; fables like Wishes Granted in which a fictional Goddess of Desires descends to make a boy and his father swap places. Even in the social realist pieces, there's that wonderful sense of destiny and fate and spirituality looming over everything - the heartbreaking reappearances of vanished sons in Little Master Returns, Wealth Surrendered, Son-sacrifice, and the curse averted in The Gift of Sight...

Oh and I should warn you that Tagore is prepared to do horrible things to his characters. No Dickensian jolly opportunities for reform here; instead the Catherine Lim-esque ironies bounce back on these folks and ruin the very purpose of their lives. This is the Kaliyuga, after all: the age of the fallen. But speaking of ages, it's incredible to think these are tales from two centuries ago: the concerns are identical to those of South Asia today: religious divides, caste, bride prices, oppression of women, a culturally denatured generation of middle-class intellectuals. It's only when they mention that they're riding horse carriages rather than Tata Nanos that you realise how ancient this is.

Interesting thing about my earlier concerns about whether this is a Bangladeshi text, since the characters aren't Muslim. There are indeed Muslims, but they're marginal, sometimes exotic figures - an ancient Mughal princess in False Hope, a murderous but kindly sweetmeat seller in Kabuliwallah, a secret mistress of a Brahmin land-owner in A Problem Solved. 

What makes this Bangladeshi for me is the call of the river Padma: the flooding waters that strand lovers on islands and swallow up firstborn sons. Floods are very Bangladeshi indeed.

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Representative Quote: from Guest.

 Early monsoon clouds formed in the sky. The village-river had been dried up for weeks; there was water only in holes here and there; small boats lay stuck in these pools of muddy water, and the dry river-bed was rutted with bullock-cart tracks. But now, like Parvati returning to her parents' home, gurgling waters returned to the empty arms of the village; naked children danced and shouted on the river-bank, jumped into the water with voracious joy as if trying to embrace the river; the villagers gazed at the river like a dear friend; a huge wave of life and delight rolled through the parched village. There were boats big and small with cargoes from far and wide; in the evening the ghat resounded with the songs of foreign boatmen. The villages along the river had spent the year confined to their own small worlds: now, with the rains, the vast outside world had come in its earth-coloured watery chariot, carrying wondrous gifts to the villages, as if on a visit to its daughters. Rustic smallness was temporarily subsumed by pride of contact with the world; everything became more active; the bustle of distant cities came to this sleepy region, and the whole sky sang.

  Next book: Theater of Memory: The Plays of Kalidasa.

It's Rabindranath Tagore's birthday!

His 151st birthday, to be precise. And I'm reading his short stories!

He was born on 7 May 1861 and died on 7 August 1941, as I learned from Wikipedia. First Asian winner of a Nobel Prize, too.

And as you can see, he was a FOX. Like a cross between Jesus and Santa Claus, only Hindu. That's him acting in one of his plays, The Genius of Valmiki:

The truth is, I'm feeling pretty guilty about using Tagore for Bangladesh. He lived in British Bengal, and was born and died in the bit that's currently in India. Plus, he was Hindu, and wrote about Hindus, while Bangladesh is Muslim.

On the other hand, Bangladesh venerates him as a national hero and uses one of his songs as its national anthem. Tagore also happened to write most of his short stories while managing his ancestral estates in Shelaidaha, in present-day Bangladesh.

 I was pretty sure Mr Tagore was my best choice (there aren't, sadly, a lot of internationally famous Bangladeshi writers around today), until I realised I could do books by the inventor of microfinance and founder of Grameen Bank, Mohammad Yunus:

Also a Nobel Prize Winner! For peace, though. Does that count?

If any of you strongly believe I should ditch Tagore and read Banker to the Poor or Creating a World Without Poverty, do leave me some comments.

RIP Wislawa Szymborska (1923-2012)

I just heard about this via Facebook. Lung cancer. She was 88, so she'd had good innings. Still, it makes me want to yell out cuss words. Here's the New York Times obituary.



She was the first poet whose work really amazed me, I think. I first encountered her in an e-mail of poems sent by Alfian Sa'at, I think, with the subject-line "Wislawa Red-Hot Lava". Ever since then, I've tried to imitate that sense of everythingness, that sense of speaking of the whole world, to the whole world, in my poems. Haven't succeeded much.

Book 71, Mauritius: "The Prospector" by JMG Le Clézio

Yep, yet another Nobel Laureate! Mind you, Le Clézio was born and bred in France, but his dad's from Mauritius and he holds dual French-Mauritian citizenship and he occasionally lives on the island too. So, yeah, he counts. (Still feel guilty I'm not doing Joseph Tsang Mang Kin's The Hakka Epic, though.


As for the book, which is Le Clézio's "crowning achievement" - well, I honestly spent most of it being puzzled over why he won that Nobel. Not because it's badly written - far from it! - but the fact is that the content is far from revolutionary. It's basically a historical novel, telling the story of a poor white colonial kid named Alexis L'Étang living from the late 19th to early 20th centuries. All the necessary exotica's thrown in there: shipwrecks, jungles, plantation life, hurricanes, a sexy and mysteriously wise island girl, worker revolts and a stint in the trenches of World War One.

True, it's written quite beautifully: lush but distanced descriptions of nature and remembered folklore. But the modernist project here is quite subtle: no breaking the form as Orhan Pamuk or Luis Rafael Sánchez do. And remember, the Nobel Committee usually selects someone who's either a political or a poetic revolutionary. Where's the beef?

I only started to get a sense of transcendence when Alexis returns from the war and returns to his obsessive project of attempting to excavate the treasure of the Unknown Corsair, so he can buy back the land his uncle stole from his father: the unforgotten Eden in Boucan Valley, where the tree of knowledge was planted, where he swam with his black companion Denis in the sea. The grand, relentless, desperate search for gold, guided by ancient maps and symbols, seemed to be an allegory for the the writer's craft in uncovering literature from his soul.

And yet the story ends with Alexis accepting the futility of it all. So either Le Clézio's an extreme pessimist or my exegesis fails.


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Representative quote:
In the evenings, while the twilight deepens, I sit in the sand on the dunes and dream of Ouma and her metal-coloured body. I make a drawing of her with a sharp piece of flint on a basalt block near where the reeds start. But when I want to write the date I realize that I don't know what day or month it is. For a moment I think of running to the telegraph office as I did before, to ask: What day is it? But then I realize that it wouldn't mean anything to me, that the date is of no importance.

Next book: James Mancham's Seychelles Global Citizen, from the Seychelles (duh).

Book 60, South Africa: "Burger's Daughter" by Nadine Gordimer

Hey look! It's almost exactly a year since I started this reading journey! Sure, it's not 80 books, but 60 ain't bad either.

And South Africa's a good country to be in for our anniversary. Besides the fact that it's an important nation with an epic political and literary history (I've read Alan Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country, Athol Fugard's , and J.M. Coetzee'sWaiting for the Barbarians and Summertime before), I'm actually going to the country in June! Johannesburg, Cape Town and Kruger National Park! How cool is that?


But on to the monumental Burger's Daughter now, a book written in the wake of the Soweto uprising, initially banned in South Africa and requested as prison reading material by Mandela himself.

The Wikipedia article says the book was banned for "propagating Communist opinions", "creating a psychosis of revolution and rebellion", and "making several unbridled attacks against the authority entrusted with the maintenance of law and order and the safety of the state", but 17 years after the fall of apartheid it comes across as far more complex. The truth is, it contains not only the urgent and obvious need to bring down the racist laws of unequal justice but also the contradictions of the characters' ideologies: Lionel Burger and his daughter Rosa are white Communist South African activists (he by conviction, she by inheritance), but their comrades and hangers-on argue over the misplacedness of a white African identity, never mind that your ancestors have been there for 300 years; the impossibility of ever rectifying for the privilege you have by race; and then what about the fact that Communism's worst abuses have been revealed by Solzhenitsyn; what kind of utopia are you chasing after that?

(Really; it just goes to prove again that only the most insecure governments will censor political art. Artis always polysemous, but a narrow-minded policy-maker will be unable to see that.)

It's funny; the story begins with the life imprisonment of Lionel Burger so I thought this was going to be one of the political detention narratives I've been reading so much of recently. But of course the tale's about the eponymous daughter: how she deals with being reared for struggle against the government while not being of a heroine's disposition herself - she knows the system's wrong, she's just very lost as the last of her line.

It resonates. I mean, I've been involved as a volunteer against our own unjust system of government, and people think I'm bad-ass 'cos I wrote poems about it but the truth is I mostly use my ass for sitting on; I could name you about two hundred Singaporeans who do more activism than I do off the top of my head. And I'm not even doing much writing either: just as Rosa spends her time hanging out with dissolute young white academics who build yachts in their backyards or study Spanish literature, or else with passionate activists who accept her as one of their own but argue over her head.

And what does she do to heal herself? She gets a passport (no easy thing for the scion of a political scapegoat) and leaves the country. And is renewed, somehow (the book is terribly rhizomatic, perspectives shifting from first person to third and even to her father's biographer and the state that's investigating her, but there is a wonderful climax) and returns home and things change, maybe not of her own doing, but she seems to have figured out a little more of herself by the end when she's in prison hearing her fellow comrades singing Miriam Makeba's click song (hey, that's a link with the author of our Swaziland stop).

Everyone's telling me I need to do the same. Get off this island and write properly. See how, see how.


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In the meantime, may I point out that I don't think I've ever seen the experience of a beautiful young woman being presented with such intimacy and complexity by a writer before - a perspective neither defiant nor heroic nor victimised; a clear intelligence that has dignity yet a frustrated agency, haunted by a past that should empower her - a bit of a female Hamlet, really. The book requires patience, but it is quite, quite remarkable.

Representative quote:The middle-aged cosmetic saleswoman and the few customers not too self-absorbed to glance up saw a kaffir-boetie girl being kissed by a black. That's all. They knew no better. That house was closer to reaching a kind of reality through your kind of reality than I understood. You and I argued in the cottage. Sex and death, you said. The only reality.

Next book:Mpho Matsepo Nthunya's Singing Away the Hunger, from Lesotho.

Book 48, Trinidad and Tobago: “A House for Mr Biswas” by V.S. Naipaul

Yet another Nobel Prizewinner from the Caribbean. How the hell do they churn out so many? Been ploughing through this 642-page monster all through my promotional trip to London.


Truth is, I’m not a huge fan. At first I was in awe of how Dickensian it was: the way Naipaul paints his characters in a simultaneously comic and tragic light, with that air of distance – Mr Biswas is named Mr Biswas by the narrator even when he’s a newborn, having his ill fortune told by the pundit.

But as the book goes on, the tragedy turns into farce. Biswas is a Born Loser, failing as a son, failing as a trainee pundit, failing as a husband (and really, no matter how obnoxious the Tulsi family is, his surliness to his benefactors and abuse of his wife is inexcusable), failing in half his jobs as well (though he’s okay as a journalist and sign-painter and just mediocre as a civil servant), also failing as a buyer and builder of houses, which is the whole point of the book: owning a house of one’s own, where one can die with some dignity.

What’s odd amongst all this depressing fuckuppery is that Biswas actually improves his material goods and status over the course of his life: he starts out as a plantation worker’s barefoot son and ends off as a journalist who has his own place, never mind that it’s rickety and it’s left him 4,000 bucks in debt. Is Naipaul saying that development doesn’t count for that much? Or is the idea of the flawed house of one’s own an analogy for Trinidad’s independence (achieved one year after the publication of the book): a mitigated triumph, purchased at unreasonable cost but to be cherished nonetheless? Or maybe it’s just biographical: according to the Wikipedia entry, a lot of it’s based on the life of Naipaul’s own father.

I guess it’s still amazing that a book from Trinidad was able to break into the world market all the way back in 1961. Aside from that, I can’t say it’s worth your time.


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Oh boy, but that's the entire Caribbean archipelago finished and done with! Now back to South America.

Representative quote: How terrible it would have been, at this time, to be without it: to have died among the Tulsis, amid the squalor of that large, disintegrating and indifferent family; to have left Shama and the children among them, in one room; worse, to have lived without even attempting to lay claim to one's portion of the earth; to have lived and died as one had been born, unnecessary and unaccommodated.

Next book: Rómulo Gallegos's Doña Bárbara, from Venezuela.

Book 45, St Lucia: “Omeros” by Derek Walcott

Epic poem FTW!

Oddly enough, I think I’ve heard Omeros being talked about more as a novel in verse, like Dorothy Porter’s The Monkey’s Mask, rather than a Homeric epic as its title obviously suggests.

Methinks the epic title is much more justly deserved: after all, the narrative line here is constellated and mysterious as only the laws of poetry would allow. The characters are humble in profession but are based on figures from the Iliad and the Odyssey, and the poet insistently claims these ebony descendants of slaves are the equals of the marmoreal Hellenes, and indeed they undergo spirit quests and epiphanies and ritual battles and are the most beautiful women in the world all the same.


(Yeah, we’ve had a stretch of boring covers these past few weeks.)

Truth is, I can’t quite match every character to its corresponding figure in Greek Myth: Achille, Hector, Philoctete and Helen are easy, of course, and Ma Kilman must be Circe and Maud Plunkett Penelope because of their witchery and quilting respectively.

But Ulysses corresponds to Seven Seas, Major Plunkett and the narrator himself, each of whom are wanderers of the globe: yes, Walcott intrudes in first-person, expounding on racism in Concord and imperialism in London before making it back to St Lucia to attend one of his own characters’ funerals. Good of him to intrude, really: not quite the self-indulgence you get in Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate, but instead a kind of humility, recognizing the artificiality of him, a Dante-spouting globalised academic, daring to represent the subaltern mackerel fishers in their pirogues and village huts.

Oh, and the American tourists are the parasitical suitors of Penelope in Ithaca. Took me a while to figure that out.

Warning to those of you who’ll pick it up yourselves: the beginning’s mighty confusing, so give it time. You’ll be rolling with the maritime illogic of the poem in a few dozen pages.

And how nice that Walcott specifically sets his story in St Lucia, with all its geographical features intact, never mind that no-one’s heard of Castries and Gros-Îlet and Soufrière. Somehow the way a few other writers set their tales in generic or fictional localities depresses me a little. We citizens of small countries find it difficult to take pride in where we come from sometimes.


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And ah, he makes metered slant rhyme look so easy.

Representative quote:

I sang of quiet Achille, Afolabe’s son,
who never ascended in an elevator,
who had no passport, since the horizon needs none,

never begged nor borrowed, was nobody’s waiter,
whose end, when it comes, will be a death by water
(which is not for this book, which will remain unknown

and unread by him). I sang the only slaughter
that brought him delight, and that from necessity –
of fish, sang the channels of his back in the sun.

I sang our wide country, the Caribbean Sea.

Next book: Kamau Brathwaite’s The Arrivants, from Barbados.

Book 26, Mexico: "El laberinto de la soledad" by Octavio Paz

Gracias a Dios! After half a month, I’ve finally finished this damned book – Paz’s essay El laberinto de la soledad, his postscript including the beautiful Crítica de la pirámide, and his interview with Calude Fell, Vuelta a “El laberinto de la soledad”. (I spared myself the lengthy intro and the essays on Mexico and the United States that had been added on, though. Not quite part of the same set of documents.)

I’ve read Paz’s poems before – didn’t find them too memorable – but I chose him because I feel like I’ve read a number of canonical Mexican texts and authors already: Sor Juana, Carlos Fuentes, Laura Esquivel and Carmen Boullosa – plus I had this volume lying around in my library, bought during my student days when I was sure I was going to carry on with Latin American studies in a private capacity.


(As you can see, my copy has suffered under my care.)

But really, this is an odd book. It was tough going for me, with my rusty Spanish: Paz psychoanalyses the whole of Mexican culture and history, pre-Colombian, colonial and revolutionary, specifically outlining why he feels the intelligentsia has been inadequate, why the ideology of positivism was oppressive and the Zapatista movement was revolutionary by dint of its return to the roots of pre-Hispanic culture, and why there needs to be more international cooperation between the countries of the third world.

Jésucristo. And all I’d heard about the text before was its identification of La Malinche (Cortés’s translator-cum-lover) as La Chingada, the “fucked” or “raped” one, as well as the affirmation of Mexican identity as based in Euro-indigenous syncretism.

Y’know, it starts out very comprehensibly, and with a whole lotta poetry: a contrast between Mexicans (including Mexican-Americans) with white North Americans, settling on the image of the brutish pachuco as their iconic representative; then a dwelling on the nature of the unending festivals of the land and the notion of the ever-present Mexican mask (who knew that Mexicans were inscrutable?). A little heavy-handed with its constant reiterations of the condition of solitude, and kinda Mexicentric (seriously, women all over the world are oppressed by the virgin-whore binary, not just mexicanas), but still very beautifully written.

It’s when Paz starts tackling the subject formally through a chronological survey that things get wearisome. Still, it’s fascinating the little insights and stories you get even here: his clear respect for the Baroque writing of the 17th century nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the last of the Spanish Golden Age writers, superior even to the poet Luís de Góngora because she plainly found it joyous to seek for knowledge. Also his concern for the naming of Mexico after the capital of the Aztec empire, México-Tenochtitlán – for the Aztecs were cruel and oppressive towards all the other indigenous cultures; they didn’t even represent Mesoamerican civilization at its peak (that was the 10th century theocracies, e.g. the Maya) – yet they’re now venerated as victims and evidence of the glory of pre-European Mexico. And also his insight that each of the dictators of Mexican history seem to be incarnations of the triumphant conqueror Tezcatlipoca, from Cortés to Porfirio Diáz…

It occurs to me that this will mean nothing to the vast majority of my readers, since they’re mostly from Singapore. Beg pardon. Still, I recommend this book: just read it in your own mother tongue, so you’ll have an easier time than I did. Paz calls it an “exercise of the critical imagination” rather than a philosophical essay, noting that criticism is a compromise for him between poetry and activism. Pretty trenchant thought there.

And then there’s the universality of it: the intellectuals of all the developing world are usually lost in a similar labyrinth of solitude, searching for communion. From what I understand, the remedy is either a revolution or a street festival. Singapore government, please take note: we need more parties.


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Representative quote: El mexicano se esconde bajo muchas máscaras, que luego arroja un día de fiesta o de duelo, del mismo modo que la nación ha desgarrado todas las formas que la asfixiaban. Pero no hemos encontrado aún esa que reconcilie nuestra libertad con el orden, la palabra con el acto y ambos con una evidencia que ya no será sobrenatural, sino humana: la de nuestros mismos.

Next book: Carlos Eire’s Waiting for Snow in Havana! Yep, I'm finally venturing forth into the Caribbean!

Hey! Mario Vargas Llosa just won the Nobel Prize for Literature!

First time Peru's won it, too. Click here for the news, and here for my reaction to his first novel,The Time of the Hero.

Still slogging away at fellow Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz... and at the layouts of my latest book, GASPP!

Book 24, Guatemala: "Men of Maize" by Miguel Ángel Asturias

Whoa. I wanna write like this.

The dense, fructiform imagery of the prose; the recurrence of folk myths and pre-colonial iconography amidst the master's tongue; the epic consolidation of five hundred years' history into maybe twenty years' narrative time; the seamless blending of realism and magic and poetry.

And all this twenty years before One Hundred Years of Solitude. (Sorry, Gabo keeps creeping into the picture. But that was another continent, and besides, the wench is entering dementia.)

It's shocking that so few people know about Asturias, despite his Nobel Prize, despite his life of political involvement and modernismo and exile in Argentina, despite the fact that his son actually took on the name of Gaspar Ilóm, a character from Men of Maize, and became a pro-indigenous rights freedom fighter against the genocidal government during the civil war.

(I only know about him 'cos I did my Spanish immersion in Quetzaltenango, where one of my short texts was by him: a wonderful little fable about a Jesuit trying to trick a tribe out of human sacrifice by forecasting an eclipse only to end up gutted on the obsidian slab due to the fact that they'd calculated its coming centuries ago, thank you very much.)

This book reads like a post-colonial Ulysses - kudos to the translator, Gerald Martin, who's transliterated onomatopeia and resorted to weird neologisms and had to figure out all these local plant names, amate and atole and ceiba and chayote and chichita and chilacayote and chilate and copal - glossary in the back for the perplexed.

Only difference is, instead of feeling like the guy's being onanistic with the lexicon, you feel that real third-world Marxist sorrow of being removed from your cultural roots and your means of production: he keeps hammering home the same damn eponymous point that in the old days the Indians grew maize as a sacred crop for food, and they grew just what they needed, but turning it into a capitalist plantation crop just destroys the earth and makes everyone poor.

Plus this division of the book into chapters named after people who mystically disappear: Gaspar Ilóm, María Tecún, the Deer of the Seventh Fire (i.e. the curandero) and the Coyote-Postman - yes, nagualism i.e. transformation of men into their spirit animals is a huge theme in this book. From the Indian warrior fighting back the colonial planters to the Ladino postman arguing with the Chinese storekeeper over the shawl of his runaway wife. Each generation loses some connection to the past, as well as some of that thick wonderful poetry that infused the beginning, turning instead to Wild West saloon talk, which is still pretty fascinating, nonetheless.

And yet the Coyote-Postman Señor Nicho falls into the world of magic in the end, meeting the firefly wizards and the curandero who became a deer and Gaspar Ilóm himself while in animal shape/trance, and all the figures from the previous stories reappear in the flesh or in legend, María Tecúm become an etiology for the spirited rock that lures people to plummet over the edge of the mountains, the soldier who sold his soul to the devil now plagued with a hernia, hanging out with Machojón's ever-loyal fiancée who grows old waiting for his return in his reeking sombrero as she sells butchered pigmeat in her hole in the wall.

Amazing stuff. Sad thing is, the copy of this book isn't even on the shelves of the library: you've got to delve into Repository Used Reference and pay a reservation fee to get at it. That ain't right.

(Though it is cool to see the date-due stamp chop paper still on the inside. FTW!)


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Representative quote: Not even the ash of his cigar will fall. Hands of darkness brandishing daggers will force him to suicide. But it will be only his shadow, a skin of shadow among the yuccas. The bullet will burst in his temples, he will fall to the ground, but other dark hands will lift his body, they will mount him on his horse, and will begin to shrink him horse and all until he is the size of a piece of sugar candy. The close-knit throng of yuccas will wave their daggers, daggers stained red with fire right up to their hilts.

Next book: Zee Edgell's Beka Lamb, from Belize.

Book 16, Peru: "The Time of the Hero" by Mario Vargas Llosa

Gah! Yes, It’s been a while since I made progress on the map, but I was out of Singapore, swamped with work, and then chose a 400-pager to complete.

I’ve read Vargas Llosa before: Who Killed Palomino Molero and In Praise of the Stepmother, both of which were good, but not thrilling. Still, he’s universally regarded as Peru’s greatest novelist (and I’d already read César Vallejo's Black Angels, so I couldn’t quite switch to the greatest poet), so I figured I might as well read one of his more acclaimed works – Death In the Andes seemed popular, but in the end I decided on the book that launched his career as a vital author of the Latin American boom (and got him in shit with the military government), The Time of the Hero.


And it’s really good. I didn’t take to it straight away: after all, it’s one of the malest books I’ve read in a while, set in the Leoncio Pradio Military Academy: all the savagery of teenage boys in a monosocial environment plus the pressures of boarding school plus the pressures of the military, a dog-eat-dog-then-bugger-a-chicken-to-death environment soaked in pisco spirits and cigarette smoke and blood; barely a sympathetic character in sight. Plus the stream-of-consciousness, who’s-in-first-person-now? narrative style is a little hard to follow.

But the story draws you in – Alberto the Poet’s twisted crush on the penniless girl Teresa and his weird power relationship with Arana the Slave and Jaguar, the head honcho of the dorm, who organised their collective resistance to the Year Fives when they were being hazed. And through a bizarre chain of events (I won’t spoil it for you), you end up not knowing which of the characters is the greater hero – which one of them, for all his rottenness, has the more admirable qualities that drive them to resist the system for at least one point in their lives.

Rather nice that I’m able to recognize the cities and ethnic differences they talk about after my trip to Peru this year: Lima, Callao, Puno, Juliaca, Arequipa, and the Japanese/Chinese/African/European/Indian mestizaje that happens in the society, yielding all sorts of racist comments that really aren’t the same as North American racism because it really all comes down to class in the end. Also interesting is the realisation of Faulkner’s profound influence on Latin America, how his Modernism was reinterpreted decades later for the rejuvenation of another section of world literature.

Worth the read. Unfortunately, there’s only one copy in stock at Central Lending. I’ll return it pronto.


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Representative quote: The chicken was on the ground, gasping. That peasant Cava, can’t they see what he’s doing with his hand? He likes to play with himself, but it’s dead, the Boa’s the one who gets a hard-on even when he’s marching. We’ve drawn lots, everything’s ready, screw her or we’ll screw you like the llamas in your village. Don’t you know a story? What if we get the Poet here to tell us one of those stories that make your cock stand up? But that’s horseshit, I can get a hard-on just by thinking about it, it’s all a matter of will power. What if I get a dose? What’s the matter, loverboy, what’s got into you, peasant, don’t you know the Boa is cleaner than your mother ever since he’s been screwing Skimpy? Where did you get those crazy ideas, haven’t they told you chickens are more sanitary than dogs?

Next book: Luis Sepulveda’s The Old Man Who Read Love Stories, from Ecuador.

Book 15, Chile: “Fulgor y muerte de Joaquín Murieta” by Pablo Neruda

Yessss!!! Finally in South America! (Though in the real world, I’m currently in Munich. How did that happen?)

I’m doing an obscure play by Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda in the original Spanish, not to show off my erudition, but simply because I picked up a second-hand copy in Brazil a few months ago, and I’d never finish it otherwise, despite the volume itself being so slim. Truth is, I have doubts about its validity, given that the story mostly takes place in California during the Gold Rush – Murieta himself was a hstorical bandit whose origins may not even have been Chilean, but Mexican.


And yet! Neruda’s piece is so full of patriotism that it hella qualifies. (Plus we’ve got a big opening section about the departure from the port of Valparaíso, a location the miners long for throughout the play – when they’re not talking about their own villages and districts.) And according to Neruda’s account, Murieta was a hero who retaliated to the gringo Americans’ constant lynching of Chileans and Mexicans – specifically to the murder and rape of his wife Teresa – by going on a rampage and slaughtering white guys and gals willy-nilly (that’s the “fulgor”, me hearties), before getting mowed down himself (that’s the “muerte”).

It’s a psychedelic trip – most of the play’s performed as an oratorio, with choruses of men and women in poetry, and for some reason Murieta and Teresa never appear on stage, portrayed only by their voices offstage, refusing to embody the great idols of this legend, until the final scene when Murieta’s decapitated head speaks to us from its resting place on Teresa’s tomb – and then the audience breaks out in pre-distributed song decrying the war in Vietnam (this is another 1960s piece) and how people of colour will overcome. Strange, considering that Chileans themselves are pretty white.

But there’s also surrealism – el Caballero Tramposo, a devious trickster figure, who steals everyone’s watches for the gringo establishment, and even the Galgos (gringos) themselves, who gather in secret to recite a catechism of how they’re uniting to keep the coloured folks at bay. Not subtle, man.


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And there’s also slapstick, with the hardened miner character of Tresdedos bumping heads with the customs official Reyes, who demands loads of paperwork only to decide none of this matches up to the prospect of gold, leaves his job, and spends the rest of the play (quite sensibly) moaning about when they’re going back to Chile.

Rather fun. Haven’t seen Neruda so political before – all we read is poems by him about how gloriously beautiful women are, or panthers, or artichokes, or socks.

I’ll read Isabel Allende another time. Seriously, though, I haven’t read a single work by her. Shameful.

Representative quote:
Canción masculine

Así como hoy matan negros
antes fueron mexicanos,
así matando chilenos,
nicaragüenses, peruanos,
se desataban los gringos
con instintos inhumanos
hasta que por la vereda
pasa un caballo de seda,
hasta que por los caminos
galopa nuestro destino
y como dos amapolas
se encendieron sus pistolas.
Quién les disputa el terreno
y quién de frente los reta?
Es un bandido chileno!
Es nuestro Joaquín Murieta!

Next book: Some novel by Mario Vargas Llosa from Peru.. Screwed if I know.