Category Archives: Asia

Book of the month: Yun Ko-eun

December 23, 2025 By in Asia, Book of the month, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

‘What have you got in that you’re excited about?’ I asked Hunter at the Folkestone Bookshop when I popped in a while back.

As often happens when I walk into that place, this was the start of a long, fascinating conversation, in which I was ushered from shelf to shelf and table to table, and shown multiple tempting titles, many of them originally written in languages other than English.

I bought several, but one in particular stuck in my mind: Yun Ko-eun’s Art on Fire, translated from the Korean by Lizzie Buehler. It was the premise that got me. Since I read the hilarious Lake Como by Srđjan Valjarević, translated from the Serbian by Alice Copple-Tošić, for Serbia during my 2012 year of reading the world, I’ve had a weakness for novels that poke fun at art residencies. Indeed, beyond the titles I’ve featured on this blog, one of my favourite reads of this year was Ella Frears’s Goodlord, a book-length narrative poem in the form of an email to an estate agent, which features a section describing a disastrous experience at an artists’ retreat.

Art on Fire sounded like it was cut from similar cloth. Struggling artist turned food-delivery person An Yiji thinks her luck has turned when she is awarded a residency at the prestigious Robert Foundation in California. But there is a catch: the programme is overseen by Robert, a wonderdog who takes photographs and selects the participants, and at the end of each artist’s time at the Foundation, he chooses one piece they have created to be burned.

As the premise suggests, this is a novel that teeters on the surreal. So much about An Yiji’s experiences is recognisable – from the Californian wildfires that delay her collection from the airport to the lumbering mechanisms of the art world – and yet everything feels as though the contrast has been shunted up a notch or two, making the colours faintly cartoonish.

Nowhere is this more true than with the figure of Robert, the Foundation’s eponymous and unnervingly gifted dog, who communicates by means of a mysterious black box and several interpreters. He has very particular views on how artists should interact with him and writes An Yiji a series of passive-aggressive letters that keep her constantly on edge.

Coupled with the narrator-protagonist’s heightened mental state, this makes for an intense and often very funny read. An Yiji is so riddled with imposter syndrome that when the Robert Foundation’s director phones to offer her the placement, she assumes it’s a spam call. Perhaps as a result of the run of disappointments that have dogged her career, she tends to look for the worst in situations. To read her encounter with the skewed logic of the Foundation is to be taken into the fraught mindset many of us may have experienced during the height of the pandemic, when months of isolation made even the simplest things strange.

This unpeeling from reality allows Yun Ko-eun to show up the cracks in many of the things we take for granted. The uneasy relationship between art and commercialism comes under the spotlight, for example, when representatives from the nearby town of Q court An Yiji in the hopes that she will feature their businesses and settings in her work. There’s a brilliant interrogation of the concept of authenticity, which is approached from many angles and comes to a head through the fact that An Yiji’s story is being developed into a film by an actor she met on her way to the residency, who needs her to work with him and the director to decide the ending.

Perhaps most fascinating of all is the discussion of translation that runs throughout the pages. Robert’s approach to communication is intriguing: ‘While humans communicated with one another line by line […] Robert saved the entire space-time of a conversation in his head, like an enormous file transfer system.’ This means that there are several stages – and people – required to compress and reorder human utterances into messages he can digest. What’s more, although An Yiji speaks English, during their conversations she is required to speak through a Korean translator. She becomes enraged when she realises the intermediary is swapping her words for terms Robert prefers during their conversations, with the result that ‘phoenix’ becomes ‘Korean pigeon’ and ‘coffin’ becomes ‘supercar’.

Knowing that we are reading all this in Lizzie Buehler’s translation adds another level to the satire, making this a wonderful example of a book where the translation offers even more than the original.

And Art on Fire certainly offers plenty to start with. It is a rare instance of a deeply funny, feel-good book that has important, thought-provoking things to say about the world we inhabit. Reading it, I was reminded of the words of Eritrean writer Alemseged Tesfai, who told me about the use of humour in his work: ‘Say the unsayable light-heartedly and maybe it hits its target.’ Art on Fire hits its target repeatedly and gives us a lot of entertainment in the process. Highly recommended.

Art on Fire by Yun Ko-eun, translated from the Korean by Lizzie Buehler (Scribe, 2025)

Thanks so much to everyone who has read my work, attended my events and bought my books this year. Your support, enthusiasm and suggestions play a huge part in keeping me going. If you’d like to join the free Incomprehension Workshop taster on Tuesday 20 January 2026 at 7.30pm GMT, please register here: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/mvu2Yq8uRdCOZCinIaj_kA#/registration

Wishing you all a very happy New Year and many wonderful reads!

Book of the month: Alla Gorbunova

November 28, 2025 By in Asia, Europe, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , 2 Comments
Saints Peter and Paul Cathedral, Saint Petersburg

Books come to me from many directions these days. Emails from publishers. Messages from readers of this blog. Suggestions from other writers. Reviews. Social media posts. Conversations with booklovers around the world.

In many cases, I hear about books before they are available. And while I try not to focus on the latest thing on this blog (because good books have long tails and I think the relentless emphasis on the new is one of the book industry’s many problems), I frequently find myself tempted to pre-order things that will be published months down the line.

So it often happens that a book arrives in the post or drops onto my e-reader seemingly out of the blue, long after I’ve forgotten who or what led me to be interested in it in the first place.

This latest book of the month is a good example. Some weeks ago, the cryptically titled (Th)ings and (Th)oughts appeared on my Kindle. As titles on e-readers cannot be easily flicked through or turned around, I started to read it with almost no idea what it was or where it was ‘from’ – much like the participants in my incomprehension workshops, who gamely tackle texts with no contextual information to anchor their reading.

If I’d had a physical copy, publisher Deep Vellum’s blurb on the back cover would no doubt have left me equally intrigued but perhaps none the wiser:

‘Twisting the art of the fairytale into something entirely her own, Alla Gorbunova’s (Th)ings and (Th)oughts is a spellbinding collection of thematically-linked short prose. A teacher contemplates leaving her husband after learning that he doesn’t have a soul; a clerk realizes that the only way to survive in contemporary Russia is to go insane; cars fall inexplicably from the sky; skeletons turn up in abandoned lots; a hapless everyman named Ivan Petrovich travels through a madcap Boschian afterlife, coming face-to-face with his own shortcomings, but failing, time after time, to get it right.’

‘The only way to survive in contemporary Russia is to go insane?’ Surely it’s not possible for someone living inside Russia today (as the little I can find about Gorbunova online suggests she is) to write such things?

In fact, Gorbunova goes a lot further than the blurb suggests, depicting Putin with horns in one story and engaging in a range of reflections on evil and corruption that make little secret of their targets. In one of the Ivan Petrovich pieces, the title hero is tasked with interviewing students and awarding marks according to what bribes have been offered.

As the Russianness of the text began to swim into focus, these things started to challenge my reading. As I explore in the politics chapter of Relearning to Read – in which I discuss my correspondence with Alemseged Tesfai, a writer in Eritrea, widely believed to be one of the most restricted and censored societies on earth – reading a book from a place that we believe has active state censorship can make strange things happen in our minds. The knowledge that the words on the page might not be freely expressed or might have exposed their author to risk has a disruptive impact. As I read (Th)ings and (Th)oughts, I veered between fear for Gorbunova’s safety and incredulity at what she had got away with, which then made me suspicious of whether she has special privileges and is a kind of protected state artist or whether the collection is a form of double bluff, a cynical attempt to convince naïve Westerners like me that the Russian government is much more open and less restrictive than I’ve been led to believe. I found myself reading through the eyes of Putin’s censors as I imagine them to be, on the lookout for subversive statements and turns of phrase, struggling to relax into the text.

Even the discovery that the original collection was published in Saint Petersburg in 2017 when the situation certainly appeared rather different did little to ease my mind. I thought of a conversation I had recently with Uyghur poet Tahir Hamut Izgil and translator Joshua Freeman, whose powerful memoir Waiting to Be Arrested at Night I featured earlier this year. One of the mechanisms the Chinese government often employs is retrospective bans, rendering certain statements unacceptable after the fact and arresting writers for books that have been published with no problem years before. Surely a similar risk could menace Gorbunova here?

It’s testament to Gorbunova’s writing, and Elina Alter’s translation, that the storytelling is strong enough to drown out this noise. This is, in part, due to something she shares with Alemseged Tesfai – a love of and gift for humour. ‘Say the unsayable light-heartedly and maybe it hits its target,’ Tesfai told me.

(Th)ings and (Th)oughts seems to take a similar approach. Many of the stories have an absurdist slant that reminds me of the work of Nikolai Gogol. Others trade off their brevity, pulling out the rug from under their characters so that the piece ends with a bathetic thud. In addition, Gorbunova seems to relish mismatching situations and registers to wring humour out of them. From the psychoanalyst drafting a memo to advise clients on how to navigate the ‘difficult circumstances’ that come from being consigned to hell for eternity to the angel handing out iPads and iPhones, there is a mischievous thread of linguistic playfulness woven through this collection.

Yet this lightheartedness is by no means lightweight. A deep understanding of human psychology underpins the pieces so that characters are often at their most relatable when they are behaving most perversely. Mishenka the Contrarian is a great example – a man who because of the cruelties he has witnessed, has made an art of transforming ‘acorns of suffering into the gold of gladness’. I also loved the brief portrait of the art critic N, who risks blowing up his life by posting everything he’s always wanted to say on Facebook.

Through it all runs a sense of affectionate cynicism. Things will probably turn out for the worst, the stories seem to be saying, but it might not happen. And we’ve got to play the cards we’re dealt. Life goes on and we are all part of it, all sitting in an ‘auditorium filled with laughter – a laughter heard since the beginning of the world, as people laugh at the shame and suffering of the flesh – involuntary, helpless laughter, mixed with fear.’

Storytelling may be imperfect, compromised and subject to suppression and malign influence, but it is the best thing we have, even, and perhaps especially, when it is frustrated. The final piece portrays an orphanage filled with poets, a few of whom go on to work for a literary publication:

‘The magazine was published once every seven years on clumsily pasted-together sheets of fragile, yellowing paper, in a run of seven issues, which were all ritually torn apart and scattered over the sea unread, and it was called Hope.’

(Th)ings and (Th)oughts by Alla Gorbunova, translated from the Russian by Elina Alter (Deep Vellum, 2025)

Picture: ‘Saints Peter and Paul Cathedral, Saint Petersburg’ by Pedro Szekely on flickr.com

Book of the month: Ning Ken

September 25, 2025 By in Asia, Book of the month, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

One of the lovely things about this project is the interactions I’ve had through it with writers around the world. The Chinese literary master Ning Ken is a great example. After I gave a quote to support Thomas Moran’s English translation of Tibetan Sky, I received a copy of the finished book sent from Beijing, inscribed with a message of thanks from the author as shown above. His publisher tells me it means:

‘If my humble work surprised you, that is exactly what I hoped for. Rarity makes it all the more precious. Thank you for your poetically concise critique.’

The novel certainly did surprise me. Like the image that its title suggests – of a Tibetan sky burial, in which a dismembered body is left on a stone plinth for eagles to bear aloft – this is a book that turns many accepted (Western) norms upside down.

On the face of it, the novel is a love story. The troubled divorcé Wang Mojie, who came to rural Tibet on a ‘Teach for China’ scheme, encounters the alluring and mystifying Ukyi Lhamo, who has spent time studying in France. Both are on a quest for meaning, and they bond over their lack of fulfilment and conviction that answers may be found in mystical Tibet, but as Wang Mojie urges Ukyi Lhamo to satisfy his masochistic fantasies, they find themselves pushed to and beyond the limits of human connection.

Through all this run Wang Mojie’s interior monologues and authorial reflections. ‘As the author of this novel, I will interrupt the narrative from time to time with thoughts and comments,’ Ning Ken, or whoever he is positing as the author, informs us near the start. They certainly make good on this promise, filling the text with thought-provoking and sometimes mischievous asides that often undermine and sometimes soften the characters, as well as sharing some of their own struggles with and doubts about the process of writing. Indeed, it’s no spoiler to say that the book ends with a lengthy authorial disquisition on the unreality of endings, bringing in reflections on Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out and discussions with the characters in the novel about what would have been a fitting resolution. ‘While fiction is, of course, made up, we should think of it as the art form of the exploration of the possible, fiction imagines different possible lives,’ the authorial voice tells us.

In Ning Ken’s hands, fiction can imagine impossible lives too – at least to those of us used to looking from a Western perspective. In Tibet, the novel shows us, rules work differently, and this is partly a question of language. The concept of selfhood remakes itself, ghosts exist and people have very different views on life’s purpose and meaning, partly because the language of the nation fosters other ways of thinking – ‘We place strict limits on what we think is possible and impossible, but Tibetans do not acknowledge these limits. They don’t accept, or one might say their language does not accept, that death exists.’

In its difference and singularity, Tibet provides a brilliant setting in which to bring together Western and Eastern philosophy. Ning Ken does this through the visit of Robert, a Paris-based academic keen to debate his son who has embraced Buddhism. This is done through at times dense but often hearteningly frank and sometimes irreverent discussions – we’re told at one stage that we’re better off skipping Derrida, as he only really has meaning for exceptional intellectuals like Wang Mojie, and he’s an overthinker. For a reader like me, it was fascinating to see this culture clash filtered through a Chinese perspective.

Yet even Tibet cannot resist the pull of globalisation. Despite the hunger for authenticity that Wang Mojie and Ukyi Lhamo share, the novel bristles with examples of a trend towards ‘cultural hybridity’. Historic rituals are staged for tourists who look on listening to music played through boomboxes and sipping coke. This performative ‘postcard culture’, we learn, has arisen partly because of the hiatus in Tibetan practices brought about by ‘what we may call, euphemistically, the “intervention of history”.’

Reading lines like this, along with references to people being imprisoned for praying and the events of ‘the Square’, I found myself feeling strangely anxious. Was it safe for an author in mainland China to write about the actions of the government in this way? Then I shook my head and smiled. Whether intentionally or not, Ning Ken was once again turning things upside down for me, forcing my assumptions into the light in the process. Why did I imagine I knew what the Chinese government would or wouldn’t allow? (This is something I examine in the politics chapter of Relearning to Read, where I look at some of the mental labyrinths we go through when we read works written under censorship or in political systems different to our own.)

What resonated most for me was how Tibetan Sky explored the experience of not-knowing. In a way I’ve rarely encountered in fiction before, it captured what it’s like to feel bewilderment in the face of cultural artefacts we don’t know how to ‘read’ – books written in scripts we can’t decode, songs in tonal systems to which our ears are not attuned. What’s more, it showed the value of staying with these experiences – exploring them and turning them around in our minds to notice how we respond. Indeed, not-knowing seems to be fundamental in the journey towards enlightenment – when the 29-year-old Buddha began his spiritual quest, we learn, he did so in confusion.

This is a book that works on you in ways that it is only possible to articulate in part. ‘Reading in Tibet is really reading,’ Wang Mojie informs us. ‘You feel as if no one else exists, you are outside of time, away from the world. It is a peaceful, dreamlike state. This dreamlike reading, the dreamlike thoughts that came to me while I was reading, made me feel as if I were floating in air, everything around me filled with my own soaring thoughts.’

The experience of reading Tibetan Sky is similar.

Tibetan Sky by Ning Ken, translated from the Mandarin by Thomas Moran (Sinoist Books, 2025)

Book of the month: Tahir Hamut Izgil

June 30, 2025 By in Asia, Book of the month, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

‘I’ve got a book I think you’d like,’ said bookseller Erin when I wandered into my local bookshop, The Folkestone Bookshop, a few weeks back. They were right.

Waiting to Be Arrested at Night, translated by Joshua L. Freeman, is a memoir by Tahir Hamut Izgil, one of the leading contemporary Uyghur poets. It tells the story of his decision to flee his homeland, along with his wife and children, in the late 2010s, following decades of mounting discrimination and persecution of the Uyghur population in Xianjiang, a nominally autonomous region in northwestern China.

Through Izgil’s eyes, we live the experience of seeing your world contract to the point where there is no longer space for you to exist. The accounts of the imprisonments of many of Izgil’s friends and associates – often for minor or even unspecified breaches of the ever-shifting rules – are chilling and heartrending, yet it is the cruel absurdity of many of the directives that restrict everyday life that sticks in the mind. The requirement, for example, for Muslim clerics to participate in televised disco dancing competitions (and the brave attempt of one to embrace this insult as good exercise). Or the Looking Back Project, under which ‘many previous legal things had become illegal’, rendering authors vulnerable to being arrested for books that had been published with the censors’ blessing in previous years.

Perhaps most horrifying of all is the List of Prohibited Names, a sporadically updated inventory setting out which names may no longer be used. In light of this, anyone may suddenly find themselves banned from using the appellation by which they have been known all their lives. ‘A name is a person’s most personal possession,’ as Izgil, writing through Freeman, reflects. ‘If he cannot hold on to his own name, what hope does he have of keeping anything else?’

The way language is weaponised to curb and control is similarly disturbing. As the Chinese government’s restrictions on the Uyghurs grow ever tighter, seemingly innocuous words turn traitor. People called in for questioning are said to be taking ‘tea’, those removed to the concentration and re-education camps have been sent to ‘study’, if you have a black mark on your record, you are said to carry a ‘dot’.

Uyghurs too, learn to bury their meaning to keep safe:

‘A political campaign was a “storm”, while innocent people caught up in mass arrests or in a Strike Hard Campaign were said to be “gone with the wind”. A “guest” at home often meant a state security agent. If someone had been arrested, they were “in the hospital”.

Yet, language is also a source of great joy and beauty in this book. As Freeman explains in his introduction, poetry is a way of life in Izgil’s homeland:

‘Verse is woven into daily life – dropped into conversation, shared constantly on social media, written between lovers. Through poetry, Uyghurs confront issues as a community, whether debating gender roles or defying state repression. Even now, I wake up many mornings to an inbox full of fresh verse, sent by the far-flung poets of the Uyghur diaspora for me to translate.’

Poetry is central to this memoir too. Several of Izgil’s poems appear. What’s more, there is a beautiful litheness and directness to the prose, which captures key moments in the story with memorable clarity. When Izgil’s wife, Marhaba, learns that after years of fighting bureaucracy the family have finally received the visas that will enable them to escape to the US, her face opens ‘like a flower’.

Because of the quality of the writing, we feel the Izqil family’s bravery and the loss that goes with uprooting yourself from all you know (including necessarily severing ties with those who stay behind for their safety). As the best writing does, the story speaks for itself, urging itself on the reader, making the pages fly past.

Nevertheless, as I read, I found a question surfacing repeatedly in my mind. There are many urgent and brilliant stories by writers from persecuted minorities in the world today. Most of them do not find homes with some of the English-speaking world’s biggest publishers as this one has (coming out through Penguin Random House on both sides of the Atlantic). If they make it into English at all, such stories are usually released by small presses, which, as I often say on this blog, are where most of the risky, exciting, boundary-pushing publishing happens these days. (Books like Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse’s The Convoy, translated by Ruth Diver and published in February by Open Borders Press, for example.)

So what is it about this story that has enabled it to cut through?

I think there are a couple of reasons. The first is that the book paints the West in a relatively flattering light. Although Izgil likens the contempt of the Han Chinese authorities to the attitudes of European colonialists and quotes a friend saying they wish China would conquer the world because the rest of us are so ignorant about the realities they are facing, the US is a place of safety for Izgil. It is where he can finally taste freedom once more and thrive. I think this is a picture that fits with what many of us in the English-speaking global north would like to believe about our homelands.

The second is that the story necessarily reinforces certain narratives about China that happen to serve Western agendas. This portrayal of the Chinese authorities as harsh and unpredictable feels familiar and relatively comfortable. In this respect, although it may challenge other preconceptions, this book will resonate with significant aspects of many people’s prevailing world view.

This is not to call into question anything Izgil has written: the atrocities he describes are well documented. Nor is it to detract at all from the brilliance of this book. Rather, it is to say that this may be a story to which many in the English-speaking world may be able to listen to more easily than we can to comparable narratives that do not align with Western agendas so neatly.

If anything, this may make this book even more important. It may speak more directly and powerfully about the refugee experience to many anglophone readers because it will not invite the sort of resistance that can often arise when we read challenging books from elsewhere. By happening to echo ideas that feel familiar and safe, it may move us to deepen our sense of humanity and connection with those forced to leave their homelands.

Waiting to Be Arrested at Night by Tahir Hamut Izgil, translated from the Uyghur by Joshua L. Freeman (Vintage, 2024)

Book of the month: Baqytgul Sarmekova

January 30, 2025 By in Asia, Book of the month, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

I love small presses. They are the heroes of the international-literature world, taking risks and bringing into Englishes stories that would never win the backing of the more conservative and commercially driven big houses.

Tilted Axis Press is one of several that I particularly admire. The essay collection Violent Phenomena that it published in 2022, exposing many of the inequalities embedded in the way stories travel, has been a huge influence on me. I refer to it several times in my forthcoming book Relearning to Read: Adventures in Not-Knowing (published by Renard, another lovely small press – preorder your copy here).

I also really admire Tilted Axis Press’s definition of itself as ‘an artistic project, for the benefit of readers who would not otherwise have access to the work [it champions]’ and ‘an ongoing exploration into alternatives – to the hierarchisation of certain languages and forms, including forms of translation; to the monoculture of globalisation; to cultural narrative, and visual stereotypes; to the commercialisation and celebrification of literature and literary translation’. In its small way, I hope this blog also works towards these goals.

So, when I heard that Tilted Axis was running a crowdfunder to help secure its future, I decided to go all in and make a sizeable pledge in return for choosing a bundle of their titles. This month’s featured book was one of these.

To Hell with Poets, translated by Mirgul Kali, is the first English-language collection by Baqytgul Sarmekova, a rising star of Kazakhstan’s literary scene. Wide-ranging and daring, its usually extremely brief stories present ‘shabby aul life’ and urban angst. Their subjects include a colt at the centre of a legal dispute, a family conned by a false betrothal, a dog left to fend for itself after its owner dies, and a woman caught up in an extramarital affair.

‘Parabolic’ was one of the first words that came to my mind when I started to read the collection, but it would be misleading to describe it this way. Though they are concise and contain some of the same symbolic resonance as parables, Sarmekova’s stories do not push a moral viewpoint and try to teach a lesson. Instead, they simply present life as it is, in all its bewildering grubbiness.

Often, as in the case of the title piece, the stories centre on women caught in patriarchal structures that strip them of their idealism and dignity. Indeed, the decision to include the year it was completed at the end of each story makes their achievement all the more impressive – many of these pieces were finished just as the #MeToo movement was beginning to sweep the anglophone world, and capture abuses with a directness and clearsightedness that is still out of reach for many.

Yet To Hell with Poets is not a bald attack on injustice. The situations it presents are nuanced and complex, and all players are at the mercy of forces greater than they are, as well as their blindness to others’ feelings.

The stories are also funny. Sarmekova has an eye for the grotesque. And there is a great deal of bathos in the abruptness with which several characters meet extreme fates. At times, a mischievous, gossipy tone breaks through the texture, almost as though the author is sitting with us, swapping anecdotes.

Indeed, there are moments when Sarmekova seems to make herself her subject. In ‘The Night the Rose Wept’, for example, the protagonist laments her tendency to notice imperfections and make cruel observations during moments of tenderness and connection: ‘I might notice a lipstick smudge on my friend’s teeth as she laughed with abandon, and a cynical thought would cross my mind. Or I might spot my other friend, standing apart from everybody and barely smiling because she was self-conscious of the wrinkles that appeared on her face when she laughed too hard.’ It is difficult not to hear the voice of the author here, reflecting on the cost of her gift for clearsightedness.

And gifted she certainly is: she has the ability to capture a character’s world in a sentence. Often a single detail tells us all we need to know about someone’s vulnerabilities and motivations. There is also a particular virtuosity in the way she handles endings – resisting the temptation to click the box shut too neatly, but rather finding something wistful and compelling that, even though it may be relatively tangential, elevates the piece.

Structurally, the stories feel a little repetitive. Sarmekova favours starting with an arresting image, personage or problem and then ploughing into back story to explain how it came about. The final story in the collection, ‘In Search of a Character’, breaks this mould and hints at new directions in her writing. It will be interesting to see how she develops this as she progresses. More please.

To Hell with Poets by Baqytgul Sarmekova, translated from the Kazakh by Mirgul Kali (Tilted Axis Press, 2024)

Book of the month: Jia Pingwa

February 29, 2024 By in Asia, Book of the month, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Book publicists are a curious breed. Although I rarely accept proofs and buy almost all the books I feature on this blog, I frequently receive emails from people promoting titles that will clearly be of no interest to me. Mainstream books by British and American writers. Business books. Academic books on subjects outside my area of expertise. As I delete these emails, I wonder if the people who send them see their job primarily as a numbers game: if they simply scattergun enough emails out into the universe, someone is sure to take the bait.

But every so often I encounter a book publicist who thinks carefully about my interests and sends me a suggestion that hits the nail on the head. These people can be gamechangers.

The fact that I do a Book of the month post on this blog is down to such a publicist. Back in 2014, Daniela Petracco at Europa Editions contacted me about an as-then little-known Italian author. I explained I was no longer doing book reviews here, but she wouldn’t take no for an answer. She didn’t care. She had to send me this novel, regardless. She loved it and she was sure I would too.

Reluctantly, I accepted a copy, was blown away by what I read and started my Book of the month slot in order to be able to tell people about it. And the novel? My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante, translated by Ann Goldstein.

This month, I had a similar experience. In response to my call for books published no later than 2020 that I might feature in my year of reading nothing new, I had an email from Daniel Li, working on behalf of Sinoist Books. He sent me three suggestions that he thought might fit the bill (which immediately made me warm to him, as this was a number of books I could reasonably check out, rather than an endless list of possibilities that would require several hours to unpick). Of these, Jia Pingwa’s Broken Wings, translated by Nicky Harman, caught my eye.

Described as a thriller, the novel tells the story of Butterfly, a young woman kidnapped from the city and taken to a rural village to be sold as a wife to one of the many men left single because of the gender imbalance resulting from China’s one-child policy and rapid urban migration. It opens with her scratching her 178th mark to record the days of her imprisonment on the wall of the cave in which she is held, and centres around the question of whether she will ever escape and find her way back to the life for which she pines.

But there the similarities to a thriller end. In fact they end even before the opening page, because in his foreword, Jia pretty much gives away the plot: he reveals that the novel grew out of a story he heard from an old man from his village about his daughter who was kidnapped and rescued, and who then, in the face of unbearable media attention, eventually returned to live with her kidnappers.*

Instead of delivering a gripping story (or instead of primarily doing that), this novel offers something even more engrossing: entering into and inhabiting the unimaginable, and making it feel personal, real. Jia puts it like this:

‘When I was young, death was just a word, a concept, a philosophical question, about which we had enthusiastic discussions that we didn’t take too seriously, but after I turned fifty, friends and family began to die off one after another, until finally my mother and father died. After that I began to develop a fear of death, albeit an unspoken one. In the same way, when a short while ago cases of trafficking of women and children began to appear in the media, it felt as remote from my own life as if I was reading a foreign novel about the slave trade. But after I had heard what happened to the daughter of my village neighbour, it all became more personal.’

In order to communicate this shift, Jia enters into Butterfly’s experience to an astonishing degree. He starts with the hardships of life on the unforgiving loess plateau, where people scratch a living trying to dig for rare nonesuch flowers and growing blood onions. The specificity of the detail is extraordinary. ‘What is there to see?’ the neighbour exclaimed when Jia asked if he had been to see his daughter. Jia shows us: the millstone with its runner stone worn to half the thickness of the bed stone over years of use; the rim of the well, scored with grooves; the gourds withering on a frame near the cave entrance.

Although spare to start with – reflecting, perhaps, Butterfly’s numbness – the language flowers over the course of the novel, as she adapts to life in the village. We start to see the beauty in rituals that at first seemed crude and beneath notice. As the prose takes trouble over recording the details of how to make a good corn pudding, we see Butterfly learning to value the world around her differently, adjusting to her new reality. At times the writing is strikingly lyrical and almost painful in its poignancy:

‘At noon, I gazed at the hills and gullies and knolls far away. Distance seemed to soften them so they looked like watery billows. I longed to escape from this ocean and climb back on dry land again. But when the sun set and it turned chilly and the light left the strip, the sea suddenly died, and I was left like a stranded fish.’

But it is Jia’s presentation of female experience, rendered through Harman’s arresting choices, that is most impressive. The description of her eventual violation by her so-called husband, Bright, and the physical trials of pregnancy are exceptionally well handled. And the portrayal of labour and birth are quite astonishing – up there with Eva Baltasar’s descriptions in Boulder, translated by Julia Sanches.

There are challenges for the anglophone reader. Oddly though, these do not concern the cultural differences you might expect – although the world Jia depicts operates according to strikingly different values, the humanity in his writing makes it relatable. Instead, it is technical choices concerning pacing and what descriptive information to include that occasionally prove taxing. Several times I found myself wrongfooted by not knowing whether a character was present or had moved to a place or performed an action, when a writer working in another tradition would have told me.

This was interesting, though, rather than off-putting – an insight into the things I take for granted and the supports I am used to expecting when I read. And a reminder that the technical and stylistic mores that we tend to regard as markers of good or bad writing in the anglophone tradition are more malleable and subjective than we might think.

Because the writing in Broken Wings is not simply good. It is marvellous. Playful, expansive, precise, moving and surprising, it sweeps us into another world, transforming this sad story into something almost sacred. Jia and Harman put it best, again in the foreword:

‘A novel takes on a life of its own, it is both under my control and escapes my control. I originally planned it purely a lament by Butterfly, but as I wrote, other elements appeared: her baby grows in her belly day by day, the days pass and her baby becomes Rabbit, Butterfly’s sufferings increase, and she becomes as pitiable a figure as Auntie Spotty-Face and Rice. The birth of a novel is like the clay figure shaped in the image of a divinity by a sculptor in a temple; once it is finished, the sculptor kneels to worship it because the clay figure has become divine.’

Broken Wings by Jia Pingwa, translated from the Chinese by Nicky Harman (Sinoist Books, 2020)

* The publisher informs me that this foreword is an afterword in most editions, including the original Chinese, but it appears as a foreword in some ebook editions. Because of the sensitive nature of the subject matter, they encourage readers to read it first (although my usual advice would be to leave all extraneous text until after you have read the primary text).

Picture: I, Till Niermann, CC BY-SA 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/, via Wikimedia Commons

Book of the month: Perumal Murugan

October 31, 2023 By in Asia, Book of the month, Post-world Tags: , , , , , , , , 3 Comments

For the past three years, I’ve had the privilege of holding the role of Literary Explorer in Residence at the Cheltenham Literature Festival. This sees me co-curating and participating in a range of events about international storytelling at the UK’s oldest book festival.

Highlights this year included getting to interview my hero Tété-Michel Kpomassie – the writer I’ve most wanted to meet since I encountered his amazing memoir An African in Greenland (tr. James Kirkup) back in 2012. Building on our Zoom conversation last year, the discussion was as lively, joy-filled and life-affirming as his writing.

I also got to run a ticketed version of my Incomprehension Workshop for curious readers. It sold out and the responses were wonderful, further fuelling ideas for my next non-fiction book, of which, I hope, more soon.

Another lovely thing about the role is that I also get to hear about books from elsewhere and meet experts in storytelling from around the world. This year, these included international delegates from book festivals in Argentina, Botswana, Türkiye, India and Nigeria. From these passionate experts, I gleaned a number of book recommendations, including my latest Book of the month, which was one of several titles recommended to me by Dr T. Vijay Kumar, director of the Hyderabad Literary Festival.

Translated from the Tamil by Aniruddhan Vasudevan, Perumal Murugan’s One Part Woman was a smash hit when it was published in India in the mid-2010s, drawing lakhs of readers, prompting the writing of two sequels and changing the course of its authors life, as Murugan explains in his afterword. It tells the story of Kali and Ponna, a married couple who find themselves coming under extreme pressure as the years go by without them having children. Despite the strength of their bond, the rituals, penances and indignities to which they feel obliged to submit in the quest for a child take their toll. At last, the pressure to participate in a controversial rite on the 18th day of a local festival pushes them to breaking point, bursting open the assumptions and prejudices that have made them who they are.

For anglophone readers from the global north, this novel is an intoxicating mixture of the familiar and the strange. Anyone who has experienced or witnessed loved ones battling infertility will find much to recognise in its pages. ‘Please save me from being the talk of the town,’ laments Kali, expressing perfectly the pain of having such private matters made public, while Ponna enters into a masochistic loop, goading herself through ever more punishing and demanding ordeals in the hope of having her prayers answered. ‘Seeking a life, we have pawned our lives,’ she says, while joining her husband to sneer at those with too many children.

Yet instead of medical procedures and gruelling rounds of drugs, Ponna and Kali must do penance, make donations to temples, drink bitter concoctions and ensure they win the gods’ and goddesses’ favour. And at the heart of the novel is the ancient rite that at once lures and terrifies them: the night on which men become gods and all rules are relaxed in the dark streets of a nearby town.

Translator Vasudevan has done a fabulous job bringing the narrative into Indian English. The rhythms and structures of the prose complement the subject matter and setting perfectly, while the repeated use of the modal auxiliary ‘would’ gives the story a mythic quality, blurring the edges and making us half-believe we are reading a fable set long ago. Even linguistic challenges, such as the nuances of the Tamil term for son-in-law, are conveyed in an easy, conversational style.

Yet, despite the relaxed, sometimes mythic quality of the prose, there is nothing imprecise or vague about Ponna and Kali’s relationship. Murugan captures it perfectly, portraying the dynamism that keeps strong marriages alive and presenting a portrait of love that is truly touching – and makes the threat of its unravelling all the more poignant.

There is sharp-eyed comment on contemporary issues too. The legacy of colonialism threads through the pages, knotted around a family story of a humiliating and degrading competition run by a British officer, in which Kali’s grandfather participated.

But the natural world is never far from the story. The tone for this is set in the opening lines, with the planting of the Portia tree that rises and spreads its branches over Kali and Ponna’s travails throughout the course of the book. Alongside this, a number of other natural symbols dot the narrative, drawing and concentrating the reader’s gaze, and complicating questions just as they seem to become clear. ‘He never explained anything. He only drew your attention to things,’ writes Murugan of Kali. He could be describing his own writing style too.

In his afterword, Murugan explains that the novel was prompted by hearing a single word (which he does not reveal) and that writing the story taught him what can happen ‘if the world of values packed within a word bursts open’. ‘I am very eager to know the kinds of experiences it [One Part Woman] might now bring to literary readers across the world,’ he explains. Well, Perumal Murugan, your book centres around one word for me too: wonderful.

One Part Woman by Perumal Murugan, translated from the Tamil by Aniruddhan Vasudevan (Pushkin Press, 2019)

Picture: ‘Parshvapippala (Sanskrit: पार्श्वपिप्पल)’ by Dinesh Valke on flickr.com

Book of the month: Wu Cheng’en (probably)

June 30, 2023 By in Asia, Book of the month, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , , 10 Comments

‘Must dash, about to be reincarnated.’

As a reader, there are few things more discombobulating than stumbling across a classic you’ve never heard of. If you fancy yourself well read, you tend to imagine that you have a broad sense of the world’s great works of literature. You may not have read them all, but you know what Ulysses, Don Quixote and The Divine Comedy are about, how they fit in.

But if you are a truly international reader, you can’t avoid having this flattering self-image punctured now and again. Even now, more than ten years into my global literary explorations, I regularly find myself coming across works so influential and famous that I feel deeply ignorant never to have encountered them.

This month’s featured read is such a one. I can’t be certain how it came onto my radar, but looking through my TBR mountain one day a few weeks back, I found my eye caught by a Penguin Clothbound Classics edition of Monkey King: Journey to the West in a new translation by Julia Lovell. I picked it up and was almost instantly engrossed.

Nominally, the book (I hesitate to call it a novel, not least because it was created more than 150 years before the form as we understand it took shape in Europe) follows the quest of a Tang dynasty monk, Tripitaka, to bring back Buddhist scriptures from India. However, as the title suggests, it is one of Tripitaka’s disciples, a magic kung fu monkey, who takes centre stage. Having been pinned for 500 years under a mountain for angering Heaven’s Jade Emperor, the monkey is released on condition he assist Tripitaka as a way of atoning for his crimes. Ebullient, irrepressible and master of 72 transformations (albeit some more successful than others), Monkey, along with fellow fallen immortals Pigsy and Sandy, accompanies Tripitaka, using his powers against the many monsters, frustrations and obstacles they encounter on their journey.

One of this book’s biggest surprises is how funny it is. Much of this comes from Monkey’s antics and self-congratulation, but the context has a lot to do with it too. When you’re immortal, threats of torture and execution hold different weight – they are more often sources of boredom or annoyance than fear or bodily pain. As a result, Monkey and his companions’ reactions to many of the dangers they encounter drip with bathos and surrealism. ‘A talking horse!’ remarks Pigsy at one point. ‘Never a good sign.’ (That said, a similar blitheness pertains among many of the high-status humans Monkey encounters on the quest.)

There’s also an amusing bureaucratic strand running through divine dealings. Heaven operates a ‘cashless economy’, we learn, which necessitates all kinds of fancy footwork to settle debts. Although capable of cloud somersaulting 108,000 miles in one leap, Monkey is often beholden to all sorts of maddening conditions because ‘immortality is a stickler for arithmetic’.

Credit must go to Lovell for the humour she gets in at the sentence level. A masterful veering between registers yields wonderful subversions of expectation. In addition to the comedy of the bureaucratic language Monkey often talks in a breezy, sometimes Wodehousian tone – ‘Thanks ever so!’ – that sparks beautifully against the often brutal horrors he and his companions must face.

And what horrors they are: impregnation, sautéing, lacquering, steaming, liquification, to name but a few. They need to be mindboggling because the central problem the narrative faces is that, having a vastly powerful, magical protagonist does rather take the tension out of most of the challenges you throw his way. Difficulties arise and are, often, magicked away with a swish of Monkey’s gold staff. With a pattern that repeats itself so reliably, it would be easy for readers to get bored.

And yet, we keep reading. This is, again, in part due to Lovell’s efforts. Conscious, perhaps, of the narrow attention span of many contemporary anglophone readers, she has slashed the text down to around a quarter of its original length, cutting out, she says, large sections of recapitulation that have their roots in the oral tradition. The memorable nature of many of the episodes also plays a part – I know that the next time I have a bad headache, I will think of the gold band Guanyin puts around Monkey’s head to control him.

But the book’s stickiness is also down to the evolution of its central characters as they encounter and overcome, or learn to live with, various internal and external demons. Although relatively light on didacticism, the narrative does offer several lessons along the way, most of them related to the idea of playing the long game and not jeopardising your future for the sake of instant gratification. However, perhaps the message it transmits most consistently, albeit tacitly, is that the secret to survival is transformation and adaptation.

Certainly, that seems to be one of the reasons for this work’s enduring success. Since its creation during the Ming dynasty, a time when China housed more books than the rest of the world put together, the story (which is commonly said to have been written by poet and politician Wu Cheng’en, although no-one can be sure) has taken many forms. It has morphed according to the needs of each generation of readers, becoming now an inspiration for the young Mao, now a standard bearer for disaffected youth. It has fed into films and TV shows, weathered banning and censorship, and informed storytelling and artworks around the globe. Now in this latest, sparkling literary incarnation, it looks set to surge into its next 500 years with all of its central character’s daring and energy. Extraordinary.

Monkey King: Journey to the West (probably) by Wu Cheng’en, translated from the Chinese by Julia Lovell (Penguin, 2021)

Picture: BabelStone, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Book of the month: Maggie Shen King

December 30, 2022 By in Asia, Book of the month, Post-world, The stories Tags: , , , , , , 2 Comments
Wedding Parade

A few months ago, to celebrate the publication of the new UK edition of Reading the World: How I Read a Book from Every Country, I ran a giveaway. The terms of entry were simple: all those who wanted the chance to receive a signed copy simply had to leave a comment recommending me a book.

The response was wonderful and it was great to receive input from readers all over the planet, just as I did when I first set out to read the world in 2012. The suggestions were as intriguing as they were varied and will no doubt keep me busy for some time. However, they have already yielded some cracking reads and my last book of the month of 2022 is one of them, put forward by Lauren.

As its title implies, An Excess Male by Taiwanese-American author Maggie Shen King is built around imagining a world in which there are too many men. Set in an authoritarian, near-future mainland China, it envisions a society where the gender-selection practices driven by directives such as the one-child policy (but also at play in countries like India) have skewed the ratio of women to men so drastically that government-sanctioned polyandry is instituted in order to give as many men as possible the opportunity to marry and reproduce.

The novel focuses on one family in the process of interviewing for a third husband – ‘going to the max’ as it’s known in the world of the book. Told variously through the eyes of the prospective suitor Wei-guo, wife May-ling, and her two existing husbands, brothers Hann and XX, the narrative explores the experience of being trapped in a system that controls and subverts basic human needs and desires, exposing numerous secrets along the way.

Essentially, this book is about finding a way to say the unsayable, and live an authentic life in the face of the systematic stripping of human dignity and autonomy. As with Crystal Boys, my 2012 Taiwanese read, homosexuality (which was only declassified as a mental illness in China in 2001) becomes a shorthand for this. In the world of the novel, men who love men are known as ‘wilfully sterile’ and are sent for re-education, as well as denied various rights.

The speculative, near-future setting is also a powerful tool. By creating a society that does not quite exist, Shen King is able to express criticisms, depict hypocrisy and portray tensions much more directly and tellingly than a realist novel would allow. As Megan Walsh argues in her brilliant book, The Subplot: What China is Reading and Why it Matters, sci-fi has been especially successful in mainland China partly because of the wiggle room it allows authors – it’s no coincidence that Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem, translated by Ken Liu, became the first novel to be a bestseller both at home and abroad. For an author like Shen King, raised in a territory that has not been allowed to assert its sovereignty on the global stage for decades, the attraction is clear.

Yet any reader who interprets An Excess Male purely as a criticism of China’s approach to Taiwan is missing a great deal. Many of the anxieties around surveillance and the intrusion of technology into private relationships find their echo in contemporary anglophone society. The same can be said of various approaches to categorising and labelling people, and thereby limiting their freedoms and opportunities. The fact, for example, that being placed on a mental-health watchlist is seen as the first step towards being excluded from mainstream society resonates uncomfortably with many practices in the so-called Free World. Much as many anglophone readers might like to, we cannot get away with simply branding China as the villain here: there are problems to address in our societies too.

This subtlety is also evident in the writing and in the way the story plays out. As the best dystopian fiction tends to do, the novel reveals flashes of beauty in brokenness. Suffocating though it is, the tightly controlled system of polyandry allows for closeness and even whole kinds of intimacy unknown in more liberal societies; the fraternal bond between some co-husbands, for example, is a touching and sustaining thing, a testament to the resilience of the human spirit. There are also some lovely touches in the writing, such as the foreign nuns who appear at one point, speaking a kind of accented language riddled with the habits usually associated with Chinese stereotypes. XX’s perspective, as a character on the autism spectrum, is also, for the most part, deftly handled.

The result is a compelling and thought-provoking read. Drawing on her intimate knowledge of both Taiwanese and US society, Shen King creates a story that neatly bridges the gap between the two. In so doing, she brings readers everywhere face to face with one of the most fundamental human dilemmas: how to survive when your personal needs go against what is perceived to be the greater good.

An Excess Male by Maggie Shen King (Harper Voyager, 2017)

Picture: ‘Wedding Parade’ by Cormac Heron on flickr.com

Book of the month: Shuang Xuetao

July 28, 2022 By in Asia, Book of the month, Post-world Tags: , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Back in 2013, when I was researching Reading the World: How I Read a Book from Every Country (new edition out in September), I was fortunate to speak to many translators and other literature experts about the way stories travel. A particularly fascinating conversation was with Nicky Harman, one of the driving forces behind Paper Republic, a charity that promotes Chinese literature in English translation.

Among the many things we talked about was crime fiction. English-language publishers, Harman said, were always expecting to find great crime novels in China, yet it was very rare for anything to get picked up. The reason for this involved a fundamental difference in approach to the genre.

Despite the Sherlock Holmes stories being so popular in China that the detective and his sidekick Watson are affectionately known there as Curly Fu and Peanut, Chinese crime fiction tends to have a strongly didactic streak. The page-turning suspense that is an essential ingredient of most anglophone thrillers is generally considered secondary to the message and information the story conveys.

Indeed, the early translations of the Holmes novels provide a neat illustration. As academic Eva Hung found, many had their titles changed to give away the ending. The plot was secondary to the ingenious detection skills the works showcased.

My latest Book of the month suggests that the tide may be beginning to turn. Although far from being a conventional crime novel in the anglophone sense, Rouge Street, a collection of three novellas by award-winning contemporary author Shuang Xuetao, translated by Jeremy Tiang, contains many of the elements of a pageturner. Hard-bitten characters dodge in and out of the underworld of one of Shenyang’s roughest neighbourhoods, mysteries abound and unfold, and a sense of the compromised, broken nature of human dealings in the scramble to survive pervades the narrative.

There is a directness to the prose that has invited comparisons to Hemingway. Sometimes this is very funny, as when one character observes, ‘If you have a big ass, you don’t need to take off your pants to prove it.’ At other times, it is satisfying in its precision, enabling Shuang to convey the essence of a character who might only appear for a handful of pages in a single sentence. For example, when he tells us that Mingqi is ‘the sort of man who’d never be willing to go for an easy win at mahjong but would insist on building elaborate hands to crush the other players’, we know precisely who we are dealing with.

Yet aspects of the collection veer sharply away from the conventions English-language crime thriller readers know so well. Murakami is another name that has been mentioned in relation to Shuang’s work and it’s not hard to see why: the narrative dives into the surreal and the fantastical with little warning. In particular, an extended sequence involving a battle with an interrogator-turned-fish beneath the surface of a frozen lake flies in the face of the gritty realism that suffuses much of the rest of the narrative.

The investigation at the heart of Rouge Street is much more introspective and psychological than the fact-based jigsaw puzzles of traditional anglophone mysteries. Rather than an excavation of events, this is an excavation of the self – a coming to understanding of individual characters’ motivations through the unspooling of seemingly tangential happenings.

This is achieved through a kaleidoscopic series of shifts between the perspectives of different parties involved in the stories so that we are constantly looking at the situation through fresh eyes. It is testament to Shuang and Tiang’s skill that, for the most part, characters are distinctive enough to carry us with them each time a new voice takes over (although the flurry of shifts in the final section teeters on the edge of bewildering).

I suspect Harman is right that anglophone publishers will continue to search in vain for a Chinese book that fits their brief for a great crime novel. Rouge Street is more interesting than that: inventive, irreverent, daring and fresh, it contains far more satisfying surprises than the familiar twist at the end.

Rouge Street by Shuang Xuetao, translated from the Chinese by Jeremy Tiang (Metropolitan Books, 2022)

Picture: ‘Shenyang, China’ by Shinsuke Ikegame on flickr.com