Category Archives: Asia

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: , , , , , , , , 2 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

Book of the month: Kyung-Sook Shin

May 1, 2022 By in Asia, Book of the month, Post-world, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

My featured read from April sparked an interesting discovery. Shortly after starting it, I found myself brought up short by something on the page: a section of dialogue featuring the response, ‘…’.

I was struck by seeing ‘…’ as it was a formulation I had recently started to experiment with in my own fiction. Making the choice to use it had felt like a bit of a leap. It wasn’t a construction that had been part of the written English I had grown up with and wasn’t something I was conscious of having seen in prose books until relatively recently.

Encountering a conversational ellipsis in a work translated from Korean raised a question for me. Where had it come from? Was it present in the original or had the translator introduced it in lieu of writing: ‘X said nothing’? Did other languages have this formulation before it started to have a presence Anglophone writing?

Intrigued, I turned to Twitter. Responses from translators including Sawad Hussain, Frank Wynne and Lucy North quickly established that ‘…’ features in Japanese, Arabic, French and Spanish. Given the relatively recent emergence of this construction in English, it was beginning to sound as though translators may have been instrumental in introducing it to the world’s most published language – an instance of translation not only conveying meaning but also enlarging modes of expression.

Then, in a delightfully serendipitous turn of events, Anton Hur, the translator of the book I was reading, joined the discussion.

‘I’ve wondered the same thing,’ he wrote. ‘Frank’s answer makes me think it was invented in Europe and came over to Korea through Japan (which readily absorbed European practices) in the Modernist era. Edmund White uses it in THE BEAUTIFUL ROOM IS EMPTY (1988) and he studied Chinese lit.’

When I revealed that the book that had made me ask the question was his translation of Kyung-Sook Shin’s Violets, he responded: ‘AAAAHHHHH thank you for reading! Yes, there is A LOT of implied silence in VIOLETS, and many more “…” in the source than what made it into the translation (I changed it to “Silence” or “She was silent” etc.). Many Kyung-Sook Shin characters express themselves silently. A style!’

It certainly is. Written more than 20 years ago, Violets, as Shin explains in her 2021 afterword to the English translation, is a story that aims to speak for ‘women all around us who exist in silence’. It follows the fortunes of San, a neglected young woman who comes to Seoul and takes a job at a florist’s only for her new life to be derailed by a violent obsession with a man who comes into the shop one day.

Silence is just one of the tools used to express the reticence that underpins and ultimately drives the story. A profound succinctness in the writing works to convey an emotional detachment that reveals the heartbreaking disassociation San has been obliged to go through in order to survive. Without the connective tissue often used to embed a character’s thoughts in third-person narratives, impressions arrive as though they are occurring organically so that it often seems as though the reader is experiencing and thinking in step with San.

Credit must also go to Hur for his deft handling of cultural exposition. Issues such as name order and informal and formal voice can often creak in English language versions. But his presentation of San and her friend Namae’s outsider status in her home village – because they are Sur Namae and Oh San rather than members of the Yi family – is disarmingly unfussy and clear. (Slightly confusingly, Kyung-Sook Shin’s family name is given last in the English edition, although in South Korea she is known as Shin Kyung-Sook.)

What makes this all the more impressive is the depth of the immersion in San’s world Shin and Hur achieve in so few words. It’s no surprise to learn from the afterword that Shin spent six months working on a flower farm while she wrote the novel because there is an almost tangible quality to the depiction of San’s daily life in the florist’s, where small details speak loudly and feelings can swell ‘like a cloud of tadpoles rising up from muddy water’.

The surface tranquility of much of the narrative makes the moments of violence and rupture all the more shocking. It would have been easy to present San purely as a victim, but Shin is careful not to do so: even as she self-sabotages and runs up against systemic misogyny, San fights to act on her own terms, freeing herself from a would-be attacker in one particularly memorable sequence.

What undoes her is not her weakness but the universal inability of human beings to look at lived experiences objectively. Locked in her present, San is unable to appreciate the layeredness Shin reveals in moments and the way actions are rarely a response to the contemporary situation but to events that stretch back through and beyond the limits of an individual’s existence – impulses that have ‘lain in wait for millennia before bursting forth’. The rare moments of self-insight – the realisation that her loneliness has its roots in her rejection by her childhood companion Namae, the understanding that she is misremembering a significant encounter by picturing herself wearing a plum-coloured blouse she doesn’t own – are not enough to stem this tide.

Quiet novels can struggle to be heard in the clamour of today’s literary market. But Violets makes a strong case for the importance of making space for narratives that don’t shriek for attention. Though couched in silence, ellipses and the unsayable, this is a story that builds to a roar.

Violets by Kyung-Sook Shin, translated from the Korean by Anton Hur (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2022)

Picture: ‘Seoul | Ichon Hangang Park’ by travel oriented on flickr.com

If you’ve encountered ‘…’ as a complete response in dialogue in languages other than English, please let me know. It’d be great to build up a picture of where it exists!

Book of the month: Narine Abgaryan

August 26, 2020 By in Asia, Book of the month, The stories Tags: , , , , , 3 Comments

Monasterio Khor Virap, Armenia, 2016-10-01, DD 25

© Diego Delso / CC BY-SA 

This Women in Translation Month, it’s great to be able to feature a female-authored novel from a country that had almost nothing available in English translation when I undertook my 2012 year of reading the world.

Three Apples Fell from the Sky by Moscow-based Armenian writer Narine Abgaryan, translated by Lisa C. Hayden, is a striking and heartwarming read. Set in the remote mountain village of Maran, the novel follows a cast of aging characters facing the slow death of their community and way of life as a series of tragedies and the relentless pull of twentieth-century progress siphon off the young people, leaving the place to decline.

It sounds depressing and yet it isn’t. Although famine, war, domestic violence and natural disasters all feature prominently in the narrative, leaving their scars on the landscape and the characters, life in Maran is studded with moments of joy. Beauty persists in the little things: in homemade bread, a library made bright with flowers and cushions, a friend’s solicitude and the conviction underpinning the novel that ‘life has a way of prevailing against the odds’. Characters who have been laid low by appalling events find themselves taken unawares by kindness, generosity and hope.

There is humour too. Often stemming from bleak events, it is similarly surprising and crystallizes around singular details – fifty-eight-year-old Anatolia’s inability to let go of housekeeping niggles on what she believes is her deathbed, for example, or the way she hides Tolstoy’s books in her library because of his harsh treatment of his female characters. At times, as when a gaggle of villagers have to wrestle a coffin shut because of the corpulence of its occupant, the comedy in the novel can even be grotesque.

Genre-blurring (at least as far as English speakers are concerned) is also a source of surprise in this international bestseller. Much like the rocks beneath Maran’s foundations, the novel shifts ground, moving between a kind of earthy realism, a fable-like timelessness and intense, fantastical episodes that bend the rules of time and space. A white peacock becomes a symbol of wellbeing, a child is able to see angels of death arriving to claim famine victims, and people perform feats far beyond the scope of regular human biology.

Truth marches to an unusual beat in this novel, accompanied by storytelling rhythms that may now and then trip up anglophone readers. The narrative retraces its steps several times over certain key events and the manner in which flashbacks are often introduced may feel jarring to those used to work rooted in Western European traditions. Fittingly for a novel about ‘a place where time had not simply stopped but become confused and dozed off’, the pace is slow, sometimes to the point of being non-existent.

These things make the reading experience challenging at points but ultimately extremely rewarding. They also enable the novel to do two contradictory things: to affirm our common humanity, while revealing and celebrating local distinctiveness and difference. ‘In the end, the sky is always identically blue and the wind blows exactly the same wherever you were lucky enough to be born,’ claims the narrative voice. Well, yes, but as Abgaryan proves in this powerful debut, we don’t all describe these things in the same way – and that is why we need stories.

Three Apples Fell from the Sky by Narine Abgaryan, translated from the Russian by Lisa C. Hayden (Oneworld Publications, 2020)

Book of the month: Duong Thu Huong

May 31, 2019 By in Asia, Book of the month, Post-world, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , , 11 Comments

It’s always a pleasure to hear from other literary explorers. Reading the world is such an enriching and mind-expanding experience that I’m keen for as many people to do it as possible.

Among the numerous things I enjoy when I learn about other international reading quests is finding out what specific parameters the reader in question has set themself. Although many global book projects look similar at first glance, no two are identical because each becomes a reflection of the concerns and interests of the person at the centre of it. People might choose to categorise books by setting, for instance, or to seek out works in a particular genre or from a set time period.

Sometimes, these parameters illuminate important issues about the way stories circulate. Sophie Baggott’s Reading Women Writers Worldwide is a prime example. Having challenged herself to journey through some 200 books by women by 2020, Sophie has shone a light on the serious imbalance in international publishing, which still sees female-authored works making up only around 30 per cent of the books translated into English each year. (This is a problem that a number of campaigners are working to tackle, perhaps most notably translator Meytal Radzinski, who established Women in Translation Month back in 2014.)

Certain that Sophie must have discovered some gems on her literary travels, I contacted her recently to pick her brains for recommendations. She came back with several suggestions, including La Bastarda by Trifonia Melibea Obono, translated by Lawrence Schimel, and The First Wife by Paulina Chiziane, translated by David Brookshaw, both of which I have already reviewed enthusiastically on this blog.

One title was completely new to me, however: Paradise of the Blind by Duong Thu Huong, translated by Phan Huy Duong and Nina McPherson. I chased down a copy of the controversial Vietnamese novel – banned in the author’s home country – and was quickly hooked.

The story is told from the perspective of Hang, a young woman who is one of the many Vietnamese ‘exported workers’ sent to the Soviet Union in the seventies and eighties. When her Uncle Chinh summons her to Moscow, she embarks on a train ride that unlocks a wealth of memories, enabling the reader to piece together the mystery around her father’s disappearance and fraught relationship with her mother, and ultimately freeing Hang from the historical guilt that has bound her.

Duong Thu Huong has an exceptional instinct for the way that tension fuels a compelling story. Replete with dramatic encounters, this book is a rare beast: a literary novel with a gripping plot. Although many of the most powerful scenes centre on the main characters – with exchanges between Hang, her Aunt Tam, her mother and her uncle all working to reveal the complex web of emotions that snares them – there are some striking cameo appearances too.

In particular, I found myself itching to know more about the married couple who put Hang’s father up for one night and ‘must have been linked by some crime that kept them there, far from their village. Their shadowy past seemed to be both a bond and a yawning chasm between them, wedding their destinies and sundering their souls.’ By the middle of the next page, however, they had been left behind, never to reappear.

This engrossing storytelling also stems from the author’s sharp grasp of the way multiple, and sometimes conflicting, motivations can lead people to act against their better nature. There are numerous examples in the text but one of the most memorable involves the account of the villagers being goaded to turn against their neighbours following the classification designed to root out wealthy landowners. The rapidity with which people denounce their friends is chilling.

In her foreword, co-translator Nina McPherson warns that the Orwellian quality of the Communist rhetoric spouted by certain characters is deliberately satirical, as if worried that such sections might jar or disconcert readers. However, to my eye, the narrative shifts gears smoothly, moving seamlessly between descriptive passages of sometimes spine-tingling beauty to the harsh registers of many of the exchanges.

Nevertheless, the book is not without its flaws. Although for the most part deftly handled, the complex, flashback-laden structure yields the occasional jolt and sag. The device of harnessing something in the present to evoke a past event is a little overused in the early half of the book, with the result that a few of the transitions feel artificial. In addition, with the exception of intriguing figures such as the sinister married couple mentioned earlier, some of the walk-on characters seem redundant, almost as though they are remnants of threads or scenes cut from earlier drafts.

None of this gets in the way of the novel’s brilliance, however. It is at once engrossing and enlightening, a compelling narrative that leads readers through experiences and settings rarely represented in the English-speaking world. When set alongside the equally heart-wrenching yet deeply masculine The Sorrow of War, which was my choice to represent the country back in 2012, it reveals a strikingly different side to Vietnam.

Paradise of the Blind by Duong Thu Huong, translated from the Vietnamese by Phan Huy Duong and Nina McPherson (William Morrow, 1993)

Book of the month: Guzel Yakhina

April 30, 2019 By in Asia, Book of the month, Post-world, The stories Tags: , , , , , , 4 Comments

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A little while ago, I was contacted by Anna, a teacher at Go-English language school in Blagoveshchensk city on the border with China in far east Russia – in fact, she tells me, you can see China just across the Amur river (pictured above in one of the photos she sent me).

Anna and her students had been discussing this project and wanted to know about my Russian choices. I sent back a reply and a question – which book would her students choose for me?

FullSizeRender-28-04-19-08-42-4A few days later, I received a response featuring a number of suggestions from Anna’s students, along with explanations for why they recommended each book. The titles they’d picked included Ukrainian author Anastasia Novykh’s Sensei of Shambala (which Evgeniya says completely changed her outlook on life) and Alexander Pushkin’s The Daughter of the Commandant (which describes the ‘Russian soul in every detail’, according to Alina). In addition, Anna had made her own suggestion: The History of a Town by 19th-century author Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, whom she calls ‘the king of Russian satire’.

In the end, however, it was a recommendation for a contemporary novel that caught my eye: the award-winning Zuleikha by Tartar author Guzel Yakhina, translated by Lisa C. Hayden. Irina describes it as ‘a deep thought-provoking book which leaves its positive mark on your heart’, and soon after I started it, I knew it would be my next book of the month.

Set during the period of Soviet dekulakization and collectivization introduced when Stalin came to power in the mid-1920s, Zuleikha tells the story of the nation through the life of the title character. After witnessing the murder of her harsh husband by government forces charged with disenfranchising wealthy peasants (kulaks), Zuleikha is exiled along with thousands of others to a remote region of Siberia. There, the handful of them who survive the cruel journey must build a society from scratch, questioning and overturning many of the assumptions on which their former lives rested in the process.

As with many books that span years and capture the maturing and changing of the central characters, the tone of Zuleikha varies. The grim cruelty of the early chapters recalls other contemporary gulag-related fiction, such as Sofi Oksanen’s Purge, but there are moments of bathos too, as well as arresting imagery. After Zuleikha leaves her hometown and embarks on the punishing six-month train ride around rural Russia that will be the death of many of her companions, a softness creeps in as she begins to forge connections with those around her. This in turn shrinks to baldness in the early days at the settlement, where life is reduced to nothing but a series of punishing tasks necessary for survival, before blossoming to readmit wonder and creativity, seen through the eyes of a child and captured in art.

Tonal shifts notwithstanding, the ingenuity required to survive remains a constant theme. Whether we are witnessing Zuleikha creeping about her husband’s home in an effort to avoid her vicious mother-in-law, or seeing the official put in charge of her train risk arrest with each rare flash of humanity he shows his charges, Yakhina leaves us in no doubt of the precariousness of life in this world. The characters’ physical hardships pale in comparison to the mental suffering they endure and the self-deception they are obliged to practice to negotiate a society hostile to free thought.

Indeed, Yakhina’s ability to depict the collapse of the human psyche under extreme pressure is one of her greatest talents. The supreme example of this involves her portrayal of the breakdown of celebrated medical professor Volf Karlovich, who spends many pages believing that he is insulated from the horrors surrounding him by virtue of the fact that he lives inside an egg, until events force him to break out of his imaginary shell and engage with the real world once more. The unfolding of this episode is exquisite and credit must go to both the author and translator Lisa C. Hayden for the work they have done to imbue it with such tenderness and power.

It’s almost inevitable that in such a sweeping book, some parts drag. Indeed, the nature of the story – in which life is stripped back to its essentials and imagined afresh – necessitates a certain amount of simple, technical description. At points, there is a level of detail and lingering on certain incidental bits of information and action that some anglophone readers may find frustrating, given that such passages would usually be paced differently in comparable English-language novels. There is also a fair amount of recapping, some of which feels redundant.

Overall, however, this is a triumph of a book. It is a masterclass in synthesizing historical research with imagination and insight into how people think and feel. As Irina says, it ‘leaves its positive mark on your heart’. Thanks to Anna and the B2 students at Go-English in Blagoveshchensk for bringing it and the other titles above to my attention.

Zuleikha by Guzel Yakhina, translated from the Russian by Lisa C. Hayden (Oneworld, 2019)

Photos courtesy of Anna

Book of the month: Shehan Karunatilaka

February 26, 2019 By in Asia, Book of the month Tags: , , , , , , , 2 Comments

A few weeks ago, Mohammed left a comment on this site: ‘Ann after these long years did you finish reading all the list?’

He was referring to the lengthy collection of alternative recommendations I received for many countries during and shortly after my 2012 quest to read a book from every country. Although I made one choice for each UN-recognised nation that year, I recorded all the valid suggestions I received on The List so that I – and anyone else who was interested – could refer to them. At the time, I think I did intend to work my way through them all eventually and I have cherry-picked a number of titles in the six years since the end of the original project.

However, I have also found myself tempted away by numerous other intriguing books (many of which have been published since my list was drawn up).

That’s the thing with reading. One book leads to the next. You plunge into a story about a woman’s struggle to relocate to Johannesburg and find that leads you on to an intriguing memoir about growing up under Apartheid. This piques your interest in literature written and spoken in South Africa’s ten other official languages, which in turn leads you to discover a trend for sunshine-noir crime writing. Before you know it, a month has passed and you’re still nowhere near to exhausting the leads that sprouted from that original book.

Small wonder, then, that many of those suggestions I received in 2012 are still waiting their turn.

Sometimes, however, a title on The List gets impatient and seems to reach out from my computer screen to grab me and demand my attention. This happened to me most recently with Sri Lankan author Shehan Karunatilaka’s Chinaman.

The novel had been a strong contender for my Sri Lankan choice back in 2012. I had heard very good things about it – not least that it had won several awards, including the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature and the Commonwealth Book Prize.

There were two sticking points, however. The novel had been written in English (and after my enlightening exchange with Indian journalist Suneetha Balakrishnan I was making a concerted effort to read more translated books) and it was about cricket, of which, I have to confess, I am not a fan. As a result, I jumped another way, picking Sunethra Rajakarunanayake’s Metta as my Sri Lankan choice.

That might have been it for Chinaman. But then, earlier this month, I was invited to take part in several events at the Brahmaputra Literary Festival in Assam. Among the sessions on my schedule was a panel discussion with Shehan Karunatilaka. Clearly, it was time I read his book.

Centred around WG Karunasena, an aging alcoholic journalist trying to track down the elusive Pradeep Mathew – the greatest Sri Lankan spin bowler you’ve never heard of – the novel takes readers into the heart of the nation’s most popular sport. It is, unashamedly, a book about cricket, but, like the best sports writing, it also explores many other things – fanaticism, history, politics, love and hate. What’s more, it makes a bold claim, a ‘Sales Pitch’ appearing in the opening pages:

‘If you’ve never seen a cricket match; if you have and it has made you snore; if you can’t understand why anyone would watch, let alone obsess over this dull game, then this is the book for you.’

Karunatilaka delivers on this promise. He does so by inhabiting his characters’ obsessions – a perspective he says he gained by spending many hours hanging around bars with old, drunk cricket fanatics – so completely that we live and breathe them too. Deftly working in the necessary explanations of cricket’s mechanics alongside numerous quirky facts and pieces of trivia (how test matches came to last five days and the surprising identities of the first teams to play an international game, for example), he opens up a world and invites us in.

The whole thing is achieved with wonderful playfulness. From word-play and witty one-liners through to amusing sleights of hand in the plotting and even jokes at the author’s expense (by the end of the narrative characters have not only criticised the novel as being ‘rubbish’ in places, but also dismissed Karunatilaka’s name as ‘common’), the book sparkles with good humour.

Indeed, it is so enjoyable that it is easy to overlook the virtuosic leaps Karunatilaka makes to propel us between its numerous storylines. It is testament to his ability to draw characters in a line or two that, many times, we find ourselves picking up a thread that was left dangling tens of pages before without hesitation.

Anglophone readers tend to think of humorous books as being towards the lighter end of the spectrum, but Chinaman challenges this assumption. From racism and the violence and injustice that has marked Sri Lanka’s history through to the personal tragedy of being unable to connect with those we love, Karunatilaka presents us with a broad range of human experience and makes us feel its weight.

The result is a reading adventure as gripping and memorable as attending a brilliant test match must be for a cricket fanatic. I marvelled at the technical ingenuity, gasped at the surprises and moments of drama, chuckled at the back and forth between the players and the umpire, and luxuriated in the ability to be taken out of myself by something truly fascinating for a few days. It is a wonderful, joyous book… and a strong argument for digging out a few more of those recommendations from that there list.

Chinaman by Shehan Karunatilaka (Jonathan Cape, 2011)

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