Category Archives: Asia

North Korea: keeping the faith

April 9, 2012 By in Asia, The stories Tags: , , , , , , 20 Comments

There have been some intriguing books published about North Korea in recent years. From Barbara Demick’s outstanding Nothing to Envy to Blaine Harden’s Escape from Camp 14, an extract of which was published last month in the Guardian, there is no shortage of harrowing survivors’ accounts of life in the world’s most secretive state.

When I was starting to prepare for this project late last year, several people suggested that I contact the South Korean embassy in London to see if they knew of dissident literature by North Korean escapees that I could read. I was on the point of doing so when it occurred to me that, while this might well yield some fascinating texts, it would bring me no closer to knowing anything about literature inside North Korea itself. What did people in Pyongyang read? What stories were household classics in the land of the then-Dear Leader? I had to find out.

With this in mind, I visited the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’s website and dropped them a line. I was delighted to receive an email back from Spanish-born North Korean Special Delegate Alejandro Cao de Benos (the first foreigner ever to be granted North Korean citizenship and allowed to work for the government) and the two of us had an extraordinary exchange about what books might be available for me to read in English. You can read a full account of our correspondence in the blog post I wrote for the Huffington Post at the time.

I was planning to give Mr Cao de Benos another try after the dust had settled from Kim Jong Il’s death, however in the interim I heard from Nicholas Mercury, founder of North Korea Books, and what he said intrigued me. He had been prompted to get into North Korean literature and subsequently start his business selling rare books in English from the DPRK after reading My Life and Faith, a memoir by Korean Army war correspondent and ardent DPRK patriot Ri In Mo. He commended it to me as a text that contained ‘a point of view completely unknown in the West…that of utter love and devotion and sacrifice for a country, political system, and especially leadership, that (most) of the rest of the world prefers to despise and hate’.

I needed no further encouragement to give it a try and was delighted when the book arrived from an address in Beijing, accompanied by a DVD featuring subtitled extracts from DPRK films, military displays, dances and marching songs.

Telling the story of Ri’s early affinity for the DPRK’s ideology, his capture in 1952 and alleged 34 years of torture and imprisonment in South Korea ‘in blatant violation of the Geneva Convention’, and triumphal return to his homeland in 1993, My Life and Faith provides a fascinating insight into North Korea. At times extremely gripping, with overtones of jail literature by the likes of Albie Sachs and Nelson Mandela – to whom Ri is compared in the introduction – it presents a thought-provoking perspective on national identity and Western attitudes to the motherland. ‘It is not until they take off the colour glasses of “anti-communism” that they understand it’, he writes.

The human touches make the book. From the portrait of life in North Korea both before and after partition – where ‘widow kidnapping’ was once rife and many families were too poor to afford clothes and lived holed up in their houses ashamed to receive guests – to the descriptions of Ri’s wife sitting next to him as he writes, complaining about his old-fashioned turns of phrase, the sense of the man behind the narrative is strong.

These details win Ri credibility when he launches into broader ideological attacks, often citing statistics and events that few readers would have the means to verify. His tirades against ‘the US imperialists and Syngman Rhee puppet clique’ often have a familiar feel as they chime in closely with accusations levelled at the North Korean regime by the Western media. So we hear allegations of South Korean historians conveniently omitting or twisting facts, ‘lies’ from UN representatives, pro-Western propaganda in films and books, and a fascinating account of Ri’s interactions with the world’s media after his release in South Korea:

‘While talking with them, I found that there were differences in the way they expressed my ideas, and they seemed to take great effort to alter my words. When I said “people” by habit, they changed it to “the masses”[…] While altering my words in this way, the young journalists expressed the regrets [sic], “If the words used in north Korea are used, readers may find fault with them, so they should be altered somewhat. I’m sorry’

[…]

Many journalists with newspapers, radio and the foreign press visited me. They seemed to have not understood me well. There were instances of seriously distorted information.’

At times, the rhetoric undoes itself by too obviously pulling the tricks it ascribes to Western states. Ri regales us with the story of the South Korean soldier, a ‘victim of propaganda’ who killed himself rather than allow himself to fall into North Korean hands because he had heard exaggerated reports of the nation’s cruelty only to reel off a hysterical catalogue of Western atrocities in the next paragraph. The mawkish poems ‘Dedicated to the Dear Leader’ that pepper the narrative, the repeated assertions about the ‘deep solicitude’ of the nation’s leader and the accounts of the miracles that took place on the death of Kim Il Sung also have a distancing effect.

Nevertheless, I was impressed by how persuasive and compelling the book was. Now and then, in the face of its heartfelt appeals, I felt the see-saw tipping and found myself scrabbling for arguments to redress the balance. Then I remembered that, as Mr Cao de Benos confirmed to me, variations on this story – books ‘showing honour, loyalty and sacrifice for the motherland’ – are the only narratives allowed in the DPRK. Reading the world would not be an option there. And no amount of passion, rhetoric or idealism can make up for that.

My Life and Faith by Ri In Mo, translated from the Korean by ? (Foreign Languages Publishing House, Pyongyang, Juche 86 (1997))

Laos: a helping hand

April 7, 2012 By in Asia, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , , 4 Comments

When you’re trying to get through a book from every country in the world in a year, the research can take up almost as much time as the reading. Whether you’re following leads for a sovereign state with apparently no literature available in English or trying to work out the best book to choose from a nation with oodles of stories on the market, googling and emailing can eat up hours.

So I was very grateful when Matt Read stopped by the blog and left a comment saying he’d decided to help me out researching one of the gaps on my list. He’d chosen Laos and, after a bit of googling, he’d concluded that Mother’s Beloved, a short story collection by Outhine Bounyavong, was a good bet.

I was particularly thankful for Matt’s help as Laos was shaping up to be one of the tougher nuts to crack. Politics and the legacy of Laos’s 22-year civil war mean that the country’s publishing industry is in a relatively early stage of its development. Many writers, including Bounyavong, had to finance and distribute their books themselves in the early stages of their careers and translation from Lao into English is rare.

The book was interesting for another reason too: containing both the Lao and English versions of the stories (with the Lao on the left and the English on the right), it would be the first parallel text I’d come across this year. I hurried to order my copy.

Simple and engaging, Bounyavong’s collection consists largely of first person accounts of moments where characters gain new insights into the world around them. These epiphanies often centre on a clash between the modern world and the ancient traditions and require the protagonists to develop more humility and respect for the natural world and their fellow human beings. So we see the frumpy girl at the village dance making a lasting match with the man who sees past her looks and the young upstart in the VIP stand at the basketball match taken down a peg or two when the charity collecting plate comes round and he faces revealing he is broke.

Often the stories provide fascinating insights into Lao culture. The title story, for example, hangs on the local belief that anyone eating in the presence of a pregnant woman is morally obliged to share the food with her. Similarly, the strange little vignette ‘Fifty Kip’ yields an intriguing explanation of the traditional criterion for judging whether children are ready for school: they must be able to reach their arms over their heads and touch their ears.

Now and then the moralistic tone of the stories sticks in the craw a bit. The modern world, synechdochically present in the Coke cans and fag packets hurled from passing logging trucks, is always bad, while the traditional ways – captured in the flight of birds and the frangipani, ‘the flower of glory for Laos’ – are good. The beautiful girls end up working as prostitutes and the plain ones find true love.

Taken as a whole, though, Bounyavong’s writing has an intriguing and wistful quality that captures what it’s like to live in a country caught in the approaching headlights of Western commercialism. The book will be of interest to anyone keen to know about life off the beaten track in South-east Asia. A thought-provoking read. Thanks Matt.

Mother’s Beloved: Stories from Laos by Outhine Bounyavong, translated from the Lao by ? (University of Washington Press, 1999) Strangely enough I couldn’t see a translator credited in my edition – can anyone tell me who this was?

Bahrain: why translation matters

March 30, 2012 By in Asia, The stories Tags: , , , , , , 8 Comments

For so small an island, Bahrain has an impressive place on the world literature stage. It is thought by many to be the site of the mythic land of Dilmun, featured in ancient masterpieces such as the Epic of Gilgamesh. Legend also states that it was the location of the Garden of Eden (a claim reflected by the somewhat anachronistic Tree of Life that flourishes in the middle of desert land there). As such, it has a claim to call itself the cradle of the world’s bestselling story, The Bible.

Sadly, when it comes to contemporary books in translation, Bahrain’s record is not nearly as impressive. As it turned out, I struggled to find anything at all that would qualify as Bahraini  literature in English. In the end I asked author Lucy Caldwell, whose excellent Dylan Thomas prize-winning novel The Meeting Point is set in Bahrain, to see whether she had come across any contemporary Bahraini writers during her research.

She said that she had found very little, but that there was a writer she had heard about but not read herself. A colleague who grew up in Bahrain also gave a suggestion, mentioning an author who was the first Bahraini author to write and publish work directly in English. They were both talking about Ali Al Saeed.

Published in 2004, Al Saeed’s novel QuixotiQ explores the emptiness of modern existence through the eyes of a series of characters seeking to turn their lives around. When violence rips through their orderly hometown Okay, a place so stable that the local psychiatric clinic has gone out of business, the characters are set on a collision course. The resulting combustion uncovers a chain of corruption that links up through every level of society, right to the very top.

The basic premise is good but it is let down by the execution. Grammatically odd, peppered with strange expressions and veering between tenses often in a single sentence, the text makes the reader very uneasy from the start. This is not helped by the strange rootlessness of the narrative, which seems to be set in some mysterious, non-existent mid-Atlantic state, where characters such as ‘Conrad Spitfire’ and ‘Randy Challenge’ rub shoulders on streets with names like ‘Elmo Avenue’.

At times, the outlandish registers and malapropisms reach comic proportions. ‘Should he keep finagling?’ one character asks himself, while someone else walks about ‘feeling exacerbated’ and the narrative voice confesses ‘The way this whole shenanigan unfolded was a mystery’.

More worrying still, are the holes in the plot, which see characters acting without cause and often questioning their own motivations. ‘I suppose I could have taken the bus’, muses one to himself as he drives off in the car he has just stolen. In addition, the great revelation at the end is more than a little deflated by the observation: ‘How Patrick knew that, nobody knew’.

Al Saeed seems conscious of this. In fact much of the final section is given over to defensive comments that ‘sometimes things do not have to make any sense to be true’.

This awareness points to an authorial sense which suggests that, writing in his mother tongue with more revisions and better editorial support than self-publishing company iUniverse could offer him, Al Saeed might have made much richer capital out of his promising raw material.

It would be interesting to know why he felt he had to opt for a Western setting and for writing in his second language. But then again, given the track record for translating contemporary Bahraini literature into English, perhaps it doesn’t take a genius to work that one out.

QuixotiQ by Ali Al Saeed (iUniverse, 2004)

Indonesia: talking about revolution

March 18, 2012 By in Asia, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , 11 Comments

The further I get into this project to read the world, the more I appreciate the challenge facing translators working with books written in societies very different from my own. Not only must they endeavour to create engaging and faithful reflections of the original texts, but they must often also find a way of explaining objects, customs and even whole belief systems that may have no counterpart in their target audience’s culture without turning the narratives into anthropological essays.

Some, like May Jayyusi and Christopher Tingley, the translators of Ibrahim Al-Koni’s The Bleeding of the Stone, choose to tackle this with a brief notes section at the back, to which readers can defer for help decoding terms they may not have come across before. In other cases, as with Rajaa Alsanea’s Girls of Riyadh, cultural and linguistic differences lead to a substantial reworking of the translated text, with controversial results.

Few books, however, can have required more fancy philological footwork than YB Mangunwijaya’s Durga/Umayi. Not only does this novel satirise most of the major political events in Indonesia from the 1930s to the late 1980s, but it also draws on the region’s shadow-play tradition, weaving a number of Indonesia’s myths into the text. On top of this, as translator Ward Keeler explains in the introduction, Mangunwijaya has helped himself to all the different dialects of Indonesian spoken in the country, creating his own ‘zany style that is without precedent in Indonesian or Javanese literature’. Phew.

The basic premise — thank goodness — is relatively simple. Central character, Iin, a young woman opposed to the ‘cooking-cleaning-cuddling view’ of her sex, finds herself with a front-row seat at most of Indonesia’s key historical events, from before the time of independence from the Dutch, through the Japanese occupation of the 1940s and the horrific communist massacres of the 1960s and beyond.

Mirroring the events shaping her nation, Iin morphs from a young idealist into a hardened globe-trotter, cutting cynical deals that will never benefit the people she used to care for most and changing her dress, manner and even her face and body to fit each new scenario. Like the beautiful goddess Durga of the title — who finds herself transformed into the monstrous Umayi when she refuses to have sex with her husband Lord Guru in public — Iin loses her identity in her effort to assert herself.

As with all great satirists, Mangunwijaya has an eye for the ridiculous and a talent for plunging pride into bathos. So we hear of ‘the Nippon Armed Forces who were undefeated but then were’ and the lament of the peasant farmers: ‘Oh God, when is this freedom era going to end, begging your pardon’. Again, like the best satire, this merciless stripping back of pretension and propaganda proceeds from deep, humane anger at the injustices heaped upon normal people, which bubbles up through the text, aerating and stirring the narrative.

For all its brilliance, however, this novel does come with a health warning. Delightful though Mangunwijaya’s ‘verbal high jinks’ can be, they demand a lot. Sentences spiral off across page after page, leaving the reader trailing behind them, struggling to keep hold of subjects and objects, nevermind the overall sense. At times, searching in vain for a main clause, I found myself wondering if I had any idea what was going on at all, as though the language was forcing me to share the bewilderment of the Indonesians as regime change after regime change sweeps their land.

This is not a book to curl up with. It’s a book to concentrate on and frown at and read bits of several times over. The effort it is worth it though: this is easily one of the most inventive, urgent and passionate texts I’ve read. It’s also a testament to what skilled translators, the neglected heroes of the world literature scene, can achieve. Hats off to you, Ward Keeler.

Durga/Umayi by YB Mangunwijaya (translated from the Indonesian by Ward Keeler). Publisher (this edition): University of Washington Press (2004)

Bangladesh: the point of book prizes

March 11, 2012 By in Asia, The stories Tags: , , , , , , 4 Comments

With the announcement of the Orange prize longlist this week, the usual round of questions and criticisms began. Shouldn’t the list be more international? Why is there so much historical fiction on it? How come Penelope Lively missed out? And who on earth thought Emma Donoghue deserved to feature for a novel first published in 2008?

It can all make you rather tired. In fact, until recently I didn’t pay much attention to book award lists, regarding them as little more than a marketing ploy to shift books by a lucky cohort of writers that seemed to change very little from year to year.

Then I took the plunge into my project to read one book from every country in the world in 2012 and all that changed. As I struck out from the familiar shallows of British, American and postcolonial literature, I found that book prize lists gleamed like guiding beacons on a vast and sometimes turbulent ocean. Often they were my only way of telling whether something was likely to be any good.

So when Fay, who is shadow judging the Man Asian Literary Prize on her blog, stopped by to share her thoughts on some of the contenders, I was grateful to be able to add Tahmima Anam’s longlisted The Good Muslim to my Bangladeshi options.

Jumping back and forth between the early seventies, early eighties and, once, the nineties, the novel explores the fallout of the Bangladesh Liberation War, which saw the country split from Pakistan in 1972. Told mostly through the eyes of Maya Haque, a woman doctor who returns to the home of her mother, deeply religious brother and his neglected son after an absence of seven years, it reveals the different ways that people cope with trauma and the harm that silence or incomplete communication between those with close ties can do.

Anam writes eloquently about the predicament of the intelligent, professional woman in a society where meekness, marriage and motherhood are the order of the day. As in several of the other books I’ve read so far this year, modern medicine provides the frontier for the meeting of traditional and western values as reticent characters find themselves forced to turn to Maya in cases of extreme need. 

The writing works best where it traces the friction generated as these two worlds collide. Anam has a particular talent for showing how memories and emotions intrude into seemingly unconnected practicalities, providing a motive for actions that would otherwise seem inexplicable.

Some of the peripheral characters are a little awkwardly drawn and there occasionally seems to be a step or two missing in the emotional transitions. The scene where Maya takes her nephew to buy shoes and storms out of the shop in a huff, for example, left me feeling slightly nonplussed.

Nevertheless, this is an assured and compelling tale that deserves a wide audience — and one which I would never have found without the Man Asian Literary Prize (shadow) jury’s help. It is proof of the need for prize organisers to take care that their lists truly reflect the best eligible work, wherever it comes from.

The Good Muslim by Tahmima Anam (Canongate Books, 2011)

South Korea: telling tales

February 27, 2012 By in Asia, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , 2 Comments

‘A man needs to understand where he comes from in order to be truly human’

The question of what counts as national literature keeps cropping up in this project. As recommendations for books from different countries continue to flood in, I’m struck by the different interpretations people have.

For some of us it’s about whether a book is set in a particular country. Others think that books have to be by people who hold citizenship or were born and brought up in the nation. Still others say it’s down to whether the author, who may hold citizenship for several states, identifies him or herself as being ‘from’ that place. Meanwhile countries themselves are often very quick to claim great writers with very cosmopolitan backgrounds as their own.

As I’ve been researching the titles for the list, I’ve found myself leaning towards a definition of national literature that requires the writer to have a strong connection with the country in question. Frequently this will mean that he or she was born there, but it can also be the case that the writer has adopted a country or lived there for a large chunk of his or her life, as in the case of South Korean-born Austrian writer Anna Kim.

But what happens if you were born into a nationality that no longer exists?

Celebrated South Korean dissident writer Hwang Sok-Yong — himself born before Korea was divided after the second world war — explores the scars that such nation making and breaking leaves on individual and national psyches and the stories that we tell to explain them in his haunting 2002 novel The Guest.

Following an elderly American pastor, Yosop, who joins a government programme to visit the region in North Korea where he was born, the narrative explores the legacy of a 52-day massacre that saw around a quarter of the population of Hwanghae Province killed during the 1950 Korean War. The massacre has long been attributed to the US forces by the North Korean government, but Yosop’s memory of events is somewhat different. As he works his way around the initiative’s series of carefully stage-managed events and visits his remaining relatives inside the secretive communist state, he encounters a series of characters and ghosts who enable him to piece together a much more rounded and disturbing picture.

The book presents a refreshing contrast to the two-dimensional reports that make up the bulk of reporting on North Korea in the Western media. Less interested in attacking the regime than in illuminating the reasons for its development, Hwang presents a subtle and nuanced picture of the country, which he was jailed by the South Korean government for visiting illegally in 1989 — ‘It seems the communists, too, can be quite humane, eh?’ remarks one of Yosop’s companions in Pyongyang.

Nevertheless, the administration’s vice-like grip on the national narrative simmers beneath the novel, bubbling to the surface now and then — as in the scene where Yosop is forced to sit and listen to a series of hysterical survivors’ stories of US atrocities at a state museum, all the while knowing them to be false.

In fact, the role of memory and eye-witness accounts underpins the novel. Much of the narrative is stitched together from a series of somewhat surreal monologues delivered by the living and the dead.  At times, these can feel stilted and forced — not helped by the hefty chunks of exposition which the complex subject matter requires.

Nevertheless, the resolution depends on each of the beings having the chance to deliver his or her testimony; only once all the contrasting accounts have been heard and considered can Yosop’s ghosts be laid to rest.  The right to swap stories, however controversial, messy, provocative or contradictory, is essential to the way we understand and assimilate our origins, it seems, no matter where we’re from.

The Guest by Hwang Sok-Yong (translated from the Korean by Kyung-Ja Chun and Maya West). Publisher (Kindle edition): Seven Stories Press (2011)

Tajikistan: imagine

February 17, 2012 By in Asia, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , , 7 Comments

‘Is Tajikistan a real country?’ asked someone when I said it was next on my list. ‘Are you sure it’s not one of those made up places?’

I don’t know what ‘those made up places’ are — are we talking Neverland, Utopia or Walford here? — but strangely enough I think the citizens of Tajikistan might have chimed in with my companion’s sentiments back in the early nineties, when ‘one day everything, literally in a single instant, tore away irrevocably from its old bearings and went careering downhill like a snowball, picking up more and more atrocities on its way’.

Charting the outbreak of civil war in Tajikistan following the collapse of the USSR, Andrei Volos’s Hurramabad, which is named after a mythical city of joy and happiness, portrays the eviction of ethnic Russians who ‘suddenly found [themselves] in exile without having to move anywhere’. This is told through seven interlinked stories, each revealing the private calamity of a different individual and the way it contributes to the undermining and toppling of a collective reality that had existed for 70 years.

Anti-Booker prize-winner Volos is usually considered to be a Russian writer (and he writes in Russian), yet he was born in what is now Tajikistan, where his family had lived since the 1920s (his father suffered a heart attack and died when they were evicted). His personal perspective on the tragedies and atrocities he describes — from the man using all he has in the world to buy a gravestone for his brother before he leaves his homeland for good to the man coerced into kidnapping and sex-trafficking young girls to Afghanistan for arms — gives a muscular, biting edge to the writing, which at times launches vicious attacks on the authorities that stood by while their citizens were robbed, raped, ruined and rejected.

What is extraordinary, however, is the way that Volos has been able to sublimate and channel this emotion into a towering work of art in such a short space of time (the original text appeared in 1998). Indeed, the things described are so shocking and so far removed from anything that we in Western Europe have had to deal with for decades that I found my brain reordering 1992 to read 1929 the first few times I encountered it, as though it simply couldn’t entertain the proximity of these events.

While the constant switching from one story to another can be a little tiring and disorientating, the pieces themselves are immensely powerful. For my money ‘The House by the River’, in which Yamninov, having been forced to sign away his property to a government thug, embarks on a desperate and soul-destroying attempt to save the family house he spent seven years building, is in a league of its own. But each piece is compelling.

Over and above this, though, Volos’s use of imagery (aided no doubt by Arch Tait’s excellent translation) is among the very best I’ve read. The text glitters with spine-tingling similes and metaphors. From the ‘low overcast sky… like a hat pulled down over someone’s eyes’ to the abandoned assumptions that ‘immediately leapt back the way mountains do when you take the binoculars from your eyes’ and the heat ‘like a poultice slapped over the eyes’, Volos demonstrates time and again his ability to reach out from this forgotten corner of the world and take you to his characters.

The result is engrossing and shaming. With this book, Volos makes the experience of being evicted from your homeland by force — an experience to which many of us have been deadened by reams of newsprint and the blue flickers of the nightly news — immediate, human and real.

It left me feeling I’d been living in a fairytale until I read it.

Hurramabad by Andrei Volos (translated from the Russian by Arch Tait). Publisher (this edition): GLAS (2001)

Nepal: tall tales

January 31, 2012 By in Asia, The stories Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

 

Reading a book from every country in the world would be nigh on impossible without the schemes and initiatives that exist to promote the work of emerging authors on the global literary stage. The University of Iowa’s International Writing Program is one of the most established of these, and it was on the list of its alumni, who hail from more than 140 countries, that I came across Ajit Baral.

Even with the exposure from IWP, Ajit Baral’s English language collection of Nepalese folk tales was not easy to come by. In fact, I had to get it shipped from India via Penguin when the usual online retailers drew a blank.

Luckily Baral’s lively retelling of 31 largely oral folktales never before rendered in English is worth the effort. Illustrated by Nepalese cartoonist Durga Baral, they present a vibrant picture of some of the myths, legends, themes and cultures that have shaped the Himalayan nation.

Irreverent, funny and occasionally disturbing, the stories evoke a world full of contradictions, frustrations and marvels. Gods walk the earth, bickering and betting, ghosts steal people’s coats, rats get married and tigers talk.

Some of the tales, like the story about the old man who tries to cheat death and learns the hard way why endless life is not a good thing or the yarn about the vain Uttis tree that falls over a cliff in shock when it is insulted and is left clinging on for all eternity, have an Aesopian quality and seem to serve to explain some of life’s mysteries.

Others, like the story about the scheming barber who ends up being burnt to death when his plans backfire, seem more calculated to raise a laugh at a crook getting his just deserts.

Yet these are largely not moral tales. In fact it is rare that the good win out over the bad. If there is a common theme, it is the punishment of short-sightedness, dullness and stupidity and the rewarding of cunning and quick-wittedness — that and pushing coins up animals’ bottoms to make them appear to pass money, which happens in a surprisingly high number of these tales and which I’m at a loss to explain. If anyone from Nepal (or elsewhere for that matter) can offer a reason for this I’d be intrigued!

All in all, though, it’s the qualities that make for a good storyteller that carry the day — as must have been the case for the people who first told these tales, those who passed them down, and for Baral, who opens them up to a new audience today.

The Lazy Conman and Other Stories by Ajit Baral, illustrated by Durga Baral. Publisher: Penguin India (2009)

Turkey: mystic union

January 29, 2012 By in Asia, Europe, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , 17 Comments

 

You could be forgiven for thinking that Turkey has only produced one writer in recent years: bestseller and Nobel Prize-winner Orhan Pamuk. He was certainly the top tip in the Turkish recommendations I got for this blog and, never having read him before, I was very tempted to join the party.

Then I stumbled upon a copy of Elif Shafak’s latest novel in Foyles and, intrigued by the biog’s claim that she is the most widely read woman writer in Turkey, I decided to leave Pamuk to his adoring public (at least for this year) and give Shafak a go instead.

It cost me a bit of googling to be sure that Strasbourg-born Shafak qualified as my Turkish entry. Having lived in the US, UK and Turkey, the feminist-leaning writer — whose second English-language novel The Bastard of Istanbul led to her being charged with ‘insulting Turkishness’ (the case was dropped before trial) — seems more of a citizen of the world than of any particular country. According to her website, she prides herself on writing that feeds off ‘journeys and commutes between cultures and cities’.

Shafak’s latest book reflects this. Weaving together the story of non-practising Jew Ella, a housewife-turned literary agent’s assistant in Massachusetts, and a novel about the friendship between Sufi poet Rumi and wandering dervish Shams of Tabriz in 13th century Anatolia that she is given to assess, the narrative tests modern Western culture against medieval Muslim mysticism and finds it wanting. As Ella becomes engrossed in the text and in a correspondence with its author, she finds herself forced to re-evaluate her assumptions and priorities, with dramatic results.

There’s a lot to like about the book: it’s well-written, it’s insightful, and it’s painstakingly researched. It raises some interesting points about the fundamental commonality of world religions — religious wars, the novel-within-the-novel’s author Aziz suggests at one point, may arise from nothing more than ‘mistranslation’.

But there is an uneasiness at the narrative’s heart that is hard to ignore. As Ella and, especially, the 13th century mystics become increasingly absorbed in their quest for spiritual perfection and the true, muscular love of the title, there is insufficient weight given to the sacrifices their quest entails — the child bride left to curl up and die in a corner, the son whose loyalty is curdled into bitterness by neglect.

In addition, the perspective leaps between characters, particularly inside Aziz’s novel, necessitate some awkward repetition of events. This can be irritating, as can the character of Shams of Tabriz, who trots out one parable too many on occasion.

Nonetheless this is an enjoyable read and — judging by the sales figures and rave reviews elsewhere — clearly one that has struck a chord with many readers. Drop me a line if you’re one of them. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

The Forty Rules of Love by Elif Shafak. Publisher (this edition): Penguin (2011)

Russia: cold comfort

January 24, 2012 By in Asia, Europe, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , 9 Comments

‘How can you expect a man who’s warm to understand one who’s cold?’

I’m being a bit self-indulgent here given the hundreds of excellent and intriguing contemporary Russian novels out there. But the truth is, I’ve been wanting to read this book nearly half my life, ever since one of my A-level English teachers described how she’d spent one Christmas absorbed in it in her teens.

I’m not the first to feel this way. When it was published in the journal Novy Mir (New World) in November 1962, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn‘s portrait of life in the Siberian Gulag, which drew on his own eight years imprisonment in labour camps, flew off the shelves, causing the magazine to sell out, whipping up international outrage and eventually leading to his deportation on the grounds that he opposed the principles of the Soviet Union. (He was allowed back and award the Nobel Prize in the end, but not for long time.)

One of the Ronseal school when it comes to titles, the novel does exactly what its name suggests: it follows one prisoner, Ivan Denisovich (or Shukhov), through a single day. Yet this window of time and experience becomes the prism through which Solzhenitsyn diffracts the Gulag system, separating out its psychological, political, emotional and sociological impact on the prisoners, the guards and the wider world for all to see.

When your world is shrunk to a single punishing routine, little things come to matter very much: the mittens you hide under your pillow, the piece of bread squirreled into an inner pocket, the trowel concealed in the wall because it is slightly better than the others and will help you work faster. Dignity and identity also shrink but are not extinguished: they persist in your pride at not scrounging, in playing fair with your peers, in finding little loopholes through which to gain an extra portion by rendering someone a service.

Likewise, the guards are diminished and hardened by their daily efforts to limit and control the existence of others. Meanness glimmers in the thermometer placed in a sheltered corner so that it never drops below the -41 degrees that would enforce a day off work and in the carelessness that sees prisoners hauled out of bed again and again to be recounted.

The narrative reflects this shrinking, slipping into the present second person now and then, as though the reader is a new arrival whom Shukhov has taken under his wing and is showing the ropes. So engrossing is the text (which features on the Translators Association’s list of 50 Outstanding Translations from the Last 50 Years), that it can be quite jolt to find yourself looking up and realising you are not in the Gulag anymore.

All of which is doubly impressive because, really, this is a novel that shouldn’t work. If Solzhenitsyn had submitted it to the weekly workshop on my UEA Creative Writing master’s course, I can imagine the group sitting round, shaking its head, telling him that though the prose was well-written, there was a fundamental problem with the plot. ‘A man getting up, going to work, going back and going to bed is not a story,’ we would have told him. ‘Nothing happens. Nothing changes. Try again.’

What we would have missed is that the change that this book brings about is in its readers. Through immersing us in the details of the Gulag life and making us feel what it is like to have to bank all your happiness and comfort on the ability to secure an extra minute’s rest or a slurp more of cold gruel, Solzhenitsyn bridges the barrier between the imprisoned and the free.

How can a man who is warm understand one who’s cold? Well perhaps he can’t. But he could try reading this book.

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (translated from the Russian by Ralph Parker). Publisher (this edition): Penguin Classics (2000)