The Wrong Empire

May 21

“

You probably think, U.S./Canada, they’re interchangeable because they’re both filled with English-speaking, morbidly obese white people. Well, Manjula, you couldn’t be more mistaken. Americans are pushy, obnoxious, neurotic, crass—anything and everything—the full catastrophe as our friend Zorba might say. Canadians are none of that.

The way you might fear a cow sitting down in the middle of the street during rush hour, that’s how I fear Canadians.

To Canadians, everyone is equal.

”

At the risk of offending all Americans and Canadians, this passage from Where’d You Go, Bernadette made me laugh out loud.

May 19

“The movie celebrates a great American kid, and much of it plays with a depth and psychological acuteness almost never found in our movies anymore.”

— David Denby on ”Mud,” a new adventure film with Matthew McConaughey: http://nyr.kr/14VHcXv (via newyorker)

After seeing the movie I have to agree.

Another great American icon, the Mississippi River, is as important as the human actors and the movie feels like a trip along its waters - the time you spend on the journey and the sights you see along the way are just as important as the getting to the final destination.

I was reminded of the film’s evocation of the Arkansas coast and its riverboat-living community when reading this piece by Philip Hensher in The Guardian on the importance of place in fiction:

Of course, a narrative can’t be just about a spirit of place; that is a subject for the lyric poem. A novel has to place the psychologies of individuals in a delicate relationship with the world that formed them. Are they products of a city and a land? Have they formed the world about them? Are they in savage rebellion against it? It is too easy, as a novelist, to find correlations between geography and national character, even if a national character existed – the supposedly volatile British and the changeable island weather; or the urgent, argumentative Bengali and the constantly shifting grounds he lives on. It’s all too simple an explanation. But the spirit of place in a novel is not just an inert backdrop or a straightforward illustrator of emotions; it is part of the humanity at the centre of the endeavour. Those Bengali rivers have their own dignity, as part of the physical world, and as part of a place. There’s a high degree of human investment in the flow of water too; that is the subject of the novel..

Hensher has just won The Ondaatje prize for his novel Scenes from Early Life.

May 12

“Realistically, it probably wasn’t slave children, but there had to be armies of factory workers making this slapdash stuff, underpaid people cranking out things for underpaid people to buy and use up, living their lives mostly up cancel each other out. A worldwide entrapment of bottom feeders.” This description of shopping in a dollar store from Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior sums up the ethos of modern retail. Although this is fiction, the recent deaths in Bangladesh show it is not far from the truth.

May 4

“There is a world out there, so new, so random and disassociated that it puts us all in danger. We talk online, we “friend” each other when we don’t know who we are really talking to - we fuck strangers. We mistake almost anything for a relationship, a community of sorts, and yet, when we are with our families, in our communities, we are clueless, we short-circuit and immediately dive back into the digitized version- it is easier, because we can be both our truer selves and our fantasy selves all at once, with each carrying equal weight.”

From May We Be Forgiven by A M Homes

A very funny, yet unexpectedly touching, novel on the real meaning of family and relationships in a constantly connected world.

Apr 29

hester-lee:

picadorbookroom:

Wonderful review of Hilary Mantel’s works by associate editor Namara Smith for n+1.

“Here are some of the words in Mantel’s Cromwell novels: Guiles, argent, couchant. Estoc. Exsanguinates. Fuckeur. There is hunting; there is jousting. There are sconces, velvet cushions, jellies in the shape of castles, and stuffed piglets. There are songs that can only be described as bawdy.”

Excellent. “…vigilant dissatisfaction, bordering on the peevish.” Ms Mantel can spin a sentence as eyewatering as cider vinegar. We love her we do.

Agreed - great to see her on the shortlist for The 2013 Women’s Prize for Fiction

Having just finished Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life, I realise that I have read three of the books on the shortlist. So now it seems only fair to read the other three. A M Homes’ May We Be Forgiven up next.

Apr 22

“

The ideal writer should be a Method actor of sorts, I’ve always felt: Meryl Streep can get so profoundly into Isak Dinesen, Margaret Thatcher and Karen Silkwood in part because she finds that corner in herself that rhymes with each one of them. We can evoke the people (or places) that move us by becoming them, since every subject worth taking on remakes us in its own image.

All of us, as the neuroscientist David Eagleman points out, are “not of one mind. Everyone is of many minds all the time.” But how much more true of writers like Hamid or Smith - Hari Kunzru or Chang-rae Lee - who have inhabited so many different worlds that we (and they) can’t begin to say they exclusively “belong to” any. Perhaps finding the answer to that question - locating what Hamid calls in his new book “a plausible unitary self” - is part of what all their stylistic experiments are about. But in the meantime, what they are telling us is that for an increasing number of people worldwide, it’s only by remaining constantly mobile, keeping your voice as fluid and versatile as the world around you, that you can begin to be true to who you really are.

”

From Voices Inside Their Heads by Pico Iyer (NYT)

Apr 12

“

Turning the pages of a paper book is like leaving one footprint after another on the trail—there’s a rhythm to it and a visible record of how far one has traveled. All these features not only make text in a paper book easily navigable, they also make it easier to form a coherent mental map of the text.

In contrast, most screens, e-readers, smartphones and tablets interfere with intuitive navigation of a text and inhibit people from mapping the journey in their minds. A reader of digital text might scroll through a seamless stream of words, tap forward one page at a time or use the search function to immediately locate a particular phrase—but it is difficult to see any one passage in the context of the entire text. As an analogy, imagine if Google Maps allowed people to navigate street by individual street, as well as to teleport to any specific address, but prevented them from zooming out to see a neighborhood, state or country. Although e-readers like the Kindle and tablets like the iPad re-create pagination—sometimes complete with page numbers, headers and illustrations—the screen only displays a single virtual page: it is there and then it is gone. Instead of hiking the trail yourself, the trees, rocks and moss move past you in flashes with no trace of what came before and no way to see what lies ahead.

”

Scientific American’s The Reading Brain in the Digital Age: The Science of Paper versus Screens

Have to admit I have been converted to the screen, especially after having to pack boxes of books when I moved apartment. Only physical books I still buy are poetry, art books or those with a really attractive design.

Apr 6

The Garden of Evening Mists

On a mountain above the clouds once lived a man who had been the gardener of the Emperor of Japan.

was my favourite first line of a novel last year.

The rest of the lines in Tan Twan Eng’s The Garden of Evening Mists managed to live up to this promise so it is fantastic that he won the Man Asian Literature prize. His writing is as lush and rich as the history and jungles of Malaya where the book is set.

Although my parents are from Bangladesh, this book made be realise how little I know about the history of south east Asia, and especially the fight for independence in Malaysia.

These struggles and conflicts are encapsulated in narrator Judge Teoh Yun Ling. As a Chinese teenager she was held in a secret Japanese internment camp during the World War II from which she becomes the only survivor.

At the start of the novel she is at the other end of her life. Retiring from the Supreme Court she looks around at the paintings on the wall which reflect both her, and her country’s, history:

On one wall a gallery of former judges stared down at me, their faces changing from European to Malay and Chinese and Indian, from monochrome to color.

Her personal history includes returning to Yugiri, or Evening Mists, which had been designed by Arimoto, the Japanese emperor’s former gardener living above the clouds.

After the war Yun Ling had asked Arimoto to create a garden in remembrance of her sister who had also been held in the internment camp but did not make it out. Although he said no, they work together on Evening Mists and the growth of the garden reflects the growth of their relationship, as she overcomes her antagonism towards the Japanese:

At that moment it struck me that he was similar to the boulders on which we had spent the entire working. Only a small portion was revealed to the world; the rest was buried deep within, hidden from view.

The garden represents memories for both Arimoto who has been away from Japan for many years:

A garden borrows from the earth, the sky and everything around it, but you borrow from time.

and Yun Ling when she chooses to return:

That moment in time when just as the last leaf is about to drop, as the remaining petal is about to fall, that moment captures everything beautiful and sorrowful about life.

Yun Ling is suffering from a degenerative brain disease which is making her lose her memory. As she tries to pin down her life in a book she finds that her understanding of the past, and her relationship with Arimoto, have changed - just as the passage of years have transformed the garden.

The Garden of Evening Mists made me search out Tan Twan Eng’s first novel, The Gift Of Rain.

This time Tan Twan Eng successfully creates the narrative voice of Philip Hutton, the half-Chinese son of an English father. However the novel just as adroitly covers the same themes of memory, love and forgiveness as Philip looks back on his life and relationship with Endo-San, his Japanese martial arts teacher before the Second World War.

The life I had lived was folded, only a blank page exposed to the world, emptiness wrapped around the days of my life; faint traces of it could be discerned, but only if one looked closely, very closely. And so, for the first and last time, I gently unfolded my life, exposing what was written, letting the ancient ink be read once again.

When the Japanese invade Malaya, Philip is torn between his Chinese, English and Japanese worlds:

Like the rain, I had bought tragedy into many people’s lives but, more often than not, rain also brings relief, clarity and renewal. It washes away our pain and prepares us for another day, and even another life. Now that I am old I find that the rains follow me and give me comfort, like the spirits of all the people I have ever known and loved.

When I heard my name - my complete, dear name, given to me by both my parents and my grandfather- used for the first time earlier this evening, I experienced a feeling of integration and fulfillment that had eluded me all my life. With the delicacy of a butterfly entering the reveries of a Chinese philosopher, as though alighting on the most fragile of petals, that feeling sought and found a permanent abode within me and stilled forever the empty echoes of my dreaming heart.

Through the delicacy of Tan Twan Eng’s writing, both of these two books have found a permanent abode within my heart.

Mar 31

“They wake up in air-conditioned houses, drive air-conditioned cars to air-conditioned offices, grab lunch in air-conditioned restaurants (rights of admission reserved), and at the end of the day go home to their air- conditioned lounges to relax in front of their wide-screen TVs. And if they should think about the rest of the people, the great uncooked, and become uneasy as they lie under their blankets in the middle of summer, there is always prayer, five times a day, which they hope will gain them admittance to an air- conditioned heaven, or, at the very least, a long, cool drink during a fiery day in hell.”

From Moth Smoke by Mohsin Hamid - how the elite of Lahore are distinguished by their control of air-conditioning. This would be equally applicable in another of his novels - How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia - which is set in an unnamed expanding megacitiopolis.

Mar 30

“We are all refugees from our childhoods. And so we turn, among other things, to stories. To write a story, to read a story, is to be a refugee from the state of refugees. Writers and readers seek a solution to the problem that time passes, that those who have gone are gone and those who will go, which is to say every one of us, will go. For there was a moment when anything was possible. And there will be a moment when nothing is possible. But in between we create.”

How To Get Filthy Rich In Rising Asia by Mohsin Hamid - a fabulous book

The Wrong Empire

An Englishwoman in New York

The Garden of Evening Mists