January 16, 2010
Mapping the Invisible World with Tash Aw
This is an author I recently discovered. I am reviewing his latest book Map of the World, published in the United States on January 5. Lately, I have been reading books that take me to the 60s and 70s, and I always walk away from the experience a better…person…reader. No, a more informed individual. That aside, this new book has already been read in Europe and elsewhere for over a year, and there are mixed reviews, but I am excited about reading about a place I know little about.
The premise of Aw’s writings (this is his second novel), seem interesting. In Map, for instance, he will take me to 1964 Indonesia, expose me to some aspects of Dutch colonialism as the novel takes a historical dive and bounces back in post-colonial turmoil. The book has been described with words like “exotic”, “lyrical”, “breathtaking”, and in the words of the Toronto Star, the novel drops readers on the streets of Jakarta and “floods your senses with with impending doom.” And as my reading begins, I am sweetly greeted by the first sentence: “When it finally happened, there was no violence, hardly any drama.”
Biography
© Andrew Whittuck
Tash Aw was born in Taiwan to Malaysian parents and grew up in Kuala Lumpar. He moved to England in his teens, and studied Law at the Universities of Cambridge and Warwick. He moved to London and undertook various jobs, including working as a lawyer for four years. He then studied Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. His first novel, The Harmony Silk Factory (2005), won the 2005 Whitbread First Novel Award, and the Commonwealth Writers Prize (South East Asia and South Pacific Region Best First Book). It juxtaposes three accounts of the life of Johnny Lim, a Chinese peasant in rural Malay. His second novel is Map of the Invisible World (2009), set in Indonesia and Malaysia in the mid-1960s.
Review scheduled to appear in The San Franciso Book Review.
September 21, 2008
Rana Dasgupta, Tokyo Cancelled.
We start this section by introducing a contemporary work by Rana Dasgupta. The interest in his work has recently gone up because he is the 2009 Willesden Herald Short Story competition judge, which was judged in 2008 by Zadie Smith.
His novel, Tokyo Cancelled, which is actually a collection of short stories, has been classified as magic realism. The book is “entrancing”(Red) with its thirteen stories which has been described by TLS as “marvels of fabulation…rich in startling insigts.” Often, these are the comments that encourage the regular mass market reader (for instance, in the USA) to purchase literary books, and then when the book gets on the New York Times list, or if the author appears on Oprah, ah, the situation becomes fantastic. But’s what the point again? Oh, that this book, which was published to great critical acclaim, did “outdo the Arabian Nights for inventiveness” (Guardian).
Dasgupta was indeed inventive. At the end of the section entitled “Arrivals”, the informed reader discovers that he or she is about to read a book that follows in the footsteps of the Cantebury Tales. The sheer size of Dusgupta’s ambition is impressive. Basically, the passengers of a Tokyo-bound airplane are stuck at an airport because Tokyo is covered in snow and all flights to it have been cancelled. All but thirteen of the passengers are taken to hotels and motels with available room for the night. The thirteen for whom no room is found have to spend the night at the airtport.
What the thirteen agree to do raises Dusgupta’s story to Chaucerian proportions. They decide to entertain themselves by telling stories–thirteen stories. If the reader is also a writer, he or she might be thinking, “How come I was not the first one think about this idea of taking a classical structure and making it tell a modern story?”
Throughout the book the importance of stories is highlighted, starting with the very first one in which a king judges the moral soundness of a citizen by asking him to tell a story according the traditions of the land, which include the use of thirteen stages of story execution. The citizen does a fantastic job of telling the story and is financially rewarded. Great message here: Tell a story and tell it well; you may make some money.
We will temporarily close this entry by adding our own description of the book: “brilliant, amazing, fantastic…wake up and read this collection of stories by an ambitios writer.”
