Singapore

Give It Up for Gimme Lao
Sebastian Sim

Although I've been living in Singapore for more than five years now, I had yet to manage to read a novel by a Singaporean author. Not for want of trying though. When I first came to Singapore, I sought out some local authors and had a bit of a hard time of it actually. There just wasn’t much on offer. I did, by either sheer coincidence or lack of other options, pick up the same book as Ann Morgan’s Singapore entry, Fistful of Colours by Suchen Christine Lim. I never got around to reading it and eventually wound up passing it on to my Mum who asked for a book with some local colour when she came to visit. She said she had a hard time relating to the protagonist and her context. — I assume the book is still sitting in my Mum’s bookshelf, and thereafter I mostly forgot about reading a Singaporean author. 

Since then, I think interest in home-grown authors has really taken off in Singapore. This was perhaps spurred by the inclusion of local retailer-slash-publisher, BooksActually, on a number of “top ten best independent bookshops” lists a few years ago. Now, every high-street book seller has a shelf or two dedicated to local writers. I’m even quite impressed to find locally written Chinese- and Malay-language books available in translation. What a turnaround; might it be in part due to world-readers seeking out the latest and greatest from the world’s far-flung corners?

Give It Up for Gimme Lao! follows the eponymous protagonist as he makes his way from the first baby born after Singapore’s independence through his childhood in the country’s founding years to the present day. Gimme Lao is a brash child who, like his mother, says “I don’t aspire to be nice. I do what is necessary to get what I want”. Gimme only wants to achieve and excel in what is important, without regard for others. I saw in this a parable for the country of Singapore itself, unceremoniously born into the world following its 1965 ejection from Malaysia, and left to do whatever it takes to get ahead. Singapore has managed to succeed, but largely by steamrollering ever forward without much concern about the costs of getting there.

Italy

The Leopard, Giuseppe di Lampedusa
Il Gattopardo

A friend decided to celebrate her 40th birthday by renting a fantastic villa in Sicily in the shadow of Mount Etna. It was the perfect setting to read The Leopard, a novel about the waning days of Sicilian aristocracy.

The novel is set mostly during the Risorgimento period of Italian unification during the 1860s, and looks at the aristocratic Salina family, headed by the stoic Prince Fabrizio. With Italian unification and the end of the Kingdom of Sicily and Naples in sight, Don Fabrizio knows change is coming. His old ways and proud traditions set to be consigned to the past, yet the Prince must seek to secure the future for his nephew and heir, Tancredi, if there is to be any chance of saving some part of the dynasty. "For everything to stay the same, everything must change" says Tancredi famously. The Prince recognises the truth in this as the novel's events unfold.

The author, Giuseppe di Lampedusa, was actually the last in a line of minor princes in Sicily. While the novel is based on the life of his great-grandfather, another Prince of Lampedusa, the novel is a mirror to his own life and the changing times he in which he lived in the early twentieth century. After the Lampedusa Palace was bombed and pillaged by Allied forces in World War II, di Lampedusa sank into a lengthy depression, and began to write Il Gattopardo as a way to combat it. 

Di Lampedusa had a lengthy, unsuccessful struggle to find a publisher, being told by one Italian editor that "his novel is unpublishable". In the year following his death, di Lampedusa's nephew found a publisher, and Il Gattopardo went on to become the top-selling novel in Italian history and is considered one of the most important novels in modern Italian literature. 

Translated from the Italian by Archibald Colquhoun.

China

Beijing Comrades, Bei Tong
北京故事, 北京同志

One of the most surprising things for me when I compiled my original list of read countries what that I had never read a book by a Chinese author. I’d read many history books, biographies and memoires about China and books set in China, but never a novel by a Chinese author. Given that my uni degree was in East Asian Studies, this seems like a pretty huge oversight on my part.

I had a few days stopover in Shanghai visiting an old friend, so what better occasion that to finally rectify my lapse in world reading? China has thousands of years of literary history under its belt, and counts on a few Nobel Prize winners too. So the prospect of narrowing it down to one book to read was rather daunting. Serendipity struck and when I ordered my entry for Taiwan; Beijing Comrades popped up in the “Customers who bought this item also bought” section. Intrigued by the blurb, it went straight into my cart.

Beijing Comrades is the story of a gay love affair set against the backdrop of Tiananmen-era Beijing. Owing to its controversial subject matter and challenge to Party ideology, it was published anonymously on an underground gay website in China. It became widely successful and although no Mainland publisher would dare pick it up, the book was eventually published in Taiwan. It later also became a Hong Kong film called Lan Yu. Scott E Myers’ excellent translation marks the first time Beijing Comrades is available to English readers.

The story follows Lan Yu, a poor university student from rural China, and Chen Handong, a businessman profiting from China’s opening to the outside world at the end of the 1980s. Despite their differences, they fall together in a romantic, tragic love-for-the-ages in the turbulent upheavals and Confucian family pressures of the time. Beijing Comrades offers a realistic, intimate portrayal of two people struggling with love, sexuality and each other when the world around them was coming of age.

Iraq II

God in Pink
Hasan Namir

During a recent work trip, I had some downtime and popped over to Santa Cruz, a surf–hippy college town on the Pacific Coast, some 100 km south of San Francisco. Walking around the bijou downtown, I came across the fantastic if unimaginatively named Bookshop Santa Cruz. I could have wandered the shelves for ages, but I spent an alarmingly large amount of money in a distressingly short amount of time.

 The shop had a whole shelf of international LGBT authors, whose contents in large part went directly into my shopping basket. A couple of the authors were from countries you would not typically expect to find such writing, including Nigeria, South Korea and Iraq. I was particularly pleased at the prospect of updating my 4,000-year-old previous entry for Iraq with something more contemporary.

Set in wartorn, 2003 Baghdad, God in Pink focuses on Ramy, a young man struggling to find the impossible balance between his sexuality, religion and culture, and Ammar, an imam whose beliefs are tested by his dealings with Ramy. The violent horror of war is made to seem nearly normal, a contrast with the vivd urgency of Ramy's self-doubts and questioning.

Another Middle-Eastern book, along with The Sand Fish from the UAE, where the outcome didn't fall into my Western narrative expectations and was more thought-provoking than its 151 pages would belie.

Brunei

The Forlorn Adventure
Amir Falique

In planning for a long-weekend trip to the oil-rich Sultanate of Brunei, I struggled to find a suitable book to read. It's a small country, without much of a tradition for prose fiction and a population whose first language is not English. It was always going to be a bit of a tough one to crack. Ann Morgan's pick for the country did not really inspire much confidence either. I happened to glance at the comment section to Morgan's Brunei post, and someone mentioned a book about a Bruneian astronaut, which at the very least promised to be more amusing than Morgan's hokey Dan Brown-esque hodgepodge.

I was indeed amused and entertained by The Forlorn Adventure. The storyline was interesting enough for some holiday reading, if at times a bit silly (but also kind of perfect for holiday poolside reading). What was particularly interesting however was the small glimpses the story offered into everyday Bruneian life (the protagonist cannot hug his fiancée before leaving on a mission as it would be "improper"; the Sultan is still the number-one big boss in the year 2525).

Also quite amusing was my request to write in the frontispiece. This required three hotel staff to consult each other, the Internet and various other staff members on the correct way to write all the hooks and dots of Malay written with the Arabic alphabet. 

Since finishing the book, I see that Falique has published a number of other books in a detective series entitled the "Brunei Secret Intelligence Agency". I've also even managed to find another Bruneian writer, KH Lim, whose coming-of-age story Written in Black is a promising addition to the corpus of this little-read country.

Burma II

Smile As They Bow, Nu Nu Yi
ပြုံး၍လည်း ကန်တော့ခံတော်မူပါ၊ ရယ်၍လည်း ကန်တော့ခံတော်မူပါ, နုနုရည်

After a spree of buying world books, I'd had this one on my shelf for quite a while. I finally got the perfect opportunity to read it when my Mum mentioned that she would like to revisit Burma forty years after her first visit, just after the military junta took power. I was quite intrigued to experience the country with her in this way, as much of the country has been in a vacuum, unchanged since her visit there in 1970, but in others it has begun changing quickly. It was a fantastic mother–son trip through the temples of Bagan and the decaying colonial splendour of Rangoon. 

Smile As They Bow offers a glimpse into the little-known world of the Burmese nat tradition. Nats are the spirits of semi-historical, semi-mythical people that continue to play an important part of everyday life in the country. Smile As They Bow is set during the weeklong Taungbyon Festival when people from all across the country come to pay their respects to these spirits via natkadaws, transgender spirit mediums.

While the focus is on Daisy Bond, one of the Festival's most famous and flamboyant natkadaws, the narration switches among festival-goers, natkadaws and assistants alike, in a text that teems with detail, delightful vulgarities, colloquialisms, the sacred and the profane. It's and assault on your senses. 

Deftly translated by Alfred Birnbaum (English translator of Haruki Murakami's books) and Thi Thi Aye.

Taiwan

Rose, Rose, I Love You, Wang Chen-ho
玫瑰玫瑰我愛你, 王禎和

En route back to Singapore after Christmas holidays home in Canada, I had a few days layover in Taipei. Naturally, I took the opportunity to read a Taiwanese author. — I'm usually quite organised with my holiday reading, and plan well in advance. But in the rush up to Christmas, I didn't get around to arranging anything for Taiwan and was left with a last-minute scramble on Amazon. Rose, Rose, I Love You came flying in just under the wire, arriving literally the morning of my flight to Taiwan.

I'm very glad that it did arrive in time, because Rose, Rose, I Love You has been one of my favourites in my reading the world project so far.  Wang Chen-ho is one of Taiwan's most famous writers. Rose, Rose, I Love You, considered Wang's masterpiece, is comic novel set in the coastal town of Hualien during the Vietnam War. The plot centres on the efforts of the town's leaders to come together to set up a brothel to entertain a group of American GIs coming to Taiwan for R&R. The raucous dialogue and outrageous story caused quite a stir when it was published in 1994.

Special credit is due to Howard Goldblatt, the book's translator. As a translator myself, I can recognise the mind-twisting challenges he must have faced trying to translate a book that Taiwanese readers would have easily managed, but in a linguistic hodgepodge that would be completely alien to English-language readers. The book is written partly in Mandarin and partly in Taiwanese dialect, sprinkled with Japanese and contains countless plays on words of the mispronunciation and misunderstanding of English words being taught to bar girls. Quite a challenge to find a way to convey these shifts and nuances when the target audience of the translation will read everything in a single language. I tip my hat to you, Mr Goldblatt, I surely could have never done as well.

I also got the idea for my holiday reading to ask for the place and date to be written on the title page in local script. A great memento of my experiences reading a book in situ.

Malaysia

The Gift of Rain 
Tan Twan Eng

A recent road trip up the coast to the historic Malaysian city of Malacca provided the opportunity to add this country to my list. There are a fair amount of Malay authors available in local bookshops, a few of whom, like Tash Aw, even have international renown. I had particularly wanted to find a book by an ethnic Malay author rather than an ethic Chinese author, for no particular reason other than to set a challenge for myself. All the titles I came across for Malaysia seemed to have ethnic Chinese authors for some reason. 

 In the end, I settled for a book (by an ethnic Chinese author) whose jacket description caught my attention. The Gift of Rain by Tan Twan Eng (陳團英) is set in Penang, an improbably Anglo-Malay-Chinese-Indian island entrepôt set in the Andaman Sea. The island and its unique hybrid, hodgepodge culture is the backdrop to the turbulent times of World War II. 

The half-Chinese, half-English protagonist gets caught in a tangle of war-time loyalties and deceits during the Japanese occupation of his beloved island home. There was an out-of-place digression into Chinese history lesson when protagonist’s estranged Chinese grandfather takes a flashback trip down memory lane. But mostly the book does a formidable job in making you question the shifting moral sands of complicated history with frequent what-would-you-do situations where every option is fraught.  

Given the setting, I’m not surprised that I feel I gained insight into World War II in Malaya rather than about the country itself. I’d still like to read a book by an ethnic Malay author at sometime to see if I’d that would offer up a point of view on my northern neighbour.

Canada, French

Le désert mauve
Nicole Brossard

As a Canadian, I was naturally curious to see what Ann Morgan chose to read for Canada. My country, naturally, has a few literary bigwigs of it own, along the lines of Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, and Robertson Davies. I don’t know why, but I just assumed she would pick one of them. It certainly never occurred to me that she’d stray from this well-trodden path, and much less that she might read a book by a French-Canadian author in translation. It just wasn’t the done thing.

Consequently, I was more than a bit surprised to see Le désert mauve by Nicole Brossard, and translated by Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood as Mauve Desert, under the Canada entry. Reading Ann Morgan’s post about the book made me doubly intrigued because, as a translator myself, the book deals with the act and meaning of translation.

Le désert mauve is a bit confusing to talk about, actually. It’s one book, but three books. It’s a book and its translation, but both are written in the same language. The first book is about fifteen-year-old Melanie coming of age in the Arizona desert. The second book is about Maude Laures, who finds the first book in a Quebec bookstore and becomes obsessed with it, spending two years analysing its characters, events, and emotions. The third book is Laures’ eventual translation of the first book. (An imagined English-to-French translation, as the book in its entirety is French in the original – and wholly English in Mauve Desert). 

This imagined passage from one language to another was particularly interesting to me. I found myself flipping back and forth between the two books to see how Laures had translated passages that we ambiguous. Had a certain lyrical passage become dulled? Did clarity come into any darker corners? – As a technical translator, I don’t have to philosophise about these issues much, but I do constantly wonder what gets lost and transformed along the way despite my every best intention otherwise. It was fascinating to be able to see the translation process and its results in this way.

Burma

Not Out of Hate, Ma Ma Lay
မုန်း၍မဟူ, မမလေး 

I was killing some time in a bookstore in Bangkok recently while waiting to meet up with some friends. By chance I wandered past a shelf and this art deco Veronica-Lempicka-esque cover caught my eye and I happened to pick it up. I nearly fell over when I read the back cover and discovered the book was by a Burmese author, and was the first book published in English translation from the former hermit kingdom of Burma. A country virtually shut off from the modern world for nearly fifty years, there was as little leaving Burma as there was going in, and the country remained a black hole on many world-readers' lists. 

Although one of the country's very few female authors, Ma Ma Lay is widely acknowledged to be one of Burma's greatest twentieth-century writers. Her stories are known for authentic portrayals of modern Burmese society. Not Out of Hate, originally published in Burmese in 1955, explores the impact of the West on Burmese culture and society, as told through the story of a young, small-town woman who marries a Westernised man. The well-written story was made more poignant when post-reading contemplation led me to see the book as an allegory for the country as a whole.

As a translator myself, I found it quite interesting that Not Out of Hate's translator, Margaret Aung-Thwin, made frequent recourse to the use of footnotes to explain contextual and cultural elements of the book. Footnotes are certainly one possible strategy for translators to use when they encounter a concept that's difficult to translate because it doesn't exist in the other language, or a situation the foreign readers wouldn't understand because they lack the same cultural references. The general view is, however, that they are a distraction that breaks the flow of reading the text, and, as such, are rarely used by most translators. It's interesting to see through the use of footnotes here, the details and nuances that must sometimes be left by the wayside when translating otherwise.