Well. Here I am more or less immobilised by what the doctor tells me is bronchitis and a fever, though at least a lower fever than I had this weekend. But with the magic of my little laptop and a nest of blankets on the couch, I can at least try to wake up my brain with this, so I can work up to posting some notes for my (sigh) classes, which I'll probably have to miss tomorrow (due to being more or less unable to walk more than 10 feet without my abused lungs protesting, much less deliver gripping lectures on set theory and truth tables.)
But I digress.
The Harmony Silk Factory is a good book, though not a spectacular one. It tells the story of Johnny Lim, possibly any or all of: a communist, murderer, and Japanese collaborator during the war. You get three different pictures of him from his son, his wife, and his British friend, all of whom are naturally too involved in the story to be reliable narrators, but by combining the three, an interesting story definitely emerges. I thought I might mark this book as memorable, though, because it's one of the first pieces of Malaysian literature I've ever read, besides the picture books I loved as a child and am assured are safely in storage.
But oddly enough, it seems to be one of the only pieces of Malaysian literature out there in the mainstream. Am I wrong? Why are there all these countries with so few books to read to represent them?
2 comments:
I can perhaps speak to some of the publishing issues surrounding the lack of Malaysian literature in the mainstream.
Translation from non-roman alphabets is heinously difficult and expensive. A blockbuster from China might be translated because the initial audience numbers within china might justify it, because the extra-national audience with an interest in the subject is pretty large, and sadly, because the chances of making a movie out of the title are pretty good. These factors decrease the risk associated with introducing a new author into the western publishing markets.
Even if there is a thriving writers' community within Malaysia, their international audience might not be so huge. Canadian authors are much more widely available within Canada due to government publishing subsidies than they are even in the US. Might the same paradigm operate in Malaysia?
And finally, how large is the native-language audience for Malaysian works? Pardon my ignorance, but are works by Malaysian authors typically written in Chinese, or Malay? If Chinese, how freely available are publications in the Chinese market? I really don't know much about this subject, so if you know, speak up.
And finally, to digress, I wonder how much of a chill effect Chinese intellectual controls exert on the chinese-language publishing industry. If works that explore the country's political and social history are censored or controlled by the state, that would have a marked effect on the scope of chinese publication houses. Many publications could be doomed to languish as manuscripts, or worse, to not be written at all, as chinese-language writers would certainly know that the chances of their manuscript reaching a print audience were remote at best. Any idea, Audrey?
Interesting comments! I really came to this because I was talking to Richard at some point about the value of reading books which tie you to your culture - which pulls me to all of Canada, China, Singapore, and Malaysia, really. But I realised that in spite of having read plenty from Canada and China, I'd read basically nothing from Singapore and Malaysia, where the last few generations of my family are actually from. A big part of this was that I blinked at the fact that most of the characters in this book had typically Malaysian Chinese last names, and realised I'd never seen that before.
What you bring up does make me think that part of it is the heterogeneity of the population in both places. For both countries, official languages are at least English and Malay, maybe also Tamil (which is an East Indian language I don't know anything about). I've usually seen Malay written using the roman alphabet, so I'm assuming that's at least not a barrier. But there are a lot of different ethnic groups speaking a variety of different languages (and dialects of languages), which could be a factor in not having so many popular works.
Intellectual controls could also be a factor, both as a general fact about the culture (probably even today, most children aren't encouraged to explore their creative side), and as a fact about the religious climate (in Malaysia, at least, which is a Muslim country). So this probably gives two strikes against literature - first, that there probably aren't as many people who see writing as a viable profession, and second, that censorship probably is a rather significant factor. I mean, Tash Aw, who wrote this book, grew up in Malaysia, but then studied in England (and still lives there).
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