Saturday 8 August 2020

Tsundoku #12 - August 2020

August's Tsundoku may not find you on a beach sadly - or if it does then it's probably the closest beach to your house. But summer reading remains essential wherever you are...here's some new Asian-focussed fiction and non-fiction for the month...some fiction first up...


Kimiko Guthrie's Block Seventeen festures Akiko "Jane" Thompson, a half-Japanese, half-Caucasian woman in her midthirties, is attempting to forge a quietly happy life in the Bay Area with her fiancé, Shiro. But after a bizarre car accident, things begin to unravel. An intruder ransacks their apartment but takes nothing, leaving behind only cryptic traces of his or her presence. Shiro, obsessed with government surveillance, risks their security in a plot to expose the misdeeds of his employer, the TSA.


Malaysia's Ho Sok Fong has published a story collection Lake Like a Mirror, an exploration of the lives of women buffeted by powers beyond their control. Squeezing themselves between the gaps of rabid urbanisation, patriarchal structures and a theocratic government, these women find their lives twisted in disturbing ways. In precise and disquieting prose, Ho Sok Fong draws her readers into a richly atmospheric world of naked sleepwalkers in a rehabilitation centre for wayward Muslims, mysterious wooden boxes, gossip in unlicensed hairdressers, hotels with amnesiac guests, and poetry classes with accidentally charged politics - a world that is peopled with the ghosts of unsaid words, unmanaged desires and uncertain statuses, surreal and utterly true.


Vaseem Khan, of the Inspector Chopra series fame, is back with a new cozy series starting with Midnight at Malabar House. As India celebrates the arrival of a momentous new decade, Inspector Persis Wadia stands vigil in the basement of Malabar House, home to the city's most unwanted unit of police officers. Six months after joining the force she remains India's first female police detective, mistrusted, sidelined and now consigned to the midnight shift. And so, when the phone rings to report the murder of prominent English diplomat Sir James Herriot, the country's most sensational case falls into her lap.


In Breasts and Eggs Mieko Kawakami paints a radical and intimate portrait of contemporary working class womanhood in Japan, recounting the heartbreaking journeys of three women in a society where the odds are stacked against them. This is an unforgettable full length English language debut from a major new international talent.


Also, for lover of Chinese classical poetry Reading Du Fu is a collection of essays from experts of Chinese literature dedicated to the poetry of Du Fu, commonly regarded as the greatest Chinese poet. These essays are engaged in historically nuanced close reading of Du Fu's poems, both canonical and less known, from new angles and in various contexts, and discuss a series of critical issues, including the local and the imperial; the body politic and the individual body; poetry and geography; perspectives on the complicated relation of religion and literature; materiality and contemporary reception of Du Fu; poetry and visual art; and tradition and modernity.


And some non-fiction....

Gregory Afinogenov's Spies and Scholars examines the untold story of how Russian espionage in imperial China shaped the emergence of the Russian Empire as a global power. From the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, the Russian Empire made concerted efforts to collect information about China. It bribed Chinese porcelain-makers to give up trade secrets, sent Buddhist monks to Mongolia on intelligence-gathering missions, and trained students at its Orthodox mission in Beijing to spy on their hosts. From diplomatic offices to guard posts on the Chinese frontier, Russians were producing knowledge everywhere, not only at elite institutions like the Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg. But that information was secret, not destined for wide circulation.


Justin Jacobs The Compensations of Plunder looks at how, from the 1790s until World War I, Western museums filled their shelves with art and antiquities from around the world. These objects are now widely regarded as stolen from their countries of origin, and demands for their repatriation grow louder by the day. Now a new generation of Chinese scholars begun to criminalize the prior activities of archaeologists, erasing all memory of the pragmatic barter relationship that once existed in China.


Award winning journalist Barbara Demick's Eat the Buddha tells the story of a Tibetan town perched eleven thousand feet above sea level that is one of the most difficult places in all of China for foreigners to visit. Ngaba was one of the first places where the Tibetans and the Chinese Communists encountered one another. In the 1930s, Mao Zedong’s Red Army fled into the Tibetan plateau to escape their adversaries in the Chinese Civil War. By the time the soldiers reached Ngaba, they were so hungry that they looted monasteries and ate religious statues made of flour and butter—to Tibetans, it was as if they were eating the Buddha. Their experiences would make Ngaba one of the engines of Tibetan resistance for decades to come, culminating in shocking acts of self-immolation.


And finally, Clive Hamilton's much talked about expose Hidden Hand concerning the Chinese Communist Party’s global program of subversion, and the threat it poses to democracy. Accordign to Hamilton, through its enormous economic power and covert influence operations, China is now weakening global institutions, aggressively targeting individual corporations, and threatening freedom of expression from the arts to academia. At the same time, Western security services are increasingly worried about incursions into our communications infrastructure.

And a couple of Tsundokus...

Welcome to Catherine Platt, the new Executive Director of the Hong Kong International Literary Festival, who posted her own spring tsundoku...

And my own August tsundoku, which is surprisingly China-lite for a change...