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...
