Elaine Chiew Converses with Indonesian Feminist Gothic Writer Intan Paramaditha

Intan Paramaditha. Courtesy of the Author.

If you haven't yet heard of Indonesian writer Intan Paramaditha, I am convinced you soon will. 

Intan Paramaditha is an Indonesian fiction writer and academic based in Sydney. Her short story collection Apple and Knife, translated into English by Stephen J. Epstein was published by Brow Books (Australia) and Harvill Secker (UK) in 2018. Gentayangan (The Wandering), her debut novel on travel and displacement where readers choose their own narrative path, was selected as Tempo Best Literary Work for Prose Fiction in 2017. The novel received the PEN Translates Award from English PEN and the PEN/ Heim Translation Fund Grant from PEN America, and it will be also be published by Harvill Secker in 2020. She holds a Ph.D. from New York University and teaches Media and Film Studies at Macquarie University.

EC:   Welcome to AsianBooksBlog, Intan. A real pleasure to have you.

IP:     My pleasure! Thank you for having me, Elaine.

EC:   First, congratulations on the publication of your wonderful short story collection, Apple and Knife, full of fable-like and allegoric energy, a celebration of the transgressive and mysterious darkness of womanhood.

I’d like to start with your background. What were your favourite reads in childhood? Did you always know you’d be a writer?

IP:   As a child, I loved reading fairy tales of H.C. Andersen and Grimm. Growing up in a Muslim family, I was also familiar with stories of the prophets and I enjoyed reading them.

The story Apple and Knife which became the title of the collection, was inspired by the story of Yusuf (Joseph) in the Quran. I have always been fascinated with these tales because the moral messages tend to co-exist with violence, often in weird, uncomfortable ways. The “what if” question has always triggered me. What if we told the stories, maintaining all the elements including fantasy, darkness, and violence, but from a different perspective?

I starting writing when I was nine, and I knew that I wanted to be a writer. I sent my stories to a children’s magazine when I was in elementary school. So being a writer is quite predictable. But I did not expect that I would become an academic, which made things more complicated!

Paper Republic 2018 roll call of translations

Paper Republic promotes Chinese literature in English translation. It focusses on new writing from contemporary Chinese writers.

Balanced between the Western new year and the Chinese New Year of the Pig, Paper Republic has just launched its 2018 roll call of published English translations from Chinese. With 33 novels, six poetry collections and three young adult or children’s titles, it’s a unique resource you won’t find anywhere else on the web.

The roll call includes titles from established authors such as:

Girl power for grown-ups: nari shakti 2018 Hindi Word of the Year

The Oxford Dictionaries Hindi Word of the Year is a word or expression that has attracted a great deal of attention and reflects the ethos, mood, or preoccupations of the past year.  Oxford Dictionaries has just announced the 2018 Hindi Word of the Year. It is: nari shakti.

Nari shakti expresses the increasing activism of women in various fields.

Derived from Sanskrit, nari means women and shakti means power.  Today the term is used to  mean  women taking charge of their own lives - so girl power, for grown-ups.

Indie Spotlight: Dr. Salman Waqar

Indie spotlight is a regular column focussing on indie authors and self-publishing.

The Surgeon is a work of science fiction recently self-published through Createspace by U.K based, Pakistani-born eye surgeon Dr Salman Waqar. It imagines the shape healthcare might take in the years ahead and explores the profound ethical questions that advances in medicine will provoke worldwide.

The Surgeon is set in London in 2030. By this time, advanced robotic systems are commonly used for surgery. Mortality and complication rates are non-existent, even in operations that were once considered perilous.

But now a prominent politician, and close friend of the UK Prime Minister, dies during routine heart surgery. Why? It seems a killer doctor is on the loose. Join Professor Daniyaal Ashraf, a prominent surgeon originally from Pakistan, as he teams up with the medical authorities, Scotland Yard and even the UK intelligence services, to stop the culprit before more innocent lives are compromised.

Here, Dr Salman Waqar talks about his motivation and inspiration for writing The Surgeon.

Don't forget to vote!

Asian Books Blog is currently running poll to find its book of the lunar year in the Year of the Dog just closing.  Details here. Don't forget to vote!!!!

Broken Wings, Jia Pingwa's novel about a trafficked woman, in translation

             

Nicky Harman writes: I have just finished translating Broken Wings, a novel by Jia Pingwa about human trafficking. Kidnapping is not a popular theme in literary fiction; a Goodreads list consists exclusively of man-rescues-beautiful-girl, “romantic suspense” genre novels. (Though of course, there is also a lot of quality non-fiction, in the form of memoirs by trafficked women.) So some of Jia Pingwa’s biggest fans in China were surprised when this work (called in the original Chinese, 《极花》, literally, extreme- or pole-flower) came out in 2016. Butterfly is a young woman who is kidnapped and taken to a remote country village where Bright Black, the wifeless farmer who has bought her, imprisons her in his cave home. He rapes her and she gives birth to a baby son. The rape, the birth and Butterfly’s fading hopes are described in her own voice, and the effect is bleak. Jia writes in his Afterword that he was inspired to write this story by the experience of a friend whose daughter suffered a similar fate. The real-life young woman was eventually rescued but could not cope either with her sudden notoriety or the loss of her baby, whom she had had to leave behind, and actually returned to the village.

Broken Wings is a disturbing read for other reasons too: Jia Pingwa hints at Butterfly's impending mental breakdown, and presents us with an eventual rescue which may, or may not, be a dream sequence. Will Broken Wings appeal to English-language readers and if so, why? Having been alone with my translation for many months, I was keen to ask my editor, David Lammie, for his views on the book.

Tsundoku #1 – February 2019 - New Year; New Column…

I’ve opted to call this monthly missive on forthcoming books, tsundoku, the Japanese word for all those books that pile up by your bedside just begging you to get on and read them. It seemed fitting for a column that aims squarely at encouraging you to build that pile a little higher each month…


Tsundoku will assemble a random assortment of Asia-related books – novels, non-fiction, photography, graphic art – that comes across my own desk. Being a writer on various matters Asian, as well as a regular reviewer, I often get an early peek at forthcoming books. So tsundoku is essentially me passing on a few recommendations…


So here goes…fiction first….

Lion City Lit: Interview with Seema Punwani, Author of Cross Connection

Seema Punwani is a writer, single mum, and marketing professional who learns negotiation skills from her teenage son. She launched her debut novel Cross Connection at the Pune International Literary Festival in September 2018. Hailing from India, Seema was born in Spain, grew up in Mumbai and now lives and works in Singapore, pursuing her Masters in Creative Writing part-time at LASALLE College of the Arts.

Cross Connection is a modern-day romance about the eternal quest for true love—the second time over. I had the pleasure of listening to Seema read several excerpts from this very funny novel at the Singapore Writers Festival (SWF) as well as the Australasian Association of Writing Programs Annual Conference 2018 in Perth, and spoke with her to find out more about what makes her tick, her favourite SWF experience, and how Singapore has shaped her writing.

Seema Punwani

To start with, we’ve read the official synopsis of Cross Connection, but I’d love to hear from you directly. In your own words—elevator pitch the novel to someone who doesn’t know anything about it. You have two sentences tops… go!
Cross Connection is about second chances, at love and in life. The same story is told from two different points of view—the female protagonist Sama and the male protagonist Zehn.

Imagine you had the chance for the novel to be placed in between the works of any two authors in a bookstore. Which two would you pick, and why?
I love this question! I would like for Cross Connection to be placed between Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell and The Red Notebook by Antoine Laurain.

Both books appear to be a boy-meets-girl kind of romance, but the story runs a lot deeper. The narrative covers various social issues and it’s not your average love story. Cross Connection has its share of sweet emotions and funny dating stories, but it also deals with real-life issues like divorce and depression, and is not the fairytale romance one may imagine.

500 words from Tony Reid

500 words from is an occasional series in which novelists talk about their new novels. Tony Reid has recently brought out Mataram: a novel of love, faith and power in early Java.

Tony Reid is better known as Anthony Reid, author of ten non-fiction historical works on Southeast Asia, including the much-read and translated Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, c.1450-1680.  He has taught Southeast Asian history at universities in the US (Yale, UCLA, Hawaii) and Australia (ANU), as well as Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore.   He now lives in Canberra, Australia. Mataram is his first work of fiction.

Mataram follows the story of Englishman Thomas Hodges, after he seizes a chance at glory by being the first to venture ashore from his East India Company ship when it arrives in Java. Will he find success, or die forgotten with some Javanese kris or Portuguese poignard between his ribs?  The key seems to lie with his captivating female interpreter Sri, but he can only keep both her and his Englishness by inventing a mission from King James to the mysterious great ruler of the interior, in the region known as Mataram.

In Mataram, Thomas and Sri find a kingdom poised to decide its destiny.  A rich Hindu-Buddhist past of gods and spirits now confronts a sterner Islam, and pushy Europeans offering both science and God. For Hodges and Sri, survival alone will be a challenge, reconciling survival and desire with conscience in this mysterious spiritual landscape, impossible.

So, over to Tony…

Book of the Year of the Dog

Asian Books Blog runs its own literary award: the Asian Books Blog Book of the Lunar Year. We are about to confer the award for the Year of the Dog, now drawing to a close.

Asian Books Blog highlights books of particular interest in, or especially relevant to, Asia, excluding the Near West / the Middle East.  The award thus highlights such books. Authors can be of any nationality, and can be published anywhere, either conventionally, or through self-publication – an important route for new voices in Asia, especially in the many countries within the region with limited publishing industries. Self-published titles are eligible in eBook format. Traditionally published titles must be available in a physical format, either hardback, or paperback.

Books are eligible if they were published in either in the Year of the Rooster (2017) or the Year of the Dog, and if they featured in Asian Books Blog during the Year of the Dog. Anthologies are eligible, as are collections of short stories by a single author. Reissues are not eligible.

Happy reading!! Christmas break

The blog is closing for Christmas.  It will re-open on Friday January 25, when we will launch our poll to find the book of the lunar year in the (almost) past Year of the Dog. HAPPY READING ONE AND ALL!!!!

There’s no Poetry in a Typhoon by Agnès Bun

Agnès Bun is a video journalist for Agence France-Presse, a literary critic for the Asian Review of Books and a published poet. Before the age of 30, she had: reported on the aftermath of the 2013 typhoon which devastated particularly the Philippines; come under fire in Eastern Ukraine; covered fatal earthquakes in Nepal and floods in Sri Lanka; filmed the Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh.

Her memoir, There’s no Poetry in a Typhoon: vignettes from journalism's front lines, translated from the original French by Melanie Ho, enables Agnès to reflect on the moments of guilt and grace she experienced as a reporter, and on the haunted, hopeful faces she came across during her extraordinary assignments.

It also enables her to confront her own identity.  Agnès is a French citizen born of Chinese parents who escaped the Cambodian genocide in the 1970s. She here describes how writing There’s no Poetry in a Typhoon provided an opportunity for her to reconnect with her multiple roots.

A Carnival of Translation – Translators and their writers

For this blog, Nicky Harman interviews Natascha Bruce, who has been on a residency with Dorothy Tse, the noted Hong Kong author of surreal stories. The annual residency, called Art OmiTranslation Lab, offers the chance for author and translator pairs tofocus in detail on a text, while also emphasizing translation as a means towards cultural exchange.

NH: What were your expectations for the residency? 

NB: Things we knew to expect: twelve days to use however we liked, spent with three other translator-writer pairs. My Google image searches also suggested that the Hudson Valley might be pretty in late autumn. And all this turned out to be true! The other translators and writers were Elisabeth Lauffer translating Anna Weidenholzer from German; Hope Campbell Gustafson translating Ubah Cristina Ali Farah from Italian; Samuel Rutter translating Cristina Sanchez-Andrade from Spanish. Reality even exceeded my Google image search expectations: for a few days, deer frolicked outside our Hudson Valley windows, then winter arrived and turned everything to very beautiful snow.

NH: Did you and Dorothy cook up a plan in advance?

The nitty-gritty in turning a manuscript into a book by Eldes Tran

Eldes Tran is an associate editor at Epigram, an independent publisher in Singapore. She has worked with non-fiction and literary fiction authors, and has helped developed children’s books, from picture books to middle grade. She here explains how a manuscript becomes a book.

Indie spotlight: Shanghai Dreams

Indie spotlight focusses on self-published authors and self-publishing. Alexa Kang is a Boston-based, Chinese-American author who publishes her Shanghai Story trilogy, World War 2 historical fiction, through her own house, Lakewood Press. You can read about book 1,  Shanghai Story, here.

Shanghai Dreams is the second book in the trilogy. It tells the story of Clark Yuan, the Western-educated son of a prominent Chinese family in Shanghai who became a KMT operative, and Eden Levine, a Jewish refugee from Munich who came to Shanghai with her family to seek safety and a new life away from the Hitler regime. One of the characters, John Rabe, is based on a man who existed in real life. Rabe was a Nazi who nevertheless saved many lives.

Alexa here discusses the complexities of depicting a Nazi character in a sympathetic light.

Indie Spotlight: Crystal Watanabe

Indie spotlight focuses on self-publishing and indie authors. When Christie Dao, a Vietnamese-American now based in Singapore, self-published her inspirational book, Actualize Your Dreams, she felt it was important to work with an Asian-American editor. She chose Crystal Watanabe. Here, Christie interviews Crystal.

Indie spotlight: Remembering Shanghai by Claire Chao

Indie spotlight focuses on self-publishing and indie authors.

Hawaii-based, Hong-Kong-born Claire Chao is the co-author, with her mother Isabel Sun Chao, of Remembering Shanghai: A Memoir of Socialites, Scholars and Scoundrels, published by the indie publisher, Plum Brook.

Remembering Shanghai follows five generations of the Chao family over two centuries, from the time of Claire's great-great-grandfather down to the present. Mother and daughter traced their family story as far back as they could. Claire's great-great-grandfather rose from poverty to become a minister to the empress dowager, and built a large portfolio comprising hundreds of properties, a bank and a shipping company.

Isabel Sun Chao, the memoir's main protagonist, grew up the third daughter among six siblings in glamorous 1930s and ’40s Shanghai - everyone’s favorite child, cosseted by servants, wet nurses, cooks, drivers, even a resident tailor.

Soon after Mao came to power in 1949, Isabel journeyed to Hong Kong. Clutching a pink suitcase packed with party dresses to wear on her spring holiday, she didn’t realize that she would never see her father, or her grandmother, again. Claire accompanied her to Shanghai nearly 60 years later to confront her family’s past, one that they would together discover to be by turns harrowing and heartwarming.

Claire here discusses why she and her mother decided to write a family memoir, and gives advice to other indie authors.

Indie spotlight: Inspiration from Onnagatta and Onna bugeisha

Indie spotlight focuses on self-publishing and indie authors.

K. Bird Lincoln, an American, now lives in the Midwest, but she has previously lived in Japan.  She is the author of the medieval Japanese fantasy series, Tiger Lily, which explores the gender-bending lives of rebellious girls living during a period of Japanese history relatively little-known in the West.

Here, K. Bird Lincoln talks to Alexa Kang about Onnagatta and Onna bugeisha, gender-fluid Japanese who inspired her character, Tiger Lily.

Backlist books: The Home and the World by Rabindranath Tagore

Backlist books is a column by Lucy Day Werts that focuses on enduring, important works from or about Asia.

This post is about The Home and the World, a novel originally published as Ghare Baire in Bengali in 1916. Its author, Rabindranath Tagore, was born in Kolkata, British India. He was a wealthy, well-travelled Bengali writer best known for the poetry collection Gitanjali. In 1913 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

An internationally known literary and artistic man from a wealthy, socially active family owning extensive lands in what is now Bangladesh, Tagore was anti-imperialist yet ultimately rejected the nationalist Swadeshi movement, which promoted production and exclusive consumption of local goods. The Home and the World reflects the author’s mixed feelings on the subject.

See below to find out what you need to know to decide whether you should read The Home and the World, or what you should know about it even if you never do!

Obituary for Louis Cha, by John Minford

Louis Cha, or Zha Liangyong, (查良鏞), pen-name Jin Yong (金庸), OBE, Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur, novelist, journalist, entrepreneur and public figure, was born 10th March 1924, Haining County, Zhejiang Province, China, and died 30th October 2018, Hong Kong.

Between 1997 and 2002, John Minford, now Emeritus Professor of Chinese at the Australian National University, brought out a three-volume translation of Cha's The Deer and the Cauldron, with Oxford University Press Hong Kong (OUP HK). Now OUP UK has published it in the UK.  John here provides an obituary for Louis Cha.