The Star Online: Lifestyle: Bookshelf
The Star Online: Lifestyle: Bookshelf |
| Posted: 16 Aug 2011 12:29 AM PDT Success came slowly but surely for bestselling American author, Steve Berry. ALTHOUGH every new book of his appears on bestseller lists everywhere from Malaysia to New York, thriller writer Steve Berry likes to say that he does not know much about writing. "But I'm an expert on rejection," the 56-year-old adds in his good-humoured drawl, on the phone from his home in St Augustine, Florida. He explains that he wrote eight manuscripts and had his work dismissed 85 times in total before one story was picked up and published by Ballantine Books in 2002. That novel was The Amber Room, a tale of art heists and war history. It was followed by nine others, all blending historical fact and heaps of imagination. Seven of the books star Berry's popular character, Cotton Malone, a Copenhagen-based rare-book dealer. Berry describes him as an alter ego who gets to do things his creator has not had the chance to try, including firing guns and jumping out of planes. Both collect old books – Berry has more than 1,000 – have a son in his teens, and are "lousy with women", he jokes. The latest in the Malone series, The Jefferson Key, is now available in major bookstores in Malaysia. A tale of modern-day piracy and old-school action, the book has had regular spots on The New York Times' bestseller list since it was published in May. At first glance, it seems that Berry and his creation have a lot in common with thriller king Dan Brown and his fictional creation Robert Langdon, who is regularly embroiled in historical mystery. Asked about this, Berry responds humbly and happily. "I'm fine with the comparison. I was a fan long before The Da Vinci Code," he says, of Brown's 2003 mega hit. "If it wasn't for Dan Brown and what he did by publishing The Da Vinci Code, I wouldn't be here. That book brought the thriller genre back to life." In fact, he adds, if he sees a Brown book in a store window, he always pauses to pay his respects. "I stop and I bow. You must pay homage to the Da Vinci!" Like his hero Brown, Berry began writing in the 1990s, but it took him much longer to get published. After graduating with a law degree from Mercer University in Georgia in the United States, he practised divorce law and, later, criminal law, married and raised a family. But in his 30s, he says, "a little voice in my head started telling me to write books". So, every day he would write stories from dawn to breakfast, before either his first wife or three children got up. "I was 35 years old when I wrote my first book. It was horrible. I wrote a second book – it was horrible. Then I wrote my third book," he pauses suggestively, "and it was also horrible!" Finally, he joined a writers' group in nearby Jacksonville, an hour's drive away from his then home in Atlanta, Georgia, and the feedback he received over the next six years helped him polish his manuscripts enough for publication. "I quit three times, but that little voice in your head keeps driving you and nags you and annoys you," he says. Now he teaches writing to aspiring authors and the lesson always includes these words: never give up. Berry spends up to 18 months on every novel and a third of the time is usually research. He reads extensively, consulting perhaps 300 sources for every book and also likes to travel to the locations his characters find themselves in. He flew to Russia for The Amber Room and France for The Templar Legacy (2006), the first Cotton Malone book. While he failed to find time to head to China for last year's The Emperor's Tomb, he had "eyes and ears on the ground" and got regular reports from a friend who visited the country for three weeks. The next Malone novel is slated for 2013, while Berry is now working on a standalone, which will star a disgraced newspaper reporter. "Cotton called me on the phone and asked if he could have a year off," he says in explanation, though clearly it is he who needs the break! He has no plans to do a John Grisham and write legal thrillers for a change of pace, saying: "I do not adhere to the philosophy that you should write what you know. Write what you love." And what he loves is history. His fees from teaching and lecture tours are channelled into History Matters, a non-profit society he founded with his second wife, Elizabeth. They raise funds to preserve historical artefacts, whether art, writing or memorabilia. Most recently, they helped the Bridgeport History Centre raise funds to preserve 19th-century posters. "History matters," says Berry. "Without knowing where we're coming from, we have no clue where we're going. History is critical in that regard." – The Straits Times, Singapore/Asia News Network Full Feed Generated by Get Full RSS, sponsored by Used Car Search. |
| Posted: 15 Aug 2011 04:09 PM PDT A Korean author examines the mother-child relationship in her touching English language debut. THERE'S a big difference between "mother" and "mum." "Mother" is someone to be respected, perhaps held at arm's length. But "mum" is an intimate name. It's the woman on the floor playing with her child, wisps of hair falling around her face, instead of the woman in the starched dress sitting in the parlour. The distinction made all the difference for novelist Kyung-Sook Shin, whose book Please Look After Mom has made a splash in English language publishing world and is a bestseller in her native South Korea. On a recent day in New York City, Shin discussed, through her translator, the popularity of the novel and its universal themes of mother and child, and the gradual realisation that all our mums actually have a life outside the family and are women with thoughts and desires. The book centres on a modern-day family coping with grief when their mother, known only as "Mom", vanishes in a busy city train station. The story tracks the woman's disappearance through the eyes of her children, her husband and, ultimately, through her own words. The first line reads: "It's been one week since Mom went missing." As a teenager, Shin had taken the night train to Seoul with her mother and thought to herself that when she became a writer she would write an ode to her mum. Shin contemplated the book for years, thinking of the character as "Mother", but was unable to set anything on the page. Then one day, the first line suddenly came to her, and the use of "mum" changed everything. "It surprised me," she said. "Everything flowed very naturally ... as though a door had opened." Shin is one of South Korea's most widely read and acclaimed authors. She was honoured with the Manhae Literature Prize, the Dong-in Literature Prize and the Yi Sang Literary Prize, as well as France's Prix de l'Inapercu. She had dreamed for years of becoming a writer and published her first work of fiction in a Korean literary journal at 22. Shin grew up on a farm with many brothers and sisters. She was an avid reader, even though there weren't many books available. "As my older brothers would borrow books and bring them into our house, I would read the books and find out about a world I didn't know," she said. "I would just take them away to into my space, and they would come look for me or the books." She papered the windows of her room so that she could focus, reading entire anthologies, history books, whatever she could get her hands on. "My mother was very happy to see me read," she said. Most of the younger children out in the country were expected to help with farm work, she said, not become writers. And so, Shin went to Seoul to study, with her family's blessings. From the time she was 16 to age 30, she worked all sorts of jobs so she could write – editing at a publishing house, writing for a radio station, tutoring children. "There was a kind of literary atmosphere that I was able to inhabit and I was able to kind of understand what it meant to be working with literature," she said. When she was about to turn 30, she published a collection of short stories that sold 300,000 copies, the first time a collection had done so well in South Korea, she said, and everything changed. Since then, she has been writing full time, working on coming-of-age stories, historical novels and non-fiction. She has published seven novels, two non-fiction books and several collections of short stories. Please Look After Mom, her first book to appear in English, made its debut at No. 4 on The New York Times list of bestsellers and is now in its eighth printing. It will be published in 19 countries. The book is richly imaginative, but also grounded in reality as the daughter, oldest son and husband take the reader through their guilt, fears and realisations about the mum and the sacrifices she made. Through them, a portrait is created of a woman whose identity is shaped almost entirely by her children, her secret thoughts and desires locked away. As she wrote her book, the person Shin called most was her own mum. "I used to think, as many people do, that my mother was born a mother. But through the process of writing I came to understand that she was born something else entirely and became a mother," she said. Shin's English author, Robin Desser, said she was hooked from the first sentence. She worked with a translator to preserve Shin's voice and to tweak the text so readers would really grasp the story. "You hope for the perfect balance between being true to the authenticity of the work, and having a translation that reads fluently," she said. Desser said the differing points of view, and the universal theme of motherhood, made the book a natural for translation. It also has the bonus of showing English readers sociological changes occurring in South Korea. "She uses specific imagery so powerfully and with great emotion, so you feel you are there," she said. "You are at once related to something, being delivered to your door and heart with so much grace." And while reading it, readers can't help but think about their own mums and feel pangs of sadness, melancholy or nostalgia. But Shin, currently a visiting scholar at New York's Columbia University, doesn't want us to feel guilt over the selfless acts of her story's mother and the self-absorbed children. "I don't think that's a productive way of looking at mother-child relations," she said. "I'd like to think of it as a natural cycle that you get a mother's love and then you give that love to someone else. Through that progression, we can make good on that relationship." – AP Full Feed Generated by Get Full RSS, sponsored by Used Car Search. |
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