The Star Online: Lifestyle: Bookshelf
The Star Online: Lifestyle: Bookshelf |
| Posted: 04 Nov 2012 12:59 AM PDT FOR the week ending Oct 28, 2012: Non-fiction 1. Dare To Dream by One Direction 2. Guinness World Records 2013 by Guinness World Records Ltd 3. Justin Bieber: Just Getting Started (100%Official) by Justin Bieber 4. A World Without Islam by Graham E.Fuller 5. The Power Of X Qualifying The 10 Gods by Joey Yap 6. Unstoppable: The Incredible Power Of Faith In Action by Nick Vujicic 7. I Declare: 31 Promises To Speak Over Your Life by Joel Osteen 8. Steven Gerrard: My Liverpool Story by Steven Gerrard 9. Another Forgotten Child by Cathy Glass 10. No Easy Day: The Only First-hand Account Of The Navy Seal Mission That Killed Osama Bin Laden by Mark Owen & Kevin Maurer Fiction 1. Fifty Shades Of Grey by E.L. James 2. The Hobbit (movie tie-in) by J.R.R. Tolkien 3. Reflected In You by Sylvia Day 4. The Casual Vacancy by J.K. Rowling 5. Lone Wolf by Jodi Picoult 6. One Hundred Names by Cecelia Ahern 7. The Time Keeper by Mitch Albom 8. The Innocent by David Baldacci 9. The Garden Of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng 10. The Sins Of The Father by Jeffrey Archer ■ Weekly list compiled by MPH Mid Valley Megamall, Kuala Lumpur; mphon line.com. |
| Posted: 04 Nov 2012 12:57 AM PDT The announcement of this year's literature Nobel winner has our columnist embarking on a 10-course sensual feast peppered with 10 feisty characters and adorned with hypnotic imagery. ON my bowed bookshelves, there are only three of Mo Yan's books. It's a shame, for the man is the newly crowned Nobel laureate in Literature. Regrettably, one of the books is unfinished, while the other two not at all read. Though I was a chapter short from finishing that book, it still somehow resonates loudly enough to occupy a special spot in my heart. Those tense moments years ago in a packed train while thumbing it remain crisp in memory. I was, on more than one occasion, impressed, as well as terrified, by Mo Yan's fictitious and macabre recounting of Japanese brutality against Chinese civilians during World War II. But make no mistake: the book is not historical fiction. History is just the background; in the forefront, Mo Yan speaks about religion, love, feminism, family and, ahem, sex. A master of descriptive language, he is unrivalled in his ability to capture small observations and transform them into grisly gruesomeness that slip perfectly between realism and surrealism, much as life in China became, first under Japanese occupation and then as part of the Cultural Revolution when cruelty was surreally realistic. "... A palm-sized piece of flesh twitched like a skinned frog ... the commander, whom she thought was long dead, climbing slowly to his knees; he crawled over to the chunk of flesh from his shoulder, flattened it out, and stuck it onto the spot where it had been cut off. But immediately it hopped back off and burrowed into a patch of weed. So he snatched it up and smashed it on the ground, over and over, until it was dead. Then he plucked a tattered piece of cloth from his body and wrapped the flesh in it." That episode right in the beginning of the book, when a piece of flesh has to be dead in order to be tamed, is surrealism at its best. The moment when Japanese armies storm into a remote Chinese village in the countryside, killing everyone, every horse, and slaughtering even themselves is testimony to a consummate writer deserving of the Nobel Prize he won. This book, with its title equally bristling, is called Big Breasts And Wide Hips. You can gather from the title that the book is raunchy. It is through raciness that Mo Yan addresses his conviction of feminism, as if their bodies are the cause of women's sufferings. The matriarch of the Shangguan family bears eight girls and one boy by different fathers. The eight strong-willed and feisty girls, who attempt to survive on the coattails of those who are stronger and meaner, stand in stark contrast with the boy, ruined by the maternal bosom. His desire to extend the all-too-brief seductive period of suckling his mother's teats has rendered him weak, fallible, selfish, and a useless pantywaist. As a narrator, the boy also lends us a lens through which to conjure up the horridness of people suffering in political upheavals that result from foreign invasions and persecutions under Mao's communist regime. While his sisters crave for mercy and die lacking it, the boy survives with his mother's milk as his mainstay in the tormented world. "... The real things on the tips of Mother's breasts – hers were love, hers were poetry, hers were the highest realm of heaven and the rich soil under golden waves of wheat ... nor could they compare with the large, swollen, speckled teats of my milk goat ... hers were tumultuous life, hers were surging passion." In this epic, one that is likely to have helped win him the Nobel Prize, Mo Yan revisits the 20th century, an era of unprecedented fanaticism. On the one hand, it was an era of starvation when people had nothing but themselves to eat. On the other hand, it was a time of intense political fanaticism when bell-tightened citizens participated zealously in the communist regime. Fanaticism was surreal because it thrived riotously in and contradicted with realism where all that a person needed for survival was not extremism but an iota of kindness and mercifulness. Between the cracks of this irony are the weak and feeble like the Shangguan siblings and mother, who are prosecuted and trampled beneath the horses' hooves. At this time when all nations of the world fix their watchful eyes on China's economic power and its potential as an economic buddy, we turn to this book and gaze backward on the vicissitudes of this vast nation in the past century and ponder if the same may recur in this century or the next. Such afterthought, if successfully roused, will render Big Breasts and Wide Hips a 10-course sensual feast peppered with 10 feisty characters and adorned with hypnotic imagery. And with the main course out of the way, the other two books, leaner and shorter, are desserts waiting to enthral. ■ When Abby was younger, she read Lu Xun, one of Mo Yan's inspirations. The similarity between the writers is stark and comforting, as if the literally feast is timeless and unceasing. |
| Posted: 04 Nov 2012 12:55 AM PDT Even broken lives can be beautiful, as this darkly funny novel suggests. Beautiful Ruins Author: Jess Walter Publisher: Harper, 337 pages WHY do KL drivers slow down to stare at multi-vehicle pile-ups? Could there be something ... beautiful about them? Considering the things that pass for sculptures of modern art, perhaps. But such morbid beauty isn't just found in mangled metal. The pile-up of broken lives in Jess Walters' Beautiful Ruins is just as fascinating. The comic-tragic tale unfolds from several directions as the protagonists race towards the inevitable collision. And it's all because of Richard Burton. In 1962, Porto Vergogna (literally, "port of shame") is a dying Italian fishing town and home to young Pasquale Tursi, keeper of the oddly named Hotel Adequate View. Tursi's daydreams of building tennis courts are interrupted by the arrival of Dee Moray, an American starlet who was supposed to be in Liz Taylor's Cleopatra. It's not long before Tursi starts thinking about a different kind of "love". However, stuff happens and, one day, she vanishes. In the present day, several people are failing in their romances and careers. Claire Silver, assistant to film producer Michael Deane, is disappointed with her porn-addict boyfriend and the box office bombs her boss made. Shane Wheeler's dreams of being a writer also bombed, along with his marriage and finances. Across the pond, Pat Bender's latest music-comedy act goes belly-up, ending his rock star ambitions. Hoping for a break, Wheeler pitches a story to Deane, so he's off to meet his assistant, Silver. Wheeler's knowledge of Italian helps when an elderly Italian man, a now-aged Tursi, shows up with one of Deane's old business cards – and a story that moves Wheeler, Silver and Deane to help him. There's a tingling sense of anticipation that's maintained throughout the novel, the promise of a spectacular collision that only happens during a rare alignment of some major cosmic bodies. The third-person narrative is mostly the spilling of the characters' thoughts. The jumps in the timeline, punctuated with excerpts from several characters' manuscripts or screenplays, can be initially hard to follow but the dark, often vulgar comedy helps. Another compelling aspect about Walter's novel is that its backdrop can be considered "beautiful ruins" as well: the film, book and music industries, as represented by the principal characters. Gawk and maybe chuckle at the references to trashy reality TV shows, bad movie ideas and English professors who write popular horror fiction (makes one think of Justin Cronin). Although their worlds are crumbling, the protagonists manage to cling on, just in time for Tursi's arrival. In helping the old Italian find a missing piece of his past, their hope is rekindled. What one feels about this book is captured by Wheeler's reaction to the present-day Deane, a "lacquered elf" whose obsession for eternal youth has given a 72-year-old man the face of a "nine-year-old Filipino girl" (makes one think of Karl Lagerfeld). "Try not to stare," Silver advises Wheeler. Like Wheeler, you'll fail. You can't help it. Even if you have almost no idea what's going on, there's no way you can take your eyes off Walter's ruined lives as they converge and finally crash into each other. I don't really fancy how some loose ends are tied up, but at least it rules out a sequel if they decide to bring it to the silver screen. "Go read this now" would not suffice. The splendour of Beautiful Ruins, like the pyramids and temples of Ancient Egypt, must be personally witnessed to be understood. You will not be able to look away. Be awed at the chaos and brilliance of his work, and be moved by a story of optimism and a decades-old love. |
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