Review of Zen Cho’s Spirits Abroad

Spirits Abroad

Zen Cho

London: Tor, 2023

ISBN: 9781035015658

341 pp.

The Malay Chinese world is full of complex but fascinating conjunctions. Many people might be familiar with this phenomenon when it comes to the Nyonya food culture but it is also true of the world of the imagination. There are vampires which feed on human flesh, for example, but they must moderate their appetites so that they can manage their multi-generational family relationships and continue going to school because they understand the importance of education. There are oil-covered doppelgangers preying upon the Malaysian Oxbridge community but they too must navigate the various class and age-based epiphanies with which the other members must contend. There are monsters who, as bad boy communist philosopher Slavoj Zizek observed somewhere, follow us from the old country and latch on to us no matter how we try to escape (in this argument, Zizek equates Dracula with incest but I think we need not explore this too deeply here). The result of this conflation of traditions is a rich seam of magical realism that has been well mined by the author Zen Cho.

I first came across Zen Cho’s work with her delightful novel Sorcerer to the Crown, which I have reviewed elsewhere on this site. In this collection of short stories, all of which have been published previously, although I had not read any of them, she often seems to bring herself into the limelight, often on the cusp of adulthood or else reflecting on that time from a few years thereafter. Generally, there is some dissatisfaction with how the character (who may not be the author after all) has managed the transitions involved and this in itself is a suitable topic for personal horror. When it comes to an association of some kind with the supernatural, it is not surprising that there comes about a combination of the mundane with the fantastic.

Most of the stories were published from 2010-2, although there are some from 2014-5 and even one from 2020, Odette, which has a melancholy feeling of a much stronger nature than others in the collection. It is more common to find a measure of humour in the conflation of mundane and fantastic, as in “The House of he Aunts” and “First National Forum on the Position of Minorities in Malaysia.” Her work is particularly well-served by her ear for dialogue (from The House of the Aunts, p.92):

“’Nanti kena rotan by the discipline teacher then you know,’ said Ah Lee. ‘You know Puan Aminah doesn’t even let us wear coloured watches. Must be black, plain black strap.’ She showed him the watch she was wearing. ‘Metal watch also cannot. Too gaya kanon.’

‘Weh lau,’ said Ridzual.”  

I find this very amusing but then I have become relatively familiar with the way that Malaysian (and Singaporean) people speak in English and I imagine it might be a bit of a barrier for those who do not have such familiarity. However, an open and enquiring mind will surely welcome the chance to expands its horizons.

That the stories have been written over the course of a decade by someone who is still a young author (she was born in 1986, which is scarcely more than being a teenager as far as I am concerned) rather encourages the desire to try to establish some kind of arc of development in the work but I am not sure how much that would be valid here. Some of the stories, for example The Fish Bowl, seem to rely on well-established themes which might be related to youth but that one appeared in 2013, while the seemingly more sophisticated The First Witch of Damansara was first published in 2012. Of course, stories are not necessarily published in the order in which they were written so maybe such speculation is all pointless anyway.

This is a thoroughly enjoyable collection of stories which I would have no hesitation in recommending to anyone. If readers have not had any opportunity to explore the Malay world before, then this is a splendid opportunity to do so. Those who have had the opportunity will surely welcome the chance to learn more. It will also be of interest to readers who just enjoy the kind of genre writing or who are interested in the tensions between modernity and tradition.

John Walsh, Krirk University

Review of Sapkowski’s The Last Wish

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The Last Wish

Andrzej Sapkowski

New York, NY: Orbit, 2008

ISBN: 9-780316029186

359 pp.

Translated by Danusia Stok

This collection contains the short stories, first published in Polish in 1993, that first brought us the character of Geralt of Rivia, also known as The Witcher. Geralt’s fame has subsequently spread not just through the series of novels that have been published about his adventures and, perhaps more influentially, by his reinvention as the hero of a video games franchise and now a major, as they say, television series. It is through the last of these that The Witcher was first brought to my attention and piqued me to buy (and review elsewhere on this site) the first novel, Blood of Elves and it was while reading this that I realised I should have started with the two initial collections of short stories, with The Last Wish being followed by Sword of Destiny, which is also waiting for my attention on my second, slightly improvised book shelf.

So what is it about Geralt of Rivia that seems so interesting? For a start, the stories come from something of a simpler age, where problems can be solved by the swish of a sword or the seizing of the momento wrestle destiny one way or another. The world in which he lives is one which passed through a kind of grand conjunction of many worlds, during which various creatures migrated from one to the other. It seems like humans came from elsewhere to the present world and, owing to their reckless fecundity, have driven native races such as the elves to the verge of extinction. There are also numerous non-civilised creatures, such as dragons, rusalka, striga, likimora and so forth which may be viewed as dangerous and inexplicable predators bent on making life difficult for peaceable human farmers and foresters or, alternatively, as the innocent victims of a monstrous intrusion of their ecology by a rapacious breed to creatures determined to bring what had been the commons into enclosure and private ownership. In order to support their claim to the land, human elites has created through magical or scientific means to create a genetically enhanced breed of creatures – the Witchers – who would act as itinerant assassins for hire, thereby pacifying the land (and calling it peace, no doubt).

As a Witcher, Geralt has a mass if characteristically white hair, problematic but powerful eyes and a number of other medical conditions that can be managed in part by the skilful application of herbs. He is, in other words, a form of Elric reborn and Elric was a great hero of my youth. So, I am well-disposed towards Geralt from the outset and willing to sympathise with his world view and cheer him on in his many struggles with enemies with two or more legs. That he is, by necessity, an outsider, only of course adds to the sense of comradeship. And so, I happily travelled with The Witcher as he established his character by defining his moral code in a tricky situation, demonstrated his potent but not unbeatable combat skills and even suggested a wry sense of humour through his relationship with his friend, the bard Dandilion and, in a more foreboding manner, with the wizard Yennefer. The seeds of future stories are sown in the The Last Wish itself (the stories are linked and presented in novel form but remain individual stories nevertheless), when Geralt forms a long-term relationship with the princess whose care he will be involved with in Blood of Elves and, presumably, beyond. Nevertheless, there is a pleasingly episodic nature to some of the stories, as if for Geralt they represent early adventures before the main narrative of his life is written.

The text is translated well by Danusia Stok, who stands aside and lets the action take the centre stage. The pace is rapid and none of the stories outstays its welcome. Secondary characters can be vivid and sometimes even memorable. By virtue of his role as an enigma, Geralt seems likely always to be a bit of a vacuum at the centre of the stage but that is something I am happy with in my heroes. Now, on to the next book.

John Walsh, RMIT Vietnam, April 2020

Review of M.R. James’ Ghost Stories of an Antiquary

Ghost Stories of an Antiquary

M.R. James

London: William Collins, 2017

ISBN: 9-780008-2-242091

XII and 156 pp.

The ghost stories of M.R. James scarcely need any introduction, since they have become household favourites, in the UK at least, which regularly appear in anthologies and collections of this and that. James celebrates the minor academic who, going about his affairs (I am not aware of any protagonist being a woman and, indeed, I cannot think of any female character in his works who does anything more than cook, clean or swoon), becomes involved with some kind of supernatural affair that threatens disaster but can generally be fended off with a measure of officer class British pluck.

It is tempting and not unreasonable to suppose that these protagonists resemble the author himself, as biographical details tend to support. Certainly, in his role as narrator – the stories are generally relayed to the narrator by some more or less unreliable source – he often wishes to show that he is just like one of us, supposing that his readers all shared the same demographic characteristics:

“Awake he remained, in any case, long enough to fancy (as I am afraid I often do myself under such conditions) that he was the victim of all manner of fatal disorders: he would lie counting the beats of his heart, convinced that he was going to stop work every moment, and would entertain grave suspicions of his lungs, brain, liver, etc. – suspicions he was sure would be dispelled by the return of daylight, but which until then he refused to put aside (p.99).”

There is certainly little doubt that the author and his protagonists live in a society that was strongly characterised by class and gender (thankfully, there is very little ethnic diversity in this selection which means we can avoid the unpleasantness of Bram Stoker in The White Worm, for example) The otherness of the lower classes is endemic and evident in every word of their speech, as this little boy testifies:

“’Ow, I seen it wive at me out of the winder,” wailed the boy, “and I don’t like it (p.103).”

Of course, it is always tempting to look at books and the time at which they appeared to consider whether they looked forward to the changes that we, looking retrospectively, are aware are about to happen. This volume first appeared in 1904, with subsequent collections in the same genre appearing in 1911, 1919 and 1925 – he was at the same time rather more prolific with his scholarly works. The beginning of the twentieth century can be viewed as a tranquil, imperial, all is well with world kind of feeling that I identified in the early part of Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth. However, a more realistic portrayal of the period, with the old world ready to be killed but the new world not yet ready to be born would be Robert Tressell’s The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists. Political ferment of such a kind is absent from the antiquarian ghost stories but they do, nevertheless, have some measures of modernity of their own The settings are contemporary, for example, rather than being the Gothic landscapes and monumental buildings that had become common. Meanwhile, the scholar-protagonists do use the advanced research techniques of their time, since the age of mechanical reproduction has furnished private laboratories with the latest published knowledge and expertise. Communications are such that people still have to go to a specific place in order to find out something but they have developed to the extent that it is possible at little more than a moment’s notice (or the arrival of a telegram) to organize a trip to continental Europe via rail and steamer. The characters themselves do often characterise themselves as being modernist in nature by rejecting the superstitions of the past and applying scientific techniques to understanding the phenomena of the world.

These stories will not be to everyone’s taste. Some will find them pedestrian, claustrophobic or overly rarefied. However, ghost stories are allowed to take us to other places where we might not be too sure how to behave and may not feel too comfortable about how to think. In that sense, these are excellent companions.

John Walsh, RMIT Vietnam, February 2019

Review of Selected Short Stories by Rabindranath Tagore

Selected Short Stories

Rabindranath Tagore

London: Harper Press, 2013

ISBN: 978-0-00-792558-2

IX + 162 pp.

South Asian literature is starting to make some inroads into the western understanding. In part, this is because of the emergence of a middle-class and bourgeois style of living that makes descriptions more accessible (e.g. Aravind Adiga and Vikram Seth) or because literary genius through a form of magical realism can transcend time and space (e.g. Arundhati Roy and Salman Rushdie – an anglo-South Asian, of course). There has always been the gentles humanism of R.K. Narayan, whose charming characterisation brings about class and gender contradictions and conflicts in a way that admirers of Jane Austen would, in my opinion, appreciate. However, there is still a gap in understanding and this is a gap that is reified by colonial writers or those in support of them that argues that East is East and West is Wester and there can be no understanding by one of the other. This is of course nonsense – now as it has always been. It is only necessary to think of the spread of the principal religions and philosophies to realise how ideas can spread: Buddhism was taken up from India to Afghanistan (and probably further west) and to Korea and Japan in the east. Few people would reasonably argue that there are no significant social and cognitive differences along these journeys.

So it is possible to understand and appreciate art, in this case literature, from a very different culture. That which is different and follows different approaches and objectives is not inherently inferior but does require some effort on behalf of the reader. Asian writers tend not to win major international literary prizes and reading the work in translation can provoke mystification rather than empathy, notwithstanding that it is possible to penetrate such mysteries. Asian literature (to commit a gross generalisation) works in different rhythms, has different stylistic emphases and rarely includes the kind of psychological analysis of character associated most closely with Freud that now pervades western literature. This is in addition to the numerous sometimes subtle references to social and familial relationships that are often contained implicitly within language and which cannot be explained without interpolations or footnotes. It is tempting for some readers – Rudyard Kipling is the particular example in this case – to conclude that stories concerning relations between different people behaving in difficult to understand ways are not worth very much. When reversed, it is clear that this is foolish because otherwise we could dismiss so many western writers for exactly the same reasons.

This brings us to the extraordinary polymath Rabindranath Tagore. The first non-European winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature (1913), the composer of the national anthems of two countries, a person who had the privilege to travel to Britain and its elite universities, reject them and return to write stories of rural Bengal (here in the translation of someone whose name I could not find) that quite fully comply with Kipling’s dismissal. We have, in this slender collection, stories of families who have become ruined through some unspecified economic changes, with women locked in space and time but whose compassion knows no bounds, sons who mock the traditions in which they were raised and daughters whose only value is as a potential marriage catch. The relationships between the characters are marked by variations in caste, class, gender and ethnicity relations that require careful study by western readers to understand. Not only that but the very obvious agents of change in the society described – imperialism and its attendant internationalisation and the spread of capitalism – only very fleetingly appear, as in a European doll that excites the imagination of a small boy or the arrival of a new brand of tobacco that challenges its smokers to re-evaluate their relationship with the past. When estates are degraded and futures won and lost, it is not (at least in this collection) because of the intervention of powerful external forces but the willingness and ability of characters to adhere to their historically designated modes of behaviour – which we must all believe are rooted in virtue and dignity rather than opportunism and luck. Such characters expect or at least aspire to expect that the remainders of their social relationships will remain the same and, therein, lies their tragedy. Yet underlying all of this is the statement and restatement of virtue and of love that characterises many of those portrayed or else is the missing element of those who appear to have prospered in the changed circumstances. There is much that has been achieved in this vein in these stories.

Books by Rabindranath Tagore do not seem to be very prominent these days and I imagine I would not have come to this book if it were not for the sainted San Min bookshop sandwiched between where I am writing this and the Zhongshan Junior High School MRT station. This edition is part of the Collins Classics series that are sold at a reasonable price and contain some prefatory remarks about the life and times of the author and an extensive concluding glossary that presumably incorporates vocabulary from the whole range of books in this series. Having had this opportunity to sample the work of Tagore in this way, I will be happy to seek out a more representative selection of his oeuvre.

Review of Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

Raymond Carver

“L.D. put the shaving bag under his arm and picked up the suitcase.

He said, ‘I just want to say one more thing.’

But then he could not think what it could possibly be (p.134).”

This passage, the conclusion to the final story in this collection, ‘One More Thing,’ is emblematic of the world which Raymond Carver so precisely describes and dissects. In post-war America and subsequent decades, mostly young and inexperienced couples struggle to understand the bourgeois mores they are expected to observe and to find something meaningful in the suburban world of consumption and commerce they inhabit. Generally, they are unable to do so and so we see L.D. thrown out of the house by his wife after being abusive to their 15-year old daughter after what is “… another tragedy in a long line of low-rent tragedies (p.130).” In the end, faced with the consequences of their actions, inadequate as they may be in the face of overwhelming forces beyond their ability to influence, they are reduced to silence. The image brings to mind the conclusion of Dante’s Inferno, where we are brought into the presence of Lucifer, who has been reduced to glacial, frozen immobility because of his inability to bring the universe under his own control.

In the eponymous story around which this characteristically slim collection is based, the characters try with only limited success beyond the obvious and the physical. Estranged seemingly from both religion and political ideology, they have few resources when seeking to explain or to understand their own circumstances. They search for something special in love, as if such a construct could genuinely provide some meaning to life. They are also reduced to silence and then all the gin runs out.

Carver was a wonderful writer and while, on the one hand, it is possible to appreciate and enjoy these short stories for what they are, on the other hand there is some measure of regret that he did not write something more substantial to outline his world view in some more depth. Instead, he moved towards verse an while poetry is of course a perfectly good medium for dealing with the big picture, it does seem that he preferred to pare down his work until he could illuminate daily life in a haiku or a moment of zen-like enlightenment. The stories in this collection are a little bleaker than in other collections and the sense of optimism to be obtained is very fragile and ephemeral. The most that people can hope for, it seems, is that things are not worse than they are now and then things do get worse and then they die. Usually in silence. At least they can have a drink while they get through it all – something that Carver himself had to give up in order to save his life and launch his writing career. He became a major part of modern American literature.

Review of Elephant and Other Stories by Raymond Carver

Elephant and Other Stories

Raymond Carver

Was it Trotsky who complained that artists could not be trusted because they always insisted on their own ability to create art above and beyond any intervening ideology. This is true of Raymond Carver’s world, in which the characters refuse to comply with what might be expected of them in the confines of the society in which they were living. This was the America of the post-war decades, where people smoke, drink and eat the dreadful American food of the time. The characters cannot quite fit into society but cannot tell why or even how. The truth is that society was moving into a more intensive form of capitalism and generating, as a result, greater feelings of alienation and isolation as familiar social relations are replaced by market relations and life becomes centred on production and consumption. Not everyone, of course, is able to make sense of this transition and so cannot fill the role expected of them by themselves or by others.

In the first story in this extraordinary collection, ‘Boxes,’ the protagonist’s mother spends her life packing and unpacking the eponymous boxes as she cannot find a place to live that suits her. She wants to live somewhere warm but then it is too warm and people disappoint her and life is impossible, so then she goes to live in the same town as her son but then her relationship with him fails to live up to her expectations and other problems emerge and so she decides to move on somewhere else. Her peregrinations are the outward sign of the internal turmoil that the other characters feel and that both affect her and are affected by her. All of this is expressed in the most extraordinary immersion into everyday life and the use of a form of discourse that is thoroughly conditioned by it:

“My mother passes the chicken to Jill and say, ‘I wrote that lady I rented from before. She wrote back and said she had a nice first-floor place I could have. It’s close to the bus stop and there’s lots of stores in the area. There’s a bank and a Safeway. It’s the nicest place. I don’t know why I left there.’ She says that and helps herself to some coleslaw (p.18).”

The inability to deal with capitalism is revealed in a different aspect in the title story ‘Elephant,’ which chronicles the life of a patient working man, who has to provide financial support for his children, mother, inadequate brother and others who are all struggling to reach their own form of accommodation with society, their aspirations for what they each consider to be a decent standard of living and their ability to mobilize the resources for that standard of living.

Failed and failing relationships fill these stories and most of the others. The exception is the final one, ‘Errand,’ which is a dramatic retelling of the facts of the death of Chekhov, with whom Carver was often compared. Here, the purpose of the fiction appears to be the separation of what is real or perhaps authentic from what is not, as in the meaning of the art separated from the way in which it is expressed:

“Do you understand what I’m saying, Olga said to the young man. Leave the glasses. Don’t worry about them. Forget about crystal wineglasses and such. Leave the room as it is. Everything is ready now. We’re ready. Will you go (p.124)?”

Carver was a great genius and this short volume portrays this to considerable effect. I wonder what his fiction would have been like if he had attempted to write consistently in a long-form? If anything, he moved in the opposite direction towards poetry in the attempt, as it seems to me in any case, to identify the meaning of things in the skein of everyday things. T.S. Eliot famously wrote of John Webster that he could see the skull beneath the skin. Here, Carver sees the nature of American society beneath the cigarette and the possibly-not-cooked-properly chicken breast.

 

A Country Doctor’s Notebook

A Country Doctor’s Notebook

Mikhail Bulgakov

Mikhail Bulgakov is of course best known for his extraordinary work The Master and Margarita, which I first read in Athens nearly 30 years ago but which remains vividly with me to this day. However, before reaching that stage of his life, Bulgakov wrote a series of short stories about his experiences as a young medical doctor in rural Russia in 1916-17, just before the time of the revolution and published after it took place. The stories tend to focus on the inadequacy of the teaching of the doctor and, to a greater extent, the ignorance and superstitions of the peasantry. The ability of science to shine a light on this ignorance and banish it was clearly popular with the authorities and the stories were published in various journals, as pointed out in the short but useful introduction, if slightly old-fashioned, from the translator Michael Glenny. The records of those journals have helped to contribute to the nine stories in this quite slender volume. It is helpful to have the stories collected together because of the difficulties Bulgakov faced in getting published for most of his subsequent life. It is published by Vintage Books in London, which company also publishes his other works as part of the Vintage Bulgakov series which has the company’s trademark and rather pleasing bright red spine.

The early stories follow a common theme and style, which is not very surprising given that the young writer was still finding his voice and because of the power of his subject matter, not to mention the fact that he could place stories in a variety of different markets. At first, the young doctor, fresh out of medical school, is introduced, against the background of remote Russian villages, with their lack of facilities, punishing snowstorms and emotional and intellectual isolation. He is then challenged by a patient who presents with a medical condition he has not treated before and may never even have seen. He feels overawed and unable to cope but, having little choice but to take action (and possibly assisted by his feldsher helper and two midwives) he finds the knowledge obtained from studying textbooks and attending lectures becomes transformed into actionable knowledge when push comes to shove. Later stories reflect on endemic problems among the peasant families, such as the generational persistence of syphilis within a family, the danger of morphine addiction and the role of a doctor within revolutionary action.

The stories are short, slight, complete and quite conventional in structure. Each has a beginning, a thickening of the plot and then a resolution and there is no hint of modernist or post-modernist trickery in their construction They are rooted in the material conditions of the time and it is notable that this attention continues in works such as The Heart of a Dog, which is centred on the fantastical eponymous hero. The translation of the stories is clear and unfussy and Glenny does the most important work of a translator, which is to keep out of the way of the text.

This is a book which is of interest not only in its own right but also as a historical document and an indication of the development of one of the more significant Russian writers of the twentieth century. I read through it very quickly and would have been happy with more.

Review of Raymond Carver’s Cathedral

This collection of short stories, Cathedral, is said to mark a turning point in Raymond Carver’s relatively short but spectacular writing career from the documentary-like Would You Please Be Quiet, Please?, which I have read and reviewed elsewhere on this site to the more poetic works of his later career, which I have not (yet) read. It is certainly true that the eponymous final story concludes the collection on a different note than when it began.

Read the full review here.

Review of Erikson’s The Devil Delivered and Other Tales

As the name rather suggests, The Devil Delivered and Other Tales is a collection of stories, three in total and each of a length to suggest novelette status rather than short story. The three stories are quite different in setting and mood but contain several similarities with Erikson’s writings in general (I have reviewed much of his extensive oeuvre in the world of the Malazan in particular elsewhere on this site). The first similarity is the complexity of the action – the action may be asynschronous or polysynchronous in nature and the individual point of view may not be clear.

Read the full review here.

Review of Hamilton’s Manhattan in Reverse

Peter Hamilton is best known for his extensive space opera sagas, which generally extend over several volumes, feature numerous characters and commonly feel like the author is making it all up as he goes along and has only a vague understanding of what the ending is going to be. However, Hamilton has in the past proved that he is capable of writing coherent and enjoyable shorter novels and, indeed, short stories with the same qualities.

Read the full review here.