The Places You Will Go

Tales of Mystery and Imagination: An Interview with Shaun Tan

From StarMag

Interview by DAPHNE LEE

MOST people tend to associate picture books with simple stories, illustrated with simple, brightly coloured pictures. Of course, those with a more intimate knowledge of this medium of storytelling know that there is more to picture books than just pretty pictures that simply offer a visual description of a straightforward, basic text.

Picture books may deal with complex and difficult themes and subject matter, and this may be reflected in either the text or the art, or both.

Shaun Tan is a picture book artist whose work is definitely more complex than what the average person might expect to find in a alphabet or counting book. I know people who started collecting picture books after they read one of Tan's. The Melbourne-based 35-year-old started his career drawing for science fiction and horror novels. His art appears in picture books written by John Marsden (The Rabbits) and Gary Crew (The Viewer and Memorial) and he also illustrates his own books (The Red Tree, The Arrival, Tales from Outer Suburbia).

Tan's art is striking and detailed, rather surreal in content and style. The richly tinted, deeply unsettling images in The Red Tree manage to convey the idea of that small glimmer of hope that keeps many people going through the worst of times.

In The Arrival, the pictures are sepia toned, alternating between panaromic views and personal studies that relate the story of a man as he attempts to make a living and home in a new land.

Tales from Outer Suburbia is a collection of 15 short ... I hesitate to even call them stories. Some seem like fragments that have no beginning or end. Most tantalise the reader, offering glimpses into strange worlds or strange views of this world.

Tan's father hails from Ipoh, Perak, and met his Australian wife when he was an engineering student in an Australian university. Tan was born in Perth and visited Malaysia when he was a boy but doesn't remember much of it.

Apart from writing and painting, he has worked as a theatre designer, and did concept art for the films Horton Hears a Who and Pixar's WALL-E.

Sales Explained

From StarMag

How do warehouse book sales manage to offer titles at such low prices? And why can’t we have those prices every day?

WHAT a time it’s been of late for book lovers in the Klang Valley! We’ve had huge warehouse sales by book wholesaler Crescent; the cheaper books people, Pay Less Books; and Big Bad Wolf Books.

The last was particularly memorable for me: I picked up more than 100 books for about RM600 – this means I paid, on average, RM6.50 a book and this includes hardback picture books (retail price at least RM60) and Nigella Lawson’s best-selling cookbook Nigella Express (also in hardcover)! In fact, prices at the sale ranged from RM5 to RM20. It was a heaven-sent event for book-buyers who were seen leaving with bulging canvas bags and loaded cardboard boxes during the five days of the sale.

How can the organisers of such sales afford to sell their books at such wonderfully low prices?

There are three situations that knock prices down: when books are “remaindered”, that is, they are no longer saleable for various reasons including over-printing and the release of new editions; overstocking, when a publisher might simply wish to reduce stock while retaining a quantity for herself; and returns, when titles are returned to the publisher by bookshops that have overestimated the number of copies they can sell.

There are occasions when customers will find the same book being sold at a regular bookstore at its stated cover price, and at a remaindered store for half or less of that. When this happens it’s probably due to the varying “shelf-life” practised by different book markets.

For example, in Britain, a book may be given six months in a bookstore before its saleability is evaluated, whereas a Malaysian bookstore may keep a book for a year. Titles “retired” in Britain may end up as remaindered stock and find their way to the shelves of a remaindered store in Malaysia. The same book may, of course, still be on the shelves of a regular bookstore.

Authors receive reduced or no royalties for books sold at remaindered stores and warehouse sales, but the upside is that they may find new readers at these places.

For example, Jacqueline Ng, one of the organisers of the Big Bad Wolf sale, says that The Gift of Rain by Malaysian author Tan Twan Eng sold very well at their sale. “Unfortunately, Malaysian readers are still not confident enough about local writers and would hesitate to buy a book like The Gift of Rain for the usual RM36. However, at RM8 they are happy to take the ‘risk’.”

If these readers like Tan’s book, they might pay the full price for his next novel the moment it’s published. After all, many of us have discovered favourite authors at second-hand bookstores and then gone out and bought all their other books at retail price.

Poetic License

I interviewed the poet Bernice Chauly several months ago for StarMag and the article is out today. Unfortunately, it's a much shorter version than the original piece I submitted - a real shame as Chauly's answers would, I believe, interest anyone who enjoys her work and also anyone interested in creative writing and in the local literary scene. However, you can read the full, unedited interview below:

Bernice Chauly

Interview by DAPHNE LEE

SOME of her poems make me feel uncomfortable,“ said a friend of mine to whom I’d given Bernice Chauly’s poetry collection, Book of Sins.

She didn’t mean that the poems were bad, simply that she felt that they revealed things about her - secret, painful things that she never thought any one else would share let alone understand.

Chauly’s poems are deeply personal. They may or may not be autobiographical in detail, but the stories they tell feel like they were shaped by real, not simply imagined emotions, and of course memories. They are Chauly’s emotions, memories and stories, but they also speak to and for women the world over. They are familiar tales, but, filtered through the voice of an individual, they defy the cliches of everyday experience and become significant, compelling and unique.

This is Chauly’s second collection of poems. Her first, going there and coming back, appeared in 1997. More than a decade between books isn’t surprising when you consider what a full and busy life Chauly leads. She juggles motherhood, teaching (at the School of Performance and Media in Sunway University College), writing, organising spoken word events and the occasional acting gig. No wonder she often looks tense and tired.

Chauly supports her life’s passions (creative writing, photography and her two daughters) by taking on more practical assignments. Although romantic, she’s too smart and too responsible and loving a parent to consider going the route of the tortured, starving artist. But that doesn’t mean she doesn’t suffer for her art. In fact, as a woman and a mother, I found many of her poems painfully touching. I can only imagine what she must have felt writing them.

She confirms that “Some were easier to write than others …. It’s cathartic most of the time, a release of many sorts and levels. It's like ‘Ok, I've written about it, now its done, I've let it go, I can move on".

Of course, Chauly is not the first writer whose work is in some way a result of conflict. Many of the world’s finest artists led turbulent lives or lived during turbulent times. Chauly talks about Aristotle's Poetics, which “discusses tragedy as one of the fundamental cores of poetry.” She says, “Artists are inspired by their own conflicts and tragedies - whether it rages within the depths of their hearts or whether it rages on the streets. Conflict creates drama, if there is no conflict, there is no drama, no story.”

The Right Words, In the Right Order

What was it I once said about how poetry can make you cry, and give you wings too? It can also improve your sex life. Or so I've been told ...

Murder in China

I interviewed US-based Chinese author Qiu Xiaolong in April this year and the story was finally published today.

Since then I've also got around to reading the first book in his Chief Inspector Chen series. I really liked it and I want to read the other books.

HERE are their synopses as they appeared in Reads Monthly (StarMag, 27th May 2007) ...

 

Death of a Red Heroine

ONE afternoon, the naked body of a young woman is found wrapped in a black trash bag in an obscure canal in Shanghai. It is the corpse is of Guan Hongying (the name Hongying can be read as "red heroine"), a national model worker, thus bringing the case’s political aspects squarely into place. Chief Inspector Chen Cao and his older subordinate Yu investigate the case, eventually tracing the likely murderer as Wu Xiaoming, the only son of Wu Bai, a high-ranking Party cadre.

 

A Loyal Character Dancer

CHEN and Inspector Catherine Rohn of the US Marshal Service must work together to find a missing woman. She is married to an important witness in a US criminal case who has refused to testify unless his pregnant wife is allowed to join him. The Chinese government has reluctantly agreed to let her go and the Americans have sent a marshal to escort her. Then, inexplicably she vanishes....

 

When Red Is Black

WHEN Yin Lige, the author of a banned book, is found murdered in her Shanghai apartment, Chen and detective Yu Guangming must solve a case that may have far-reaching political and social implications. (The “red” of the title refers to Mao Zedong’s Red Guard, the “black” to the supposed enemies of the working class denounced during the Cultural Revolution.). 

Yu soon uncovers the long-ago romance between the victim and Yang Bing, a college professor.

 

A Case of Two Cities

THE Communist Party leadership appears to be vigorously investigating rampant corruption among the profligate power elite during China’s economic reforms of the recent past. 

After the head of the Fujian special case squad is murdered in sordid circumstances, Chen discovers that the dead man had been probing a wealthy businessman, Xing Xing, who fled to the United States to escape prosecution. 

Chen himself is then given the highest authority to carry on the investigation, which takes him to the United States, but he soon realises he’s not meant to succeed.

 

Source: Wikipedia, Amazon.com, FantasticFiction.co.uk

In Anticipation of Malaysians' Top 10 Books

From StarMag, 21st April 2006.

Books Malaysians Love

THE original plan, when StarMag first decided to run a poll on Malaysians' favourite books, was to ask readers to submit one title each. However, the groans, moans and curses that issued from the mouths of those whom we first ran the idea by prompted an increase to 10 fiction titles.

The grumbling continued, though. As one reader, lawyer Animah Kosai, says, “If not for the deadline, I’d still be vascilating. It was a tough choice – I had to decide, one (book) per author. Otherwise there’d be more Murakami, Kundera and Nabakov.” Asked how long the list should have been? She says, “How long is a piece of string? I bet if I had to submit the list again, it would be slightly different.” The list Kosai did submit includes Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.

The content of the list which we asked readers for was also a subject of some discussion among StarMag’s staff. Deciding on a solely fiction list proved slightly problematic as My Family and Other Animals and James Herriot’s books about his life as a vet in the British Yorkshire Dales popped up on several lists.

Should we restrict our readers to just books originally written in English? No, we decided that this would mean leaving out some really important works of literature, like Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, Miguel Cervantes’s Don Quixote and Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s This Earth of Mankind.

Of course, we fully expected to be inundated with lists featuring The Da Vinci Code, but Dan Brown’s bestseller doesn’t seem to be a favourite of as many Malaysians as evinced from local sales of the book. It might be a case of anonymity not allowing some readers to be as honest as they otherwise might be about their preferences.

“Some people might just want to appear intelligent so they’d probably include a list of classics or maybe some really ‘smart’ books. It could lead to pretty pretentious lists and inaccurate results!” says Julianne Leow, a 20-year-old Universiti Malaya undergraduate whose Top 10, which include Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaarder, was chosen based on books that made a lasting impression and one or two titles that “influenced my thinking, perception and – dare I say it – life in some way.” 

We received e-mails from the day the poll was announced (April 1) and the overall response has been healthy considering that we are a nation who, supposedly, reads an average of two books per person per year. Look out for the final results in our Reads Monthly pullout next week. 

Leow predicts that J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings will top the charts. Do you agree? You and your book club buddies can start placing bets now on what Malaysians' favourite books are!

 

Breaking Barriers

StarMag, 8th April 2007.

Breaking barriers

By DAPHNE LEE

An author who wrote about an Australian teenager struggling with her faith strikes a chord among Malaysian teens.

IN Does My Head Look Big in This?, Randa Abdel-Fattah describes the experiences of a young Muslim Palestinian-Australian after she decides to wear the hijab (veil).

Sri Delima Rides Again

MPH Publishing's reissues of Adibah's Amin's As I Was Passing and As I Was Passing II (compilations of her column that appeared in the New Straits Times in the 70s and 80s) were launched this morning at Uncle Chilli's PJ Hilton.

I was very happy to see Amir (left) there. He's my friend and partner in picture book crime (and here we look like we're Siamese twins). He also ilustrated the new covers for As I Was Passing.

This (right) is Gim Ean, my best friend at the Star.

Here I am (left), being an author-groupie.

And this (right) is Eric Forbes, my editor at MPH Publishing.

Dead and Alive

I'm currently biting my nails over Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian, which is part-detective, part-horror fiction, about a group of scholars investigating the truth behind the legend of Vlad the Impaler, the cruel medieval ruler whose crimes formed the basis of the myth of Dracula.

Reading this book, prompted me to re-read Bram Stoker's Dracula. Coincidentally, two new versions of the classic tale arrived on my desk about a month ago: an illustrated edition, and a graphic novel.

Having a Ball with Books

Last week, I met and interviewed Tom Palmer, an author who develops and works on reader development programmes in the UK.

One of the things Palmer does is promote reading through football.

I attended a workshop conducted by him at the National Library and was inspired! My friend and I are hoping to launch a community library next year and I'm really looking forward to the workshops and programmes that we'll be able to run there.