The Places You Will Go

The Whole Package

By DAPHNE LEE 

From Tots to Teens, StarMag
 

I HAVE just spent a pleasurable couple of weeks reading five collections of folktales, three of them locally published works. 

At a recent colloquim on children's literature, held at University Malaya, several speakers lamented the fact that Malaysian children are unfamiliar with local folktales and legends, Instead, fairytales like Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty are often named as favourites -- and Disney's sanitised, saccharine versions at that! 

I had a Eurocentric upbringing, in terms of literature, and I remember my father reading to me tales by Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm. There was a book that I particularly loved -- small and fat, with dark crimson clothbound covers, miniscule font, and no pictures. I remember especially loving the story of Snow White and Rose Red, and so it must have been a Grimm collection. I can remember how the book felt in my hands, and how it smelt deliciously dusty. 

Although I recall being introduced to Sang Kanchil when I started school, I don't remember what form the stories took - whether I was told about the mousedeer or if I read about him in a book. 

Their look, feel and smell are a big part of my memories of a great many books I read and loved as a child. This is why I think it's important that publishers of local children's literature pay attention to the way a book is packaged. 

The text is important of course, but so are the illustrations. Why include pictures at all unless they are of the best quality and best suited for the stories they are illustrating? The three local collections I recently enjoyed comprise well-written versions of local and Asian folktales, but the illustrations could be a lot better.

Could Be Better

From Tots to Teens, StarMag

I'VE just received a copy of the latest compilation of folktales from this region -- Myths and Legends of Malaysia and Singapore by Ralph Modder and Asishah Ahmed (Horizen Books, 129 pages, ISBN: 978-9810831004)

It's encouraging to see more and more writers and publishers producing such anthologies. I don't believe there can be too many books of folktales. These stories bear infinite tellings and re-tellings, should be reinterpreted, reconstructed and deconstructed, and kept interesting and relevant to each generation.  Although their origins are oral, they are too precious a record of our past not to be preserved in more permanent, traceable form.

While it's great that quite a number of these collections are now available, I am disappointed in the way these books have been produced. I have yet to see a local anthology of folktales that satisfies on all counts. At times the writing is weak. Often the stories do not seem to have been edited or proofread. The illustrations too are frequently of inferior quality.

This latest compilation suffers from lack of coherence. Is it a story book? Is it a book of trivia? Is it a record of historical sites? It's a little of every thing, really.

A Feast of Ghost Stories

From Tots to Teens, StarMag

IT’S not a Malaysian tradition to tell ghost stories at Christmas, but it used to be quite the done thing in Britain to gather around the fire place at Christmas and swap spooky tales.

I suspect that the practice was greatly encouraged by the cold weather at that time of the year in Britain – ideal for huddling in front of a blazing fire. Christmas is also when the family gets together, so there’s a crowd listening together, and maybe even more than one storyteller. Of course, now that there’s television, and DVDs and such, no one wants to hear grandma tell how she met the devil in the churchyard one freezing winter’s night.

Christmas time also coincides with the Celtic midwinter or winter solstice, supposedly the second most haunted time of the year (the first, for the Celts, is Samhain, celebrated at the end of October to mark the transition from “lighter” summer to “darker” autumn), and that must be another reason why ghost stories are told during the season.

For the Chinese, the most haunted time of the year is during the month of the hungry ghosts. This is when the spirits of those who died hungry, prematurely or unjustly are allowed back into the world of the living. They come seeking revenge and are mollified with offerings of food.

In the small town in Malaysia where I grew up, the hungry ghost festival was marked with displays of food in the marketplace. I loved the spectacle of rows and rows of tables heavily laden with delicious edibles. Most eye-catching were the whole pigs, several in their pink skins, several more roasted a crisp golden brown, all with apples or peaches in their mouths.

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.

What a Trip

By DAPHNE LEE

From Tots to Teens, StarMag

ALTHOUGH he doesn't write specifically for adolescents, I think Sufian Abas has the sort of weird and wonderful imagination needed to create the sort of romantic fantasies teenagers would be only too eager to lose themselves in. They would most certainly identify with Sufian's love-sick characters, his delusional young men and wide-eyed young women, all wandering through a world lit by fluorescent strips and filled with dusty roads, stuffy LRT coaches and gaudy fast food joints.

It's a world that smells, sweetly and sharply, of rotting garbage and paint-stripper; a world where ceilings leak and the plumbing is jammed with blood and guts and broken hearts. A horrific world, a romantic world, a world swollen with unrequited love and lost dreams. Just the sort of landscape hyper-sensitive, melodramatic young adults like to pretend they inhabit.

Matanya Teleskop, Hatinya Kapal Dalam Botol Kaca (The Eye is a Telescope, the Heart a Ship in a Glass Bottle) (Sang Freud Press, 82 pages) is the intriguing, irresistible title of Sufian's new collection of urban tales. The mind boggles and at the same time is filled with images rare and various.

An Interview with Shih-Li Kow

From StarMag

A local author who was shortlisted on Monday for a prestigious international literary prize shares aspects of her writing life.

IN 2007, Silverfish Books published News from Home, a collection of short stories by three Malaysians, Chua Kok Yee, Rumaizah Abu Bakar, and Shih-Li Kow.

The writers were participants of the Silverfish Writing Programme, and had been chosen to contribute to the anthology because they showed promise and commitment. Each had a different style of storytelling, but Kow’s stories stood out as the most original and interesting, and also because her voice was the most confident and natural of the three.

A year later, Kow published Ripples and Other Stories, a collection of her own, to critical acclaim locally. On Monday, that acclaim became international when Ripples was shortlisted for the world’s richest short story prize, the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award.

The winner of the ‚35,000 (RM175,000) prize will be announced on Sept 30, at the culmination of the annual Frank O’Connor International Short Story Festival in Cork, Ireland, which begins on Sept 16.

The other titles shortlisted are An Elegy for Easterly by Petina Gappah; Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower; Love Begins in Winter by Simon Van Booy; Singularity by Charlotte Grimshaw; and The Pleasant Light of Day by Philip Ó Ceallaigh.

In an e-mail interview, Kow, 40, talks about being shortlisted and other aspects of her life as a writer.