Tan Twan Eng Q&A

Tan Twan Eng was my 'discovery of the year' for 2012, after reading both his first novel, The Gift of Rain, longlisted for the Booker in 2007 and his second The Garden of Evening Mists, shortlisted last year, in December. Both long, but worth while reads I love his lyrical writing and tightly woven plots. I was so please to be given the opportunity to ask Tan a few questions about his work-so thanks to him.

Both your books deal with the relationships between students and teachers. Have you had an inspirational teacher and what was the greatest lesson they taught you?

My teachers are all the writers I’ve ever read and still read: Vladimir Nabokov, Kazuo Ishiguro, Rushdie, Julian Barnes, Somerset Maugham, and many, many others. They taught me the different ways one can view and describe the world.

I felt when reading your books very ignorant about the part of the world you come from; do you feel that your books are helping to educate people around the world about the history of Malaysia? What sort of responses have you had from Western readers and how do they compare with readers in your country?


They seem to be helping to educate people around the world, although that isn’t my main purpose or intention when I write. Western readers have more questions about all aspects of my novels, from the setting and factual background to the characters. Readers in Malaysia are more interested in the characters than anything else, because they’re already familiar with the setting of my novels.

Your writing is so full of lovely metaphors and descriptions, are you a notebook-on-you-at-all-times kind of writer or do they just come to you as you’re writing?

Wherever I am, whatever I’m doing, a part of me is always noting down whatever I find interesting, describing them in my mind. It’s the writer’s mind-set, to filter everything I observe, experience and hear through this sieve, hoping to catch something that can be used later. I do it almost without being aware of it.

In the past I didn’t take notes but remembered the descriptions I’ve come up with. These days I tend to jot them down in my phone.

One thing I loved about The Gift of Rain was how multicultural it was-do you find the blending different cultures and attitudes easy within your writing? How much does this reflect your life?


I grew up in a multicultural country, and the world has also become very multicultural too, so my life is reflected in my writing. It’s something I don’t even really think about. It’s made me adaptable and to be able to respect the different cultures I’ve experienced around the world.

You now live in South Africa, how did you find yourself there? Would you write a book set in that part of the world? How does it differ from Malaysia (I know that might be quite a lot of things!).

I obtained my Masters in Law in Cape Town. I liked the place so much I decided to live there for part of the year. It’s a beautiful city, and the people are very welcoming, very friendly. It reminds me of Malaysia in many ways. I’ve thought of setting a book there, but it’s a complex, complicated society, and I’m not sure I can be objective about it at this stage of my life.

Your writing deals with occupations, colonialism and other global migrations both aggressive and economic. Do you find yourself bitter after researching these events?

Sometimes I get enraged by what I find out in my research, but I tell myself it’s in the past. We tend to evaluate the past through the filters of present day ethics, knowledge and morality, and that skews our judgment.

There were a lot of unfairness and oppression and exploitation in colonialism. But, like so many of my generation, I’ve only reaped the benefits of colonialism, so to get angry about it seems hypocritical to me.

The 2012 Booker prize shortlist was notable for its inclusion of titles several independent publishers, including your own Myrmidon Books, what were your feelings about this? Are you purposefully with an independent publisher and how important are the standards of your publisher to you?

I’m very glad for my publisher, and for the other independent publishers, that they received this extensive, worldwide recognition and exposure. There was an article in a British newspaper praising the courage of these small publishers, for the way they took risks in signing on unknown authors. The article noted that ‘It’s only these independent publishers who can afford to run these risks.’ I feel it’s not true – in fact it’s completely wrong – these independent publishers cannot afford to run these risks, yet they still do it, because they’re passionate about the books they want to publish.

Being with an independent publisher, I can communicate directly and immediately with the primary decision makers if I have any problems. We usually solve our issues very quickly and pragmatically. We discuss everything, from the book cover to the blurb, to marketing and promotional plans.

The standards of my publisher are very, very important to me. It has to have highly experienced and discerning editors and designers - I want my books to read well and to look elegant. The content and form of my books have to be produced to the highest standards possible – I don’t want to be ashamed of them when I walk into any bookshop anywhere in the world. My publisher has recently issued a limited hardback edition of The Garden of Evening Mists to celebrate the Man Booker shortlisting, and I must say my publisher has done an extraordinary job on it. Extraordinary. People who’ve seen it agree completely.

2007 Longlist, 2012 Shortlist…you must be feeling so much pressure for your next novel! How do you relax? Does your first two books gaining so much acclaim change the way you approach your writing?

I relax by reading and exercising, by meeting friends for drinks or a meal. Or by going out into nature: to a park or the beach or the mountains. I walk a lot too, on my own.

I push myself to constantly improve as a writer, so my first two books receiving so much acclaim hasn’t really changed the way I write. Every book that I write has to be much better than the previous one. And to my horror I realised that the writing isn’t going to get easier with time.
  The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng is published in hardback and trade paperback by Myrmidon Books.

A Chat With Melinda Moustakis

Earlier this month I fell in love with Melinda Moustakis’ award winning collection of short stories ‘Bear Down Bear North’ that was published in September. The stories focus the Alaskan homesteading, trapping and fishing traditions around the Kanai River-some of the harshest landscape in the world, and the unbreakable, tough, people that live there.
Often brutal in its description of Alaskan family life, the stories in the book cover three generations of survivors in sparse, lyrical prose that shall send a shiver down your spine and is perfect for a night snuggled by the fire.
I was really pleased when Melinda agreed to talk to me about the book, and her talent and enthusiasm shines through throughout. This is a writer worth watching, and I cannot wait for her next offering.

BE : What made you decide to focus your writing on Alaska and especially the people who feature in your stories lives?MM: I was born in Fairbanks and my grandparents homesteaded in Alaska and my parents grew up in Anchorage. Then we moved to California when I was very young and I grew up hearing all these fantastic stories about Alaska. They stayed with me. And we would go up to Alaska and visit family and go fishing. Then about seven years ago I started going up more regularly in the summers to go with fishing with my uncle, Sonny, who is an expert fisherman and the storyteller in my family. I fell in love with fishing and with fishing stories. All of these factors combined--the love of fishing, being on the river, the almost mythological family stories about Alaska--and converged in my work when I started to take writing classes and started to take writing more seriously. I found my voice as a writer when I focused on the landscape of Alaska and all these stories I had inherited. These stories and stories my uncle tells me and experiences I have while fishing are the often the spark that starts a piece of fiction--but by the end, the initial spark has been completely transformed into something else. It's as if I am given a kernel of truth, a diamond, and then it is my task to build the coal around it, to build the story that will make that diamond transform and sparkle like it's never sparkled before.

BE: So do you see your work as a re-telling of old stories, a celebration of the culture you've inherited, or an exploration of how a landscape affects a culture?MM: I don't know if I could ever presume to represent a culture. I would say "a re-telling and re-imagining of old stories, a celebration of the stories I've inherited and experienced, and an exploration of how landscape affects character and voice." In terms of representation, my goal was to be truthful about both the majesty and the darker undercurrents of the Alaskan wilderness and the people who live there. The true test of the book is how it will be received by my family and other Alaskan readers--and so far there has been an incredibly warm reception. I didn't want Bear Down, Bear North to be considered "another touristy book" about Alaska. I wanted every word, every story, to be saturated in Alaska, to be authentic. In many ways, a book can be an author's love letter sent out into the world. This book is a love letter about Alaska--and this love, this relationship, is full of paradoxes: complicated and sharp and dark and light-humoured and heart-lifting and heart-breaking and biting and tender. I would use the same terms to describe the relationships between the characters in the book as well.

BE: I agree, I read it as a 'love letter to Alaska' as well, even though the character's lives aren't always romantic, but very realistic. Your characters go through an awful lot over the course of the stories, was any of it difficult to write?MM: I did not want to romanticize the Alaskan wilderness or these characters and so I had to address brutality and violence. There were many parts of the book that were difficult to write because children were in danger. The story "Bite" was especially difficult for me to write for this reason. Also, while writing this book, these characters furnished my imagination, became beloved, and so placing them in harm's way or knowing they would harm each other was devastating. I remember, while writing "Some Other Animal," that imagining losing one's mother became overwhelming, the loss unfathomable. I have to be moved while writing a story for it to be any good and I think that is the only way I can know the reader might be moved as well.
There are also certain story structures that were especially challenging for me. For example, "Point MacKenzie," which includes the perspectives of five children, was maddening to write in terms of structure and emotional content. That story took intense concentration and a lot of time, but I knew the story had to include all five voices.

BE: Your stories are so wells structured-you obviously spend a lot of time on that aspect of your writing, which as a reader you forget because your work is so lyrical! I loved the sparseness of some of your prose, if that makes sense. I particularly enjoyed the five aspects in “Point MacKenzie”, as the voices of the children informed the story more. How do you go about building up the bricks of the story, do you start with the structure, or do you have phrases that you know you want to use already stashed away?MM: I thought, briefly, that I was going to be a poet when I was taking creative classes in college. But all my poems included narrative and then fiction took over. You might call my writing failed poetry or lyrical fiction. I enjoy writing toward a structure because my brain feels so scattered at times--structure allows me to unravel the tangled ball of odds and ends and find the overall narrative arc. But I'm glad you said that as a reader you forgot about the structure which means the story pulled you in. This is my goal. I want readers to come away from a story feeling a swell of emotion because they have connected with the characters, not "That was an interesting structure." I usually don't start with a structure in mind. I have to have a character's voice in my head, a point of view, or an image to write to when I start a story--as if I have to find the structure and rhythm of the line before I discover the structure of the scene and then the structure of the entire story. Sometimes I have a line of dialogue or an image stashed away, sometimes a moment, sometimes a strange map or running list of all of these things.

BE: Within the various storied there are clear links, stories told by different members of the same family or at different times in a person's life for example. One thing I really enjoyed was discovering different aspects throughout the different stories, for example in "The Last Great Alaskan Lumberjack Show", it is mentioned that when her husband proposed he made her go to the AA, this immediately made me remember in the earlier story "Miners and Trappers" where Gracie finds her brother Jack in the cabin her wanting to swig back the vodka. Do you have entire families’ histories in your head? I suppose what I'm asking is, is there room for a prose novel about the family?MM: The book could have been called a "novel-in-stories" because the stories are all linked together and cover three generations of one homesteading family. I do have entire family histories in my brain. At the beginning, I didn't know that I was writing a book about one entire family. But I kept returning to the characters and their lives and I will continue to return to them for future projects. So there is room for a novel, I believe, perhaps even a number of them.
BE: Good! I have to admit I completely fell in love with Gracie and Jack!
MM: Gracie and Jack were the first characters to take a hold of me—“The Weight of You” was really the start of this whole project

BE: One of my favourite things about the book was how accessible it was. I live in a city in England, and have never been fishing in my life and yet immediately became swept up in the Alaskan landscape and even the (very intricate) descriptions of fishing and the technical terms used didn't put me off the writing- what's the reception been like in Alaska amongst the people who it describes?
MM: The reception from my family and other Alaskans has been fantastic. I actually go up to Alaska in October for Alaska book week and will see more how it is received. But Anchorage Daily News and Alaska Dispatch did articles on me and the book when I was in Alaska fishing this summer and both reporters read the book and loved it and told me they were thrilled to read a book about Alaska that felt authentic. Alaskans are the true reader test for the book and it meant a lot to me that my family enjoyed the book and that press in Alaska had really connected with the stories.

Bear Down Bear North is out now


Happy Reading!


BookElf xxx

The Cry of the Go-Away Bird - A chat with Andrea Eames

A few weeks ago, after a glowing recommendation from a friend, I read 'The Cry of the Go Away Bird' by Andrea Eames.

This atmospheric book is set in Zimbabwe during the late 1990's, covering the increasingly volatile political and economic situation through the eyes of a young teenager - sorry, a young white teenager, Elise. Beautifully depicted, Eames lovingly recreates the Zimbabwe of her youth, and does not flinch from depicting the shadows beneath the light, the simmering hatreds and tensions that were bubbling under the surface.

Elise and her mother move from a rural area to the city of Harare within the first chapters of the book, marking the end of Elise's idyllic childhood, and some of her naivety.

Their relocation to a farm on the outskirts of the capital city, forces Elise to become more aware of her surroundings - to grow up - and to amend her limited view of the world around her. 

From childish games, and obsessions with spirits and dreams; she wakes up to a world where increasingly you are judged, not on the content of your character, but on the colour of your skin (to reverse a Dr Martin Luther King Jr quote).

As a reader who happened to spend her formative years in Zimbabwe, I was intensely curious about this book - especially as this book starts at just the point I was leaving the country. After linking up on Twitter, Andrea was kind enough to agree to have a chat with me about her recently released book, Zimbabwe, and everything in between. 

As our 'q & a' rapidly degenerated into an enthusiastic conversation, it became impossible to capture everything that Andrea was saying word for word, but I hope that the sense of her thoughts comes through!

Andrea Eames

Andrea is no stranger to the written word. She has had various pieces published since her teen years, and has blogged for over four years (

Andrea's Blog). I asked her how she started. 

To be honest, I can't really remember a time when I wasn't writing. I love my blog - I think I'd go crazy without an outlet like this, a way to allow me to connect with people around the world, and share the things that are important to me. I'm very fortunate to be in this position where I can write and have it be so accessible. 

The relationships in the book feel very true to life - particularly the constantly changing one between Elise, Steve, and Elise's mother. In fact, the parental pair rapidly became my favourite characters, despite often speaking and acting in the most selfish of ways. 

Oh I am glad. Steve was one of my favourites also. I think that he sometimes gets short shrift, but as a character he had the unfortunate task of being the perfect vehicle to say the stereotypical and - out of context/understanding of the way things were at the time - racist things that needed to be voiced by a white farmer at the time for the story to progress. But I thought that he was very warm, a very decent man, and one who really stepped up with regards to Elise.  

I felt that her mother experienced the most growth and evolution throughout the book. Presumably you borrowed from various Zimbabwean women, though I imagine that there are elements of your mother there too. 

Oh definitely, though this isn't *my* story, there are certainly several incidents that came straight out of my own life. So all the characters in the book are ones that grew out of the people that I knew. I'd love to say that I consciously placed certain real life characteristics into the people that I wrote, but to be honest, it was trial and error...and fluke...that it worked out the way it did, that the people I created behaved the way they did. I really didn't plan it that way. 

And with regards to the character of Elise's mother, there seem to be certain inevitability's in her life.

Oh yeah. I think that there are parallels between her life and that of her parents, particularly when you think that at the time of the liberation war, Elise's grandparents made the decision to return to England. So both Elise and her mother were growing up during a time of conflict, they had a 'war time relationship' with their parents. Elise's mom is essentially reliving her parents lives. 

I was also aware, though again, this was subconscious, and not something that I actively decided to write, that it created a certain inevitability within the story - that people were almost fated to repeat the mistakes of the generation before them. I think that Elise's mother developed a lot over the course of the story.

Something that I think you captured particularly well was how, for people our age anyway, the race issue seemed to creep into Zimbabwean politics in the late 90's

It certainly felt that way to me. Looking back, there was a casual racism that was allowed to exist, allowed to feel comfortable and reasonable. A lot of people were of the opinion that the race issue was in the past, all over and done with. 

Mr Cooper represented to me the naivety of the established white community. It was so impossible to even think of all that happening again, and when politicians there started to blame 'the good old bad guys', people were blind to the implications. We all had such crazy comfortable lives that we totally failed to see the signs in front of us. So the blame game was allowed to simmer for a long time, until it provided camouflage, pushing under the carpet the fact that the white Zimbabweans had not been in charge of the country for some time. When the war vets began to appear it was very intimidating and as you said, felt like it came from nowhere. 

But for me, Zimbabwe was like a paradise. A doomed paradise.

It's a difficult book to describe really. I think of it having an anti-plot. The story *is* the country - the context -  rather than one particular characters life.

Oh you aren't wrong. That's actually been a consistent criticism of the book. There is no beginning, middle and end. All of the characters are controlled by events, rather than controlling them by their behaviours. I think in the book I describe it as individuals being sucked into a 'whole' - Elise went from being one person to being white, and nothing more. Their lives were disappearing into a wider picture. 

Structurally, there is almost a seasonal quality to the years passing. By the time I wrote about the riot scene in the school, I was trying to create an atmosphere that was closing in around them, a claustrophobia that was at once powerful and terrifying. 

It's also one of the reasons that Elise was positioned as an outsider. Her moving from her childhood home and 'second' mother had left her out of balance in her world, resulting in her being more of an observer than an active participant, a lens to the time. Even before the troubles begin, she is in unfamiliar surroundings, a stranger.

Moving away from the book itself for a moment, have you had any feedback from other Zimbabweans.

No! It's really bad. That's not a useful answer at all!

It hasn't been released there yet - it's going to be in April, and I'm really interested to hear from there, especially my Shona friends, and get their perspectives. 

The only Zimbabweans who have read it are friends, or family, or friends of friends or family! So they're all connected to me in some way, so I don't really have an external viewpoint.

But... 

Well, one or two have said that the book does resonate with them, so...

Earlier you noted that there are certain incidents that came straight out of your own life - I think that it's fair to say that the passport swap was definitely one of those incidents. How autobiographical is this story. 

The passports thing was pretty much as it was. An incredibly hard experience, really just...horrid, it displaced me. I look at the world, and see the events like natural disasters that shape it, but for me, there was no one giant traumatic event that changed everything, but even so the place that I grew up in was destroyed. It's really difficult to be coherent about it, I don't have any insights to offer or solutions. 

But as an autobiography, honestly, it isn't. This whole thing started off as a writing exercise, and it was my story. Once I realised that I wanted to write something more, it was completely re-worked. It's more like my own life provided the bare bones that I used as a starting point. I used some of my own life, but I also drew on other people that I knew, or things that I had read about or heard about in the community. 

How do you feel about going back?

It's really...a strange thing to think about. I can't imagine ever not going back, and I can't imagine ever not wanting to go back, but a few years ago, it was so painful that the moment that I left Zimbabwe, I tried to put it all behind me. It's almost as though I tried to forget, but the way it is, it's like Zimbabwe is such a huge part of who I am, the person that I am. A person can't just forget that. It's a warm living part of me.

Unfortunately, so many young, educated, talented and resourceful people - from all the races within Zimbabwe - left the country. Not because we wanted too, but because we had too. Young Zimbabweans have been left in limbo, exiled and displaced from their home. And the longer they are away...

I find it so hard to imagine going back and not seeing the people that were so important to me because they are elsewhere. It's a really hard one.

Just to go back to the book for a moment, I want to look at the character of Jonah for a moment. When he comes back, after Elise behaves despicably and causes his firing, for the funeral, I read that as an act of respect for a man who had been his friend. A friend of mine read it as an act of intimidation, demonstrating that he could be anywhere, even during a time of grief. 

Wow, that's so interesting. It's the thing about a book - you put it out into the world and people interpret it their own way. 

I think it's a totally valid perspective - I can see how it would look that way. 

For me though, it was a respectful thing. Jonah was a very mysterious character. For one thing, he is only ever seen from Elise's viewpoint, and her view of him is sinister and tinged with fear. She never understands him, so she never knows his motivations. This gave the reader a chance to view him without that veil.

Which leads me beautifully to one of the things that really stood out for me. At one point Elise says that it will always be them versus us. Was that truly how you saw it? Is that how you regard it now?

I don't think I ever felt that, but it felt to me how *she* would see it. I mean, that thought is at the moment when she is being forced to leave her home. I think that it is what she thought at that moment, but I also think it's likely to change down the line. 

Again, the writing of this was very instinctive, rather than analytical. I didn't necessarily plan out how things would go. It was a more amorphous process. I tried to capture the emotions.

Certainly there seems to be more hope for Zimbabwe now. I hope for Zimbabwe. You know, hope that the displaced may go home. Though I'd be lying if I didn't admit to certain concerns about whether everyone would be able to go back. 

Finally, I felt that this book had possibly started out as a cathartic exercise, but by the end felt that it was actually a poem, or a love letter to Zimbabwe. 

Well I'm just delighted to hear that! It was very important to me while I was writing it that I avoid taking any sort of stand. I didn't want this to be a revenge story, or a pity me one, or even a cathartic one. 

It's my acknowledgement of how much I love Zimbabwe. After being away for so long, this was my chance to immerse myself in Zimbabwe again - the sights and scents and sounds. I tried to reflect it honestly, because it's very important to me not to gloss over the difficult things. It's my history, my culture, I wanted to capture it, as it was.  

 THE GREY LOURIE - THE GO AWAY BIRD

   

The Cry of the Go Away Bird by Andrea Eames is available now from Harvill Secker, an imprint of Random House.