Local heroes

Tash Aw was here in Silverfish Books to read from his latest (and third) book on February 23. Interestingly, Silverfish Books was the only bookshop he read at, although his KL tour was organised by MPH. Something like this would have been unthinkable just a year ago: an independent taking precedence over a mega-store. (But then, there are far fewer of those in the city now.) We believe Tash himself prefers to read in a cosy setting than in a 'supermarket aisle' of a big store, and he (apparently) told the organisers that. Still. Thank you, MPH, for giving us the privilege.

About 60 guests turned up to see and hear Tash Aw, and to get their books signed. We had received 30 RSVPs. (Many who said they were coming, didn't; and many who didn't say, came). It was a good session, and Tash e-mailed to say he enjoyed it. He wished he had more time, though.

Tash Aw and Tan Twan Eng (who was also present) are Malaysia's two leading writers on the international stage at the moment (they are having a pretty good run), both self-made, both living overseas much of their time. Tash Aw won the 2005 Whitbread First Novel Award, as well as the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Novel (Asia Pacific region). Tan Twan Eng was short-listed for the Booker and the Man Asian Literary Prize 2012.

It's tempting to think that only Malaysians who live and get published overseas are successful. There are some advantages to that, of course. More money for marketing and promotions. Better environment for writing. The downside: it's almost impossible to penetrate that world, it's tough, and most authors will last as long as the flavour on a ice-cream lolly.  The books will be remaindered and will turn up in BookXcess within two years, while authors are tossed aside like used Kleenex. It's brutal. The entire Anglo-American book industry (AABI) is run by accountants. It is an industry that shamelessly panders to the lowest common denominator (while others try to reach for the sky.) The AABI lives in a vacuum (no translations, please, we're English), although traditionally they have been the most open. There are, certainly, many extremely creative independent publishers there, but they are forced to play the game to survive. (Does anyone still remember Yang-May Ooi -- The Flame Tree, Mindgame?)

Writing whilst living in Malaysia is a drag (made even more difficult for people who want to become famous authors without reading). You'll have to work like a slave in your day job, you won't get rich , and write 'with a cat crawling on your back, while the whole city trembles in earthquake, bombardment, flood and fire'. (Apologies, Charles Bukowski). The upside: enough exciting happenings around here every day for anyone who wants to write (the cusp-of-history thing, so to speak); books have longer shelf life here; a good chance the books will be read in universities and colleges; you'd be a famous Malaysian writer for a much longer time -- you'd be at the beginning of the fame curve, not at the end of it; and you'd be writing about your own people, for your own people and not about an exotic non-existent stereotype for foreign consumption, which, at Silverfish Books, we call the New Orientalism, a sort of a literary Black and White Minstrel Show -- white people imitating black people imitating white people. (Is this what's called post-colonial in academese?)

Shih-Li Kow is a chemical engineer, now in real estate management, and a mom; Rozlan Mohd Noor is a HR consultant and a single dad; Iskandar Al-Bakri is a practicing lawyer; and between them they have appeared on five short- and long-lists of international awards since 2009. Not bad for galley slaves, huh? And when we speak of Malaysian writing, we cannot ignore those who write in Malay and Chinese. Malay fringe writing is quite vibrant at the moment, and exciting. One can't help but enjoy their enthusiasm and vibes when one is with them at one of their events. The same can't be said of 'classic' Malay writing, though. The ultra-defensive, incestuous, stand it has assumed does not augur well. Its refusal to absorb any outside influence, condemns it to be forever trapped in a 'bahtera cinta' spiral. (Indonesians are way past that.) As for works written in Chinese, we hear that its pretty cutting-edge, but that's from a secondary source.

All told, writing in Malaysia has had many springs in the last six decades or so, but the present one feels like it might stretch into a nice long summer, with more new local heroes.

Is reading dying?

I was sitting next to this lady during a dinner recently, who asked me what I did. When I replied that I was a publisher, she immediately wanted to know what genre. I said that it would be easier to list what I didn’t do: business and self-help.

“Oh, do you publish text books then?”
“No, that’s another specialised field.”
“What, then? Magazines?”

She had no clue about general publishing.

As a publisher and a bookseller I get this question often: how do I get my children to read? The obvious answer to that is another question: what do you read? Children imitate adults, and if parents read children are likely to as well (though not always – but that’s a different story). Ever heard the Malay proverb about a crab trying to teach his son to walk straight? (Some readers do emerge from non-reading families, influenced by peers, teachers, co-workers, etc.)

That little conversation with the lady next to me made me think. If one does not even know what books are …?! Certainly, this might be truer in Malaysia than elsewhere, but it’s still scary.

Second, I remember how, when I was young, books would be classified as ‘real books’ and ‘story books’: the former made you clever while the latter was little more than trash, and a waste of time not to mention money. Fortunately, I didn’t grow up in such a family, but a very large number of people still do, and (to many parents) reading ‘story books’ is useless, as in:

“Why are you wasting your time reading ‘story books’? You have your finals next year!”

Third, not only is reading difficult, it’s boring; and (worse still) it feels like work. Why would I want to punish myself?

How did I start reading? I grew up in a house full of books, and there were no restrictions on what I could read. Reading ‘adult’ books was a buzz. By the time I was fifteen, I had already read (unabridged editions) of Dickens, Dostoyevsky and DH Lawrence. (Not telling which book.) They made me feel clever and some of them were … er … quite entertaining!

I read mostly for entertainment, and I love the serendipitous nature of knowledge. But I understand, perfectly, the point of view of the non-reader.

Reading has been (and will always be) a minority activity, although, particularly since the eighties, with the advent of the celebrity author, reading has taken on a new dimension – glamour. It became chic (and smart) to be seen clutching the latest bestseller in public, although there were some titles I’d be too embarrassed to hold!

There has never been a period in the history of the world when so many people have been so totally bored out of their minds as the present time, and the entertainment industry has never had it so good. I read a report in Fortune magazine recently that in the US alone 216 million people played video games! Can you imagine the size of that industry? Then, there is the radio, television, internet, and the latest thing, social media. Boredom is big business. No, huge business.

Even as recently as the fifties, people were too busy staying alive (and, in many cases, dodging bullets, and bombs) to be bored. In places like India, Africa and China, a sixteen-year-old would have already started a family of his/her own. But people still wrote books (even in their bunkers) and many more read them.

Traditionally, reading (and writing) was the preoccupation of the elite and the gifted few. It still is. People, who are not reading now, would not have been readers then. There’s no point in complaining, “My son is spending all his time on video games.” In the sixties he’d be hiking, playing with marbles, tops and kites, or hunting fighting spiders, or ... whatever. I did all that, too, and still had the time to read. I guess it’s about inclinations. So, people, who don’t read, won’t read. Period.

But that does not mean we can’t make reading more pleasant for those who do. I got two new books recently that I was keen to read. The first was Silent House by Orhan Pamuk (Faber), and the other Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan (Jonathan Cape). I had read only the first page of both and my immediate reaction was, “WTF!”

Is there no one in Jonathan Cape who understands typography? Or is it that they simply don’t care, because McEwan will sell, anyway? No time? Someone slashed the budget? One of my favourite features of a traditional book is design and packaging. With that kind of page layout, one might as well buy an ebook, if that.

Books are beautiful objects readers like to collect. One only asks for publishers to treat them as such, and show readers some respect too, or they’ll start losing even those.

What happened to the ‘publisher’ as the ‘creative intermediary’? Every book must count. If stuffed-suits become impatient and leave, that would not be a bad thing.

Someone once said, there only good books and bad books. Let’s get back to basics, then.

To italicise, or not?

It is a trivial question, and most readers probably don’t care one way or the other, but if presented to a group of publishers, it could spark a debate that could rage for weeks and still not conclude.

The trivial question being considered now: is italicising non-English words (in an English text) like apologising?

Apologising for what? ‘Sorry, you don’t understand this word, it’s not in English. Nyeh, nyeh, nyeh …’

Or, ‘we’re so sorry for italicising this word, please accept our humble apologies, we really tried to find an English equivalent, we did, really, but we couldn’t find one, so please forgive us’

Or, ‘if you're Malaysian, or if you’ve been in the country long enough you should know this word. So we’re not going to italicise it for you, you moron!’

(The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) will be used as a yardstick for the following.)

In reality, the publisher (and the editor) is always in dilemma. Decades ago, books from England would have French and Latin phrases which were usually italicised – meaning, it you don’t understand this, it’s all right. Nowadays, one finds them more commonly in the non-italicised form. There was a book I read recently that did just that, and I thought, “You arrogant pompous, elitist jerk, I’m paying good money for this book, and you dare do this to me?”

More recently, many common Hindi words have started appearing without italics, especially in speech. “What yaar?” most readers will understand quite easily. Also, it’s in the OED. So also, would be words like “Wassalamualaikum” and “Insya’Allah”, etc, because they are quite common. (The second is in the OED, but not the first.) But what do you say when you see something like this: “Apna naseeb kabhi kisi ko mat becho?” Is the author saying, “If you can’t understand this, don’t read my book?” Well, give us more of that and we won’t! We won't buy it either.

So, the publisher treads a delicate path between arrogance and condescension.

Rambutan and durian wouldn’t need italics; these are words found in the OED. They are fruits and as long as it’s clear in the text, most readers will accept it. One writer translated ‘bachang’ as horse mango. Would anyone in Malaysia understand what horse mango is? Would anyone in the world? We’d leave it as bachang, but explain that it’s a fruit somehow. Would we italicise it? We’d probably not, although it’s not in the OED.

But, we will italicise terms like nasi lemak, and assam laksa; they are not in the OED. Also, it would be nice to tell our non-Malaysian readers not to sweat over it. Kampong is the normal spelling in English, and kampung in Malay, but both forms are found in the OED. So, no italics.

If our readers are all Malaysian, we think there is no need for italics at all. But if we are publishing to reach out to an international audience, then italics should not do too much harm. On the contrary, it might be helpful for the reader to know that he or she is looking at a foreign word, and that he or she may get past them with only a vague idea of what they mean, by putting squiggles on them.

To reiterate, most readers don’t care, as long they understand what the author is trying to say. One feels publishers and editors tend to over think this too much. They should pay attention to what’s important: the story and the flow.

I was at a mamak shop last week, and I asked him, “Tamil magazine iruka?” Although two out of three words in the sentence are English, the shopkeeper immediately knew from my speech pattern that I was speaking Tamil, and he replied likewise. Should that be written in prose as, “Tamil magazine iruka?” or, “Tamil magazine iruka?” Would a non-Tamil speaker understand?

Silverfish will continue to italicise some non-English words that are not found in the OED. And we’d do that without apology.

How to write rejection letters

A Silverfish author who was in the shop the other day, spoke of a mutual friend who wanted to submit a manuscript, but was afraid of rejection. Apparently, we have a reputation. Yes, it’s hard to live down a reputation of eating babies at breakfast, but this other person was someone we knew quite well, who had even asked if he could send us his work.

“Sure, send it to us. We’ll have a look at it,” we said. Obviously, that was not good enough. I suppose we could have said, “Yes, certainly, we’d love to publish 10,000 copies your work without even looking at it.”

Rejection is a deep-rooted primal fear. It’s like waiting for exam results, or college application, or driver’s license, only worse. When taking exams, one is either confident and well prepared, or nervous as hell. In the first case, anything less than a full-house ‘A’ will be failure, and in the second, anything better but a full-house ‘F’ would be a reason to celebrate.

But, in writing, something else seems to be at work. In our experience, a person who is nervous like hell, before submitting a manuscript, is probably someone who takes his/her work very seriously, and the chances are it will be quite good.  On the other hand, we have consistently found that the work of people who swagger in with their million-sellers are anything but.

Not good enough for Silverfish, it it?!  All my friends like it. It’s something we hear often, whenever we tell them that more work would be required for their book to work. In writing, it seems the sense of entitlement is inversely proportional to effort. (Move over, Isaac Newton.)

There are exceptions. There’s one Silverfish author who’d produce lovely pieces in relatively short bursts of energy, and be flabbergasted why the ones that took so much longer to write (up to 3 years) were rejected. Interestingly, the writer, although initially disappointed, re-read the pieces a few years later, and realised what was wrong with them, and was suitably embarrassed. What was I thinking?!

Time’s normally a good judge of writing. If one still likes what one wrote six months, or a year, or two years ago, it’s probably good, but if one hates it, that’s clear too. However, there is also the major problem of maya, of illusion; in which case nothing can be done, and publishers who dare reject manuscripts of those afflicted with maya will be called names and flamed on social media. It’s a though life.

Still, the rejection letter is a necessary evil of the profession. Here are some tips for writing them for new publishers.

RL1. “Thank you for your submission. Unfortunately, we find your novel unsuitable for our lists.”  This type of letter is the most common and the safest. It could mean anything or nothing. It could mean it’s the wrong genre, or the wrong sub-genre, the wrong sub-sub genre, the subject is too risqué, too political, too erotic, too gay, too straight, too long, too short, too good, too not-good-enough, too anything the writer wants to think and tell friends. Frankly, you don’t care, and you’re good. Follow-up questions for this type of RL are rare.

Be very careful with the second type of the RL. RL2. “Interesting, but we’re unable to publish it in it’s current form.” This is dangerous, and can be construed as acceptance, so use it judiciously. What one is saying is that rejection is not forever, and that the writer should try harder. Unfortunately, that’s not the message the writer receives. “Yippee, I’ve made it!” But use your discretion, a little encouragement is often helpful. If the second draft is a big improvement on the first, that’s good; you have judged him/her correctly. However, if it’s still not going anywhere, “Cut!” But on the other had, if it turns out to be a gem, you’ll be happy your in this business.

RL3. “Thank you for your submission. Unfortunately we do not publish [this genre]. Perhaps another publisher will be more helpful.” This is a (relatively) safe, until they find out that you have published similar works before, in which case talk fast. You'll have to lie, lie, lie, without telling him/her that he/she is not Pablo Neruda.

RL4. “Thank you for your submission. Unfortunately, we think its bad and you shouldn’t write anymore. Please stop. Also we think you’re ugly and so is your mother, and your baby, and all your children. In fact, from your writing, we think your entire family is ugly and dumb, not clever at all. So, stop, stop, stop! And save the world. My cat write’s better.”

No matter which RL you send, they will all sound like this to the recipient. As a publisher, you have no chance in hell.