Betrayed

One of the first books I've read this year kind of surprised me, even though it wasn't light reading. Great début by Wiley Cash.

---

Hope in faith

When those we trust fail us

first published in The Star, 14 September 2012


I remember being aghast at stories of child abuse at the hands of religious figures. So it's no surprise that I found the premise of Wiley Cash's debut novel compelling: what happens when religious figures fail to live up to their ideals?

The novel was inspired by the tragic story of an autistic African American boy who'd been smothered during a healing service in Chicago in the United States. "I was bothered that a group of people, including the boy's mother, could stand by while something like that took place," said Cash in an interview.

A Land More Kind Than Home takes place in a small North Carolinian town populated by generally God-fearing townsfolk. Some of them, however, fear something else, too.

Elderly midwife Adelaide Lyle is haunted by the death and subsequent cover-up of the time a churchgoer dies during a snake-handling ritual presided over by the church's newest pastor, Carson Chambliss. The incident prompts her to take the children out of the church.

Despite her efforts, young Jess Hall's autistic older brother, Christopher, lovingly nicknamed "Stump" by his father, becomes the church's next victim as his mother stands by and does nothing. As the case unravels, this story of family, faith and secrets unfolds through the perspectives of three people.

There's Lyle who, as a young girl, survived what sounds like the 1918-19 global Spanish flu outbreak and helped bury a long-deceased relative. This fortitude helps her bear the secrets she has to hide but the weight would eventually prove too much. Too old to actively resist Chambliss's corruption of the church, she mostly watches from the sidelines.

Jess Hall, meanwhile, has to deal with his brother's death, which he feels somehow responsible for. The return of his grandfather Jimmy doesn't help. Instead, Jess retreats into the safety and comfort of memories of him and his brother, despite the adults' efforts to help him cope.

And we have Sheriff Clem Barefield, a survivor of his own family tragedy who has the unenviable task of battling small-town reticence and the church's code of silence to solve Stump's case. There's also a bit of unfinished business between him and Jimmy Hall.

Cash wanted to write the story of the failed Chicago faith healing, but he wasn't familiar with the city or the community. So the North Carolinian set the story in Madison County in his home state. "Once I did that, the story came alive; it became real."

And it did. Cash has done his research well, judging from how one is deeply immersed in the atmosphere of the town, with the sweet aroma from drying tobacco leaves at the Halls' farm and the "ain'ts" and double negatives in the locals' speech. In this day and age, such a stereotypical portrayal of a small American town may be frowned upon, even as one believes that such places still exist in that country, rotary dial phones and all.

We are shown how the decay of religion in a slice of the American heartland can affect its people. We feel the characters' pain, caused by alcoholism, domestic abuse and betrayal by those they trusted, as well as the plight of the lost searching for meaning or something to fill the void in their hearts.

We seethe at the seemingly aloof wickedness of those who prey upon the insecure and desperate to achieve power and influence. We are crushed, slowly, as we watch a family come apart. Even before the conclusion of this well-written novel, the slimy preacher will leave one more scar upon the lives of the protagonists.

Yet, the novel offers hope. Lyle still believes the church is the town's pivotal institution and that it will again be the beacon and safe haven it's meant to be.

"The living church is made of people," she says, "and it can grow sick and break just like people can, and sometimes churches can die just like people die. ... A church can be healed, and it can be saved like people can be saved."

We somehow find comfort in these words, even as we cringe at the on-air antics of today's Carson Chamblisses. And we hope that our religious institutions will eventually become a place more like home where those we trust with our lives – and souls – will never let us down.

---

A Land More Kind Than Home

Wiley Cash
Doubleday (2012)
306 pages
Fiction
ISBN: 978-0-857-52070-8

Induced Nostalgia

I'd gotten this book sometime back, but I can't remember if I put it into my reading list.

Was this a good book? Not really. Though it was reminiscent of a previous book, something about this one felt rushed.

---

Induced nostalgia

Don't dwell on the past

first published in The Star, 19 August 2012


For some, nostalgia is like a drug. In the United States, for instance, many are longing for the good old days. This nostalgia-as-drug metaphor is expanded and explored in Dan Simmons's novel Flashback, which takes place in what could be the mother-of-all-post-apocalyptic-worlds.

About 20 years from now, global order is topsy-turvy. The United States, European Union and China have collapsed; Japan is run by clannish feudal families and oversees a new South-East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere; large swathes of Israel are uninhabitable nuclear wastelands; and there's a Global Islamic Caliphate.

Also: the United States is several states short, Texas is a republic, and criminal elements comprising Hispanic gangs, Russian mafia and others are wreaking havoc.

Every (middle-class white) American's nightmare has come true, and over 80% of the population is seeking respite through flashback, a drug that lets its users mentally re-live the best moments of their lives. Contributing to the chaos are flash gangs, groups of miscreants who commit crimes and revisit them with the drug.

Disgraced police officer Nick Bottom (great name!) is a flashback addict who finds solace in the memories of his late wife. Embarrassingly, he's caught using the drug on video prior to a meeting with a client. So this client, a Japanese bigwig called Nakamura, sends his top goon with Bottom to make sure he does his job and keep him from going "under the flash". Nakamura wants the truth behind his son's death, a case Bottom investigated years ago.

Back home, Bottom's father-in-law receives an ominous warning to leave home over a flash gang's crime – a gang whose members include Bottom's estranged son, Val. Things get really hot when Val's gang ambushes and fails to kill a top Japanese diplomat. Son and grandfather go on the run, while Bottom learns, to his shock, that his late wife might be involved in the case he's now investigating. Old wounds are opened as Bottom gets to the bottom of the unsolved murder – and the murky beginnings of the American addiction to the past.

In Black Hills, Simmons suggests that that mankind's greed may eventually ruin the world. That happens, in a way, in Flashback. How it happened can be found in the book, but it's so tangled up with the other threads in the story, unravelling each thread for a better look can be tedious. About halfway through, you just don't care anymore.

The novel starts out slowly, exploring the Bottoms' background which nobody will eventually care about. About two-thirds into it, the pace accelerates because the book is running out of pages. Things start "falling into place" like Newton's apples at various points: A cellphone, some video footage, and bits of information from shady power-brokers reminiscent of James Bond villains, all build up to a plotline pile-up of an ending where the whole novel is supposed to – finally! – make sense ... but falls short of that.

Bottom's not even a protagonist in the true sense of the word. He feels more like a pawn in a very cluttered, ruined chessboard with mostly broken pieces.

It's hard to connect or relate to characters, whom I feel are less important than the world they're set in. The "eerily possible" scenario feels authentic, but the characters don't seem to belong there.

At first blush, and from the inclusion of a reading group guide, it looks as though Simmons is trying to do more than just entertain with this novel, despite his claim that, "hell, no!", Flashback does not state his political views. Why he wrote this book is explained in the guide, more or less, which leaves little room for a reviewer to come to his own conclusions.

But let me try.

Simmons' dystopia is America's nightmare, writ large. He's taken the fears of his fellow Americans, ramped it up to 25, and weaved it into what looks like a dystopian sci-fi thriller with a message: Stop dwelling in the past, face the pain of the present, and move on towards what could be a better future. And there's a lot of pain in the United States right now.

"You can't have life without pain," Simmons writes. "You can't have a future without pain. Being alive means having the strength to face pain and loss and to find something real through it and beyond it."

Great message, albeit one that's about 500 pages too long.

---

Flashback

Dan Simmons
Reagan Arthur (2011)
553 pages
Fiction
ISBN: 978-0-316-10198-1

Mrs Moorhouse's Longest Day

No idea why the paper thought this would make a better headline, but ... oh well.

Good book. Read it.

---

Make room on the shelf

This is a surprising debut that you’d do well to welcome into your home

first published in The Star, 10 August 2012


Like the TV series 24, which stretches a single day over 24 episodes, much of Anne Korkeakivi’s more-than-200-page novel about a diplomat’s wife with a troubled past chronicles the events of one day. It’s hard to count exactly how many days pass in it, though, with all the flashbacks spliced in between the main narrative.

In An Unexpected Guest, Clare, the Irish-American spouse of Edward Moorhouse, the British Minister in Paris, is making preparations for dinner at their Residence, and she needs to help her husband make a good impression. So she taps her skills as hostess, mediator and procurer of fine ingredients to make the occasion great.

Earlier, she had discovered that Edward may be posted to Dublin next as an ambassador, a place that holds memories for her from 20 years ago – memories she’d rather forget.

Things get worse for her once she starts seeing a face in the crowd as she goes about her errands: Niall, an intense Irish lad who had got under her skin, mixed with a very wrong crowd and ended up dead ... but did he really die?

Struggling to hide her inner turmoil as her worst fears are confirmed, Clare also has to keep the peace between mercurial half-Swiss, half-Scottish chef Mathilde and the local help at the Residence, whom Clare is depending upon to make the dinner a hit. There’s also her son James, who has snuck over to Paris from boarding school in England. Later, Clare learns that a Turkish man she had earlier helped with directions has been arrested as a suspected political assassin.

In this novel, Paris is tense following trouble that ensued when French lawmakers discuss a bill that would criminalise denials of the Armenian massacres (1915-1917) that took place in Ottoman-ruled Turkey. In real life, this happened around 2006. This pegs the novel’s timeline within the post-9/11 era, which has seen incidents the likes of the infamous 7/7 attacks in London and the recent Hat Yai incidents in Thailand. Which is why, a), Clare feels exceptionally haunted by her time in Ireland and fears for the safety of her son; and b), why readers will probably be able to empathise with her.

Steeped as it is in today’s tumultuous and sometimes violent political and ideological realities, the novel doesn’t preach peace or side with anyone, but instead uses the setting to bring into prominence the concerns of a mother who works in the diplomatic service. If it sounds real, it’s probably because Korkeakivi is also a mother and her own husband is with the United Nations.

Oh, no, not another 200-page-long diary entry disguised as a novel, you say? But Korkeakivi manages to pull it off, keeping things exciting enough so that we don’t get too bored. The story is well-crafted, and many little details that seem irrelevant, such as Clare’s poor grasp of numbers, become significant later. Several other loose ends are tied up as well, including the connection between young James’s problem and his mother’s own youth.

One little issue I had with the novel was the apparent rush to establish ties between Niall and Clare when they first met. It was hard to believe that the brusque, thick-skinned Niall could charm the caution out of a younger Clare with his rough manner and bonny blue eyes.

Given Korkeakivi’s impressive writing chops in fiction and non-fiction (she’s been published in such eminent publications as The Atlantic magazine, The Yale Review, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal), such a wonderful debut novel shouldn’t be a surprise. But what a surprise it is. Her “unexpected guest” should be made welcome on bookshelves everywhere.

---

An Unexpected Guest

Anne Korkeakivi
Little, Brown and Company (2012)
277 pages
Fiction
ISBN: 978-0-316-21266-3

Family Business

This book was great. That surprised me. And I didn't have to read the previous novels. My liking for this book doesn't really show in this review, and I didn't plan on writing so much about it. Once I started, however, I couldn't stop.

---

A dying breed of crook

first published in The Star, 27 May 2012


Apparently, Paramount Pictures had "allowed" the release of The Godfather Returns in 2004, the sequel to the original Godfather novel. But the next sequel, said to have been released without Paramount's knowledge in 2006 by the estate of Mario Puzo, reportedly didn't do so well.

Perhaps that's why Paramount, which claims it has rights over the Godfather franchise, sued to keep The Family Corleone, the "unauthorised" third book and possible bomb, from publication. Anthony Puzo, son of the late Mario and executor of his dad's estate, responded with a countersuit. A deal has since been struck to allow the book to be published, but nobody can be sure if there will be lasting peace between the two parties.

That's another book – or movie – by itself, but I'm talking about The Family Corleone today. It's a fine book, and it made me wonder if this legal battle is really about protecting the "legacy" of the franchise.

Set in the years 1933 to 1935, the prequel to The Godfather charts the rise of Vito Corleone from olive oil tauke to godfather of the New York crime families. A lot of this book also tells how Santino "Sonny" Corleone, Vito's impatient and reckless eldest son, came to follow in his father's footsteps.

Said to be adapted from unpublished material written by Puzo, it is divided into two "books" or arcs. "Mostro" (Monster) explores a bit about Vito and Sonny's pasts and how the latter, as a kid, came to know about his dad's other business. Years later, he's head of his own gang and shows how he's unlike his old man by robbing the liquor shipments of a powerful mob boss and selling the fruits of one such heist to the monster of this arc, the violent psychopath Luca Brasi.

The "Guerra" (War) arc kicks off soon after Vito finds out about Sonny's extracurricular activities, and that's when things get bloody for the Corleones and everybody else.

(I know some of you reading this online probably have or are going to open an extra window or tab with Wikipedia on, so I won't be telling you anything else about the plot. But I got help for the two Italian words from the glossary at the back. Thing is, 'bout half of 'em are swear words.)

The novel has a cinematic feel to it. Even the narration occasionally lapses into the informal lingo many of the characters use, lending it a certain warmth and familiarity.

Sprinklings of Italian add flavour to the delightfully engaging dialogue, from the Corleones' dinner table conversations and the salty, profanity-peppered exchanges between Sonny's gang members to the tense gangster round table conferences and "interrogation" sessions.

These guys are witty, charming and friendly. They can also pop your kneecaps or lop off your hands one heartbeat after you answer, "Oh, mother's fine, and the kid brother's in school, thanks for askin'." That being said, reading these guys lob racial epithets at each other, even in jest, can make one uncomfortable.

It's the closest you'll ever get to "watch" it, at least until the film adaptation comes out, if at all. Any other style wouldn't do.

Being what it is, there are some uncanny moments. At one point, Vito pays Luca Brasi a visit, seemingly unarmed and alone, and comes away unscathed. Several other characters escape death because of some unwritten code of honour or character quirk and stuff like that. But that's the stuff gangster movies – and novels – are made of.

Kudos goes to Ed Falco for his work on this novel. Incidentally, he's the uncle of Edith "Edie" Falco, who acted in The Sopranos, the TV series about an Italian-American mobster and his family.

I find myself thinking, though, whether the Mafia is still good grist for the fiction mill in the 21st century. What's the deal with mobster-inspired crime fiction, anyway?

So I look up a former chef turned author, who suggested in an essay that "...for purposes of fiction, organised criminality offers plenty of drama, ... plenty of situations in which characters find themselves in extreme circumstances with presumably difficult choices to make." Chef-Turned-Author also said that "All the real gangsters have seen The Godfather, One, Two, and maybe Three. They've seen Goodfellas. And these films made a powerful impression." No better seal of approval than that.

I suppose the kind of drama associated with the old-time gangsters offer writers opportunities to paint convincing psychological portraits of what would be complex characters that audiences can connect with. Another appealing aspect of such works, goes another school of thought, is the notion of honour. One tends to believe that it's Vito Corleone's conduct that inspires his capos' loyalty to him, a valuable asset in the long run. Who wouldn't want to work for a boss like that? Or be a boss like that?

But the Corleones' era seems to be over. And there are more bad guys out there now: religious fanatics, computer hackers, evil scientists, ecoterrorists and maybe even rogue Wall Street elements, plus a new breed of gangster who's all about bling, turf and power, and not much else.

Though some may feel that the novel's release is just business for the Puzos, I'd like to think that it has emerged as one last encore by the titular family whose on-screen exploits will, perhaps, forever remain legend. And what an encore it is.

Viva i Corleone.

---

The Family Corleone

Ed Falco
Grand Central Publishing (May 2012)
436 pages
Fiction
ISBN: 978-1-4555-1616-2

A Roast To Toast

This article was originally a blog post that languished in the drafts pool since the end of March. Which may explain the minute omissions of one or two details, such as the actual business hours (listed at the bottom) and that it costs RM1 to swap the milk with Bonsoy.

---

A roast to toast

The welcoming vibes at this neighbourhood café keep 'em coming back

first published in The Star, 21 April 2012


"Starbucks with sarongs" is not how I would describe Artisan Roast TTDI. But it's satisfactory enough as an introduction. I'm not even sure the staff wear sarongs all the time these days.

Two things to note when entering: ambience and aroma.
Welcome to Artisan Roast TTDI.

My first visit to Artisan Roast was an adventure. I almost got lost.

Part of a café concept founded in Scotland, Artisan Roast KL is owned by Michael Wilson and Amirah Mohd. Artisan Roast (AR) sources, roasts and packs its own beans and, back at its old place at Yayasan Seni Berdaftar (along Persiaran Jalan Ritchie in KL), none of their beverages were priced above RM10.

Talking to a customer are (at left) Michael Wilson and Amirah
who run Artisan Roast

The fresh, fragrant brews, made from freshly ground Brazilian Carmo beans, needed no sweetening, either. Even after the coffee had cooled way down, the thick lines of latte art and the foam they sat on held firm.

The coffee was good. The atmosphere was good. But we never went back. Nor could we.

As it's often the case these days, the news came from Facebook.

Artisan Roast was moving.

Its new digs at Taman Tun Dr Ismail are bigger, better equipped and more comfortable, being air conditioned and all. With a proper kitchen, meals and other stuff can be made from scratch as advertised. Located next to the big Maybank branch on Lorong Rahim Kajai 14, TTDI's well-known nightspot strip, it was easy to find - unlike parking.

Light reading at Artisan Roast TTDI

And unlike the old days when it was in YSB, Artisan Roast TTDI has a larger, steadier clientèle. Good, because the place needs the business.

However, gone are the serenity, open spaces and clean air. Will it become a victim of its own success as the crowd swells?

In keeping with the artisanal vibe of the brand, AR's interior has fewer polished lines and surfaces than most modern cafés. Tall benches and chairs and tables that are more like wooden beams emanate a bar-like feel. A nook of low tables and cushions at the back provides more space for family gatherings and meetings.

...Hmm. Definitely not Starbucks, then

Most of the walls are bare brick, save for some surfaces decorated with murals, some of which are half-finished. When the baristas get to work, expect half the room to smell real good.

Drinking coffee or tea here feels more natural. AR is essentially a bar for teetotallers. I was also told that some bar-goers in the area drop by for a caffeine jolt to help stretch their nights.

AR serves its own cakes, pastries, sandwiches and savoury muffins. But the a la carte menu is limited. At the moment, you can choose either eggs on toast or pancakes with caramelised bananas and whipped cream, sprinkled with cinnamon, both cooked from scratch. It's worth the wait. The menu is also evolving, bringing the promise of more scratch-kitchen yummies in the future.

Killer pancakes with ambrosial caramelised bananas.
Too much whipped cream, though.

Everything in the display chiller comes out from the kitchen as well. The Sicilian Apple Cake seems popular; one night I was there, they sold five slices within an hour.

Each rustic-looking slice looks like a cluster of apple cubes and sunflower or pumpkin seeds held together by a bit of cake sponge. I bet one slice of their Carrot Cake can improve your night vision straight away.

Other tasty treats include the Cheeeeeeeeese Cake which is worth every "E" and every sen you pay. I've found that The Zesty Lemon Slice goes particularly well with hot coffees. The Millionaire Shortbread was nice with its layer of chocolate and all, but my preferences lean towards hoi polloi shortbread.

See? "Cheeeeeeeeese Cake!" Count the "Es".

I shan't say much about their coffees. Crowds don't lie, they say. If you're curious about what they're serving, ask the barista. Beans that have had their turns in the hopper include Sumatra Mandheling, Rwandan Musasa, Ethiopian Yirgacheffe, El Salvadorean La Guachoca and those from Fazenda Lagoa do Morro in Brazil.

AR also serves Red Espresso, rooiboos tea that's prepared like espresso. The Red Latte is a great pick for caffeine-free nights - simply the most luxurious, sublime teh C kosong I've had. Another non-caffeine diversion is the Smoovie, AR's special concoction of banana, yoghurt and cinnamon. Those were the only ingredients I could taste.

Baristas at work

Nowadays, I spend at least a night or a weekend afternoon at AR, nursing one of their beverages for a while before washing it down with free filtered water. Prices are also reasonable: Most of their beverages go for between RM5 and RM10 and cakes/pastries are between RM2 to RM10. One can also pay a little more to go lactose-free with Bonsoy. Plus, the benefit of a (supposedly) cooler crowd.

But I miss the quiet. And playlist needs more tunes.

---

Artisan Roast TTDI

4, Lorong Rahim Kajai 14,
Taman Tun Dr Ismail

Daily, 7:30am (weekdays) or 8am (weekends) to midnight

+603-7733 6397

amirah@artisanroast.co.uk

Web site | Facebook page

Perils Of Possessiveness

In my defence, I did not write that title or standfirst. But the rest was all me. Not that it matters.

Maybe it was the psychological portraiture of the "mama's boy" that I didn't like, rather than the writing. The writing was fine.

---

Mama's boy

A prize-winning author gives us a sad sob story about a sad sack of a man

first published in The Star, 20 April 2012


I guess it's true what they say: classics, bestsellers and prize-winners are not for everybody.

Struggling past three chapters of this book felt like hacking through a dense bamboo thicket. The narrative is noisy, and I couldn't bring myself to care about the characters or the problems they faced. Maybe writing this in the voice of an emotional mama's boy wasn't a good idea.

In this edition of The Mirage, translated from the original Arabic published in 1948, the 1988 Nobel Prize for Literature winner Naguib Mahfouz (1911-2006) channels the voice of Kamil Ru'ba, who was raised by his mum. His mother, a powerful presence in his life, is dead and he's taken up the pen to deal with his issues.

Even before his life's story begins, we get a sense of the emotionally intense and confused, selfish and immature person Kamil is. His behaviour throughout the novel emphasises that perception. The places and times in his life just melt into the background in the heat of his pain, his neuroses, and his disappointments. Kamil's Egypt barely exists.

Scarred by the abuse and broken promises of his drunkard father, Kamil's mum becomes overly protective of him. His sheltered upbringing, naturally, does not prepare him for life's disappointments and nasty turns. He can't make friends. He's a below average student. He can't be trusted to live on his own. On top of that, it seems as though he's inherited his father's love for drink and melodrama.

But not everything he does ends badly at first. Though he successfully courts and marries his sweetheart, the relationship sours due to "medical complications", and for the umpteenth time his world starts crumbling. Then he meets and begins an affair with a woman called Inayat but little changes – until tragedy strikes.

If it is Mahfouz's intention to embody this dislikeable character in his writing and subject us to his misery until our psyche buckles, the author has succeeded beyond measure. One fights an overwhelming urge to grab Kamil and shake him until he falls apart in one's hands. He's a flawed man, son, sibling and husband and he's candid about that.

And how he rambles! He can go on and on about his favourite bones of contention, chewing until they break into pieces. Even so, some of his rants could've benefited from better paragraphing. Every time I was faced with an over-20-line block of text, I was so tempted to skip – and I did. And yet, I don't feel I've missed much.

So I didn't get a "happy" storyline in The Mirage. No matter. Life isn't all sugar and spice, and it's to Mahfouz's credit that he manages to present such a convincing if perturbing portrait of this broken man. (Kudos also to the translators, whom I'm sure worked real hard to bring this novel into the Anglosphere.)

Even so, it is hard to read, and harder still to feel sorry for such a character – which might not be the point of the novel. While some will be annoyed, others who can identify parts of themselves with the troubled protagonist will surely be discomfited.

At the end, we are not sure if it is possible for this fellow, with so few redeeming qualities, to find any happiness that doesn't eventually waver and vanish like a mirage in the desert. Perhaps we're better off not knowing. Or am I missing the whole point of this sob story?

---

The Mirage

Naguib Mahfouz
Anchor (February 2012)
480 pages
Fiction
ISBN: 978-0-307742582

Plated Perfection at Xenri D'Garden Terrace

Took a while for this to emerge after the actual dinner last month. I was characteristically worried if it would be okay. Seems to happen only when I write about high-end places.

I was so jittery, I had to confirm the names and spellings of the dishes and equipment with online research and the restaurant, while studiously avoiding the dozens of other reviews of the same venue.

Thought it would turn out okay but when the paper came out, oh my seafoodz, isn't that the sea fan mussel carpaccio, not the white trevally one?!

Also, the yuzu sorbet was actually part of the undefined "three-dessert course" that also consisted of a single mochi and two small slices of mango tempura. From this post I trimmed a little bit off the last sentence; Meltique beef is not more expensive than wagyu beef.

...I guess no matter how perfect the dining experience, writers can and will never truly do it justice. But never mind this imperfect piece. Pick a good day to indulge, call the number and make a booking. And check if you have seafood allergies.

All photos in the article and this post are courtesy of Xenri Group.

---

Plated perfection

Surrender yourself to the kaiseki experience at Xenri D'Garden Terrace and you'll see that Japanese food is more than just sushi and katsudons

first published in The Star, 17 March 2012


One of Melody's contacts had invited her out to lunch one day at Xenri D'Garden Terrace. It must have been some meal; she was virtually singing about it while tormenting me with a smartphone slideshow of the dishes. After hearing Melody ooh and aah over it for weeks, I finally took the leap to see what the fuss was all about, albeit with some misgivings.

We were going for a kaiseki dinner.

"Parfait" of Philadelphia
cream cheese, crabmeat,
tomato and avocado cubes

The word (literally, "gut stones") harkens to the days when Japanese Zen monks staved off hunger by warming their stomachs with heated stones in their robes. Today the name is bestowed to the multi-course dining concept synonymous with the Japanese ryokan experience.

Only the best seasonal ingredients within an inn's vicinity are used to create a series of small dishes. The aromas, flavours and textures of handpicked ingredients are artfully arranged and garnished to give diners a memorable experience.

By "memorable", I mean "expensive".

We arrived for dinner at slightly past 7pm. The public area, where the buffet lines were, was already full. We were ushered into a private nook befitting our "fine dining experience".

Though my companion and I were in no hurry, our orders took a while to arrive. I assumed the chef must have been bending over backwards for us in the kitchen. In Japan, chefs doing kaiseki are reputed to have an unforgivingly perfectionist streak.

Our meal arrived course by course. My appetiser, a single seared scallop, was firm and sweet, but I liked the luxuriously rich and thick sea urchin glaze it sat in even better. The "home made" seaweed caviar and sardine "biscuit" that garnished the scallop provided additional and interesting flavours and textures.

Seared scallop in sea urchin glaze with seaweed
"caviar" and sardine "biscuit"

From its meaty-pink freshness, I could tell that Melody's ocean trout was fine specimen of ocean goodness. Smoked with an apple-wood fire, poached and laid on a bed of asparagus shavings and drizzled with truffle oil, I stole a spoonful, only to be catapulted straight to heaven.

Smoked ocean trout with asparagus shavings,
drizzled with truffle oil

A good start, I thought, impatient for my next order. I didn't have to wait long. My carpaccio of white trevally (or striped jack) was dressed in an appetite-whetting honey vinaigrette. Paired with fresh firm shrimp, buttery avocado and luxuriously rich sea urchin, it was delectable. From the way Melody was wolfing down her sea fan mussel carpaccio, dressed in a tangy home-made apple sauce, I guessed it must have tasted as good as it looked, sitting prettily in the shell with a side of crunchy white fungus.

Braised wild duck confit

After such a stellar start, my expectations were sky high. Alas, my crab bisque, with an egg custard that trapped pieces of crabmeat at the bottom of the bowl, was just so-so; I much preferred the Melody's Pacific clam soup. I crushed one of the little beasts with my teeth and got a mouthful of clam essence - I could have swooned with pleasure. It was only course No. 2, and I was beginning to feel a little full. That was when I began to worry. Would we have enough room between us for what would follow?

My braised wild duck confit and Melody's braised Angus short ribs, dressed in a thick sauce made with Japanese burdock, assured us that we would make room. My slow-braised duck, accompanied by sweet little eggplants and meaty Portobello mushrooms, was so fall-off-the-bone tender, the meat would not stay on the fork.

We were truly stuffed by the time the three-dessert course rolled around. Melody couldn't finish her decadent warm chocolate soufflé, "royal" vanilla ice cream with several halved cherries drenched in a red wine sauce, although it was very good. Neither could I do full justice to my green tea tiramisu and "home made" (do the chefs live at the restaurant?) mango sorbet topped with honey-lemon jelly.

Perhaps the best part of a kaiseki meal is that you can never predict what you're getting. Even if it's a set menu, sometimes the chef throws in surprises. Midway through our meal, the chef impulsively slipped in a few additional items – we had come at a time when they were testing out new dishes, we were told.

We received, gratis, a bowl of firm glassine noodles made of arrowroot flour, kept cool with ice and dressed with the same apple sauce as the mussel carpaccio; a "parfait" consisting of layers of Philadelphia cream cheese, crabmeat, tomato and avocado cubes; and a yuzu sorbet, served with its zest. The tangy citrus with floral notes commonly used in Japanese cuisine was, until my first spoonful, an ingredient I had only read about. For bringing just this flavour across the miles, Xenri has my eternal gratitude.

Time taken? Two hours. Damage? RM238. Satisfaction level? 100%.

In spite of my wallet-conscious dining habits, I am already planning a return and wondering what Xenri's irrepressible chefs will come up with the next. I'm certain they will make the old ryokan chefs proud.

Tip: The adventurous could also try the wagyu beef grill, essentially a hotplate on a hida konro (clay stove). Our waitress rubbed a lump of fatty beef on it, before searing the slices of mid-grade wagyu on it. Xenri plans to use Meltique beef (processed using a variation of the French larding technique) for this dish.

---

Xenri D'Garden Terrace

Lot No. 2-04, 2nd Floor
Podium Block, Menara Hap Seng
Jalan P Ramlee
50250 Kuala Lumpur

Pork-free

+603-2078 6688

Xenri Group (M) web site

Dear Mr Wolfgang Stockhausen...

First, let me thank you for your comments ("Amerigo's the man", 26 February 2012) regarding my review of Laurence Bergreen's Columbus: The Four Voyages.

Alas, I could only remember one reference Bergreen made to Vespucci in the book: near the end, where he states that the "New World" was named after the Florentine explorer. However, I can't recall if he explains how that came to be. I believe Bergreen was trying to keep his writings from straying too far from the book's central figure, so not much was mentioned about Amerigo Vespucci.

My wayward pen tends to run away when reviewing things, so I try to keep my piece within the perimeters of the book itself, and not the subject. Unfortunately, this also means that some salient points, such as the origins of America's name, are likely to escape notice. My thanks for pointing that out (this is why people should write to newspapers).

The German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller is believed to have named the new continent for Vespucci in 1507. By the time Waldseemüller had second thoughts, a large number of maps had been distributed with the name, so it stuck. I don't think it occurred to Vespucci to give his own name to the New World.

Nor was Columbus on the look-out for a new land mass. He'd promised his royal Spanish patrons the fabled riches of China, India and maybe Japan: gold, spices and the like. From the book, one feels his fear of failing to live up to their expectations as well as his own.

Although Bergreen suggests that Columbus may have eventually realised that he stumbled upon a whole new continent, others posit that the Genoan mariner died believing he'd reached the shores of Asia.


I'd written this reply about six days earlier and sent it to The Star first; they published it on 11 March 2012.

In this version, the second paragraph is restructured, and the last line in the fifth paragraph is removed.

When New World Changes Old, And Vice Versa

I don't have much to add to this review, other than the doubts I had about the "Mongol empire in ruins". A quick but much-belated check revealed that the Mongol Empire began breaking up around 1368, when the Yuan Dynasty fell and was replaced by the Ming Dynasty.

Now, we have the Internet, which not only informs us when an empire falls but can potentially facilitate the fall of empires. Misinformation, conquest, and war and all its inhumanities, however, are still with us.

---

Clash of civilisations

The shockwaves of Christopher Columbus's voyages of exploration and discovery five centuries ago still reverberate today

first published in The Star, 17 February 2012


The Christopher Columbus I read about in school was the famous explorer and navigator who discovered America. His image then was viewed through rose-tinted lens, his exploits written and spoken of in admiring tones.

Years later, I'm older, just a teeny bit wiser, and ready for the rest of the story. So thank you, Laurence Bergreen, for writing Columbus: The Four Voyages. This book appears to be an attempt to fill the gaps in the Columbus narrative and explore the darker side of the explorer's forays into parts of the Caribbean. It is dark, and bound to instil revulsion towards the behaviour of the Spaniards who would later hasten the demise of the Inca and Aztec empires.

Apart from the life story of Christopher Columbus, or Cristóbal Colón as he was known in Spain, the author also shows us what it was like in Genoa and Europe back then, thus providing historical context for everything else that followed: Columbus's voyages and the subsequent colonisation of the New World and the subjugation of its native populations. Bergreen also notes that other Genoans before Columbus tried – and failed – to sail across the Atlantic. And the reaction from those who heard about his research: "You mean he made four voyages?" Yes, he did.

The Genoan's idea to cross the Atlantic and arrive in the East was, from Bergreen's writings, a badly informed venture based on mostly unreliable accounts by the likes of Marco Polo and the polymath Ptolemy (c. 90–c. 168CE). By Columbus's time, the rule of the "Grand Khans" in China was long over and the Mongol empire lay in ruins. But he didn't know that.

They even added an image of the explorer, allegedly painted
by Venetian artist Sebastiano del Piombo (1485–1547). No
paintings of Columbus were made when he was alive, and no
one is sure if the guy here is ol' Chris. If he hadn't been
away most of the time...

Of course, the undertaking needed lots of resources. Failing to sell his idea to the king of Portugal, Columbus turned to the Spanish monarchs. His proposal, in short, was: Give me men, ships, and stuff, and a nice shiny title, and I'll bring back spices, gold and all manner of riches – and convert a few locals to Christianity. The self-styled "bearer of Christ" believed his was a holy enterprise. That belief was strengthened by the safe crossing of the Atlantic on his first voyage, and a few other strokes of luck in subsequent journeys to "the East".

But his luck and supposed divine protection was not foolproof. Though a masterful mariner and expert on the water, Columbus was rather clumsy on land and in politics. Many of the men who came with him to the New World on subsequent voyages behaved badly, to say the least. Columbus himself was accused of using torture to keep the peace and force the natives to bring him gold. News of his alleged mismanagement of the New World settlements reached Spain, and at the end of his third voyage, he was sent back in chains and stripped of his authority. After returning from his disastrous fourth and final voyage, he died in 1506, a physical and emotional wreck.

Bergreen has done a good job researching and writing Columbus. The facts practically turn the pages for the reader, though one could argue that it could also be the morbid fascination with people's bad behaviour. Even some of the "noble savages" exhibit varying degrees of political cunning, using their ties with the explorers to their advantage.

As for Columbus himself, sadly, I came away with an impression that he was a self-serving, delusional jerk with gold fever, who was not averse to the idea of enslaving the natives, even those who had been kind to him and his countrymen. The author uses several forms of the word "delusion" a few times.

Though Columbus may not have been the first to reach the Americas, he did make it public, triggering the massive and continuous influx of people to the Americas. A partial result of that is the world-shaping superpower that is today's United States. His name has been given to many roads, buildings, vessels, geographical features, and towns in that country. The native populations there, however, would probably have other opinions.

Bergreen's Four Voyages shouldn't be seen simply as an indictment of his subject's failures – as a governor or explorer of the East – but also a historical account of the consequences of empire, and how lofty goals and high moral grounds can never fully justify the damage done to the colonised in the name of religion, wealth and nation.

Even so, Columbus shouldn't be harshly judged for the times his conduct was less than exemplary. His fate depended on the successes he promised he would achieve upon crossing the Atlantic. If he didn't make it, well, who can say that a world unmarked by his voyages would be any better?


18/10/2014  About a week after this review was published, someone wrote to The Star in response to it. The paper published my reply not long after.

Another issue I felt I haven't explored was the 'true image' of Columbus in comparison with one Bartolomé de las Casas. But I think I'll let The Oatmeal handle that.

---

Columbus

The Four Voyages

Laurence Bergreen
Viking (2011)
417 pages
Non-fiction
ISBN: 978-0-670-02301-1

Sweeping, Colourful Yarn

It took a while, but it's finally out: the review of Luis Alberto Urrea's Queen of America. I was bummed at first to learn that it was another of those "sequel novels" but it turned out all right, even without reading the first book.

The way I wrote about the descriptions of food in the novel is a reference to the author's vivid, evocative storytelling, not about the topic. This is not a food book.

I don't know if they've modified or kept the standfirst in the print version, but I'm putting it in here.

...wait, did they uncensor the "b*****d" in my submitted copy?

---

Sweeping, colourful yarn

The "hummingbird's daughter" grows up and finds hope and heartbreak in a new country

first published in The Star, 29 January 2012


A controversial bill of law signed last year in the US state of Arizona, according to the Los Angeles Times newspaper, "bans schools from teaching classes that are designed for students of a particular ethnic group, promote resentment or advocate ethnic solidarity over treating pupils as individuals." As a result, schools in Tucson, Arizona also banned such titles as Rethinking Columbus: The Next 500 Years and William Shakespeare's The Tempest from classrooms.

And this book I'd just finished reading, would they ban this, too? I wonder.

Queen Of America is about Teresa Urrea (1873-1906), who was revered as the "Saint of Cabora" by Mexico's indigenous Mayo and Yaqui populations.

Her popularity with the Indians and the poor made the Mexican Government nervous and, after her exile, she came to the United States and briefly stayed in Clifton, Arizona, before embarking on a managed tour across some major US cities.

After a quarrel with her minders, Urrea (known as Teresita) cancelled her tour and went home to Clifton. She reportedly died of an illness in 1906 and is buried there.

This book is the sequel to The Hummingbird's Daughter, which chronicles Teresita's early life up to the moment she was exiled from Mexico.

Both were written by Luis Alberto Urrea, the 2005 Pulitzer Prize finalist for non-fiction and member of the Latino Literature Hall of Fame. Teresita, it seems, was the author's great-aunt.

In Queen Of America, Teresita and her father have fled to the United States. Trailing them are assassins, possibly hired by the Mexican regime at the time, as well as multitudes of pilgrims and people seeking healing. And reporters.

Her father, the now jobless and purposeless Tomás Urrea, is often drunk and depressed but Teresita, besieged by the sick and poor, has no patience for her dad's mood swings. Adopting a neutral position, the US Government won't accept the Urreas as citizens.

Tomas eventually puts down roots in Clifton. However, Teresita longs for more. She marries a stranger who turns out to be a bit – it was said – bonkers. Unable to go back home, she accepts an offer of a lift to San Francisco.

After healing someone there, her tour around America begins. She faces much of the same: needy people, curious Yanquis, doubting reporters, and strident critics – and finds a new love interest.

In this fictionalised retelling of her life, it's hinted that Teresita's powers are real.

The fictionalised story of Teresa Urrea, the "Saint of Cabora",
is told in these two books - the results of a total of over 20
years of research

Urrea blends history with fiction so well it's hard to tell whether an event is authentic or apocryphal.

You want to believe the salty correspondence between paper man Lauro Aguirre ("My Beloved Companion, You Degenerate Wretch, Tomás: Things are excellent in El Paso! Even a dissolute drunkard like yourself could be happy here.") and Tomás ("[Spanish bad word] Aguirre ... How it darkens my day whenever another letter from you arrives, you pretentious bastard.") actually happened. Spanish words in the narrative add flavour and Spanish swear words add spice. I chuckled upon spotting several of the latter – thank you, Anthony Bourdain.

Speaking of that celebrity chef, Bourdain of the descriptive prose: oh, the vivid, mouthwatering descriptions of food, of chillies rellenos "searing on the flame"; fried tortillas "awash in pico de gallo salsa and crushed avocado wedges with lime"; new things such as "los pancakes"; and even more tortillas, "lying like tawny magic carpets beneath the drooling eggs" along with "diced nopal cactus, melons, oranges, coffee, and watery milk". Don't read when hungry.

Urrea's painstakingly researched novel (six years worth; The Hummingbird's Daughter took 20) also explores Teresita's emotional tug of war between home and the heart.

Readers' hearts will break, little by little, as her hopes are dashed, raised a little, and dashed again in the rollercoaster of a life away from her father: her failed first marriage, the US tour, becoming a mother, and her father's passing.

Eventually, the novelty of her US roadshow wears off.

After the birth of her daughter, her second pregnancy and her father's death, the "queen of America" realises that she's the queen of nothing, and that everything she really wanted is everything she'd left behind. She returns home but not long afterwards, symptoms of her illness appear....

What a sweeping, frank and colourful yarn. Urrea's latest is a brave yet delicate effort that weaves his great-aunt's history into an entertaining yet touching non-hagiographic work that honours her life and times.

The new Arizona law might keep this book out of the state's schools, but at least one copy should find itself into everybody's hands.

At the risk of sounding stupid, through the flawed magic of Google Translate: Gracias por esta hermosa historia (thank you for this beautiful tale), Señor Urrea.

---

Queen of America

Luis Alberto Urrea
Little, Brown (2011)
491 pages
Fiction
ISBN: 978-0-316-18764-0

Another Red Future, Imagined

Probably my last book review for 2011. I not sure if I can call The Fat Years a "thriller", though. And so ends another year.

---

Red future

Hegemony and hope in an ascendant China

first published in The Star, 30 December 2011


With a tagline like "The notorious thriller they banned in China", a critique of China's ruling Communist Party is what you'd expect in these pages. But it's not exactly what you think.

Originally published as Shengshi: Zhongguo 2013 (loosely, "A Golden Age: China In 2013"), Chan Koonchung's work of speculative fiction was translated into English as The Fat Years. It starts "two years from now", ie after this novel's publication earlier this year. China has emerged ascendant from the aftermath of a global financial crisis. Some famous brands have fallen into Chinese hands, including Starbucks.

In one of the now Chinese-owned Wantwant Starbucks outlets, Old Chen, a former journalist, current author and resident of Happiness Village Number Two, is moved to tears by China's prosperity; some of those tears end up in his "great-tasting" Lychee Black Dragon Latté.

Earlier, his friend Fang Caodi pestered him for the umpteenth time about a missing February (yes, he means the month, the entire month). Big deal. Politically inconvenient timelines tend to disappear in China. That doesn't bother Old Chen – much. He's divorced, getting old and has writer's block.

Hope for his second spring in the country's golden age comes in the form of an old flame, Wei Xihong aka Little Xi. A former judge disillusioned by the system, she quit her job and eventually took the Raja Petra route (ie, she became a dissident blogger, for those who don't get the reference). Chen's search for her would put him on a course to unearth the truth behind the missing month, the details of which are only remembered very vaguely by several characters.

Born Fang Lijun, Fang Caodi is an asthmatic and jack-of-all-trades who returned to mainland China after years of wandering and renamed himself after an elementary school. Fellow asthmatic Zhang Dou, who was once a child slave, is now a wannabe guitarist. These two guys come to believe in the hand of the Chinese government behind this collective national amnesia.

Things come to a head one day when Zhang, Fang and Little Xi surprise Old Chen by pulling up to him in a black SUV with an unconscious government official bundled up at the back. Will he talk? And if he does, what will they learn?

The Fat Years describes so many things that are so close to home in modern China. Polemics for and against a totalitarian regime, its ideology and ruling elite are conveyed through the book's characters. However, it could do without the lengthy preface, which sort of gave the ending away. That and the translator's introduction pretty much summed up the novel for the casual book browser, who'd probably leave it on the shelf. Which would be a pity.

With its folksy narrative and dialogue and occasional bits of humour, The Fat Years is not stridently didactic about – nor a full-blown parody of – China's situation.

It's more about folks like Old Chen, Little Xi, Fang Caodi and Zhang Dou. Particularly Little Xi and Fang, whom the author considers among the many "incorrigible idealists" in China: "... the people languishing in prison or under government surveillance – human rights lawyers, political dissidents, ... public intellectuals, whistle-blowers...".

Despite the bad news in China (factory worker suicides, dodgy food manufacturers and callous drivers in horrifying hit-and-runs and so on), the presence of people like Little Xi and Fang gives others hope. That things aren't really all that bad, and that they will get better. That there are still people out there trying to make things better.

For me, the romance between Old Chen and Little Xi gives the book a bit of much-needed heart and gives us a glimpse of that hope. After Little Xi had gone into hiding, Old Chen tracks her down, but she refuses to see him, so they communicate through e-mails and comments in a forum thread.

Briefly, Old Chen's entreaties to Little Xi made netizens on both sides of the Taiwan Strait forget about politics to split hairs over the duo's online exchanges. Opinions differ, but they seem to agree about one thing: "Stop faffing around Little Xi, make up with Old Chen and everything will be okay!"

As the author puts it: "No society can afford to be without idealists – especially not contemporary China." After all, it can be argued that a bunch of idealists put China on the path it's treading today – and their job is far from done.

---

The Fat Years

Chan Koonchung
translated by Michael S Duke
preface by Julia Lovell
Doubleday (2011)
307 pages
Fiction
ISBN: 978-0-385-61918-9

Saving JFK

"Hot book!" they said, so I chiselled the review out of my glacial writer's block. But my speed record for reviewing David Sedaris's Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk - two days after reading - is still unbroken. And likely to remain that way.

I was initially worried that I wouldn't be able to appreciate the book due to my shallow understanding of Stephen King's body of work. The last - and only other - book of his I'd read was Pet Sematary, a terrifying tale of Indian graveyards and demon-possessed zombie pets (and people). In contrast, 11/22/63 is a different sort of animal, and it even ends... happily.

A little disappointed that no coupon was attached with it. RM87.90 is a bit steep, even if it's Stephen King.

---

Saving JFK

Stephen King's tale of time travel explores the possibilities in — and perils of — changing the past 'for the better'

first published in The Star, 09 December 2011


A rule of thumb I follow regarding books: If the author's name is bigger than the title, caveat emptor.

When the author is Stephen King, however, perhaps there is some justification. Even more so when the title is the word-less 11/22/63. That's Nov 22, 1963, the day John Fitzgerald Kennedy was shot. And yes, there is reason to be wary of this book – but only because it might get hold of you and never let go. The first time I opened it, I almost skipped lunch.

The much-anticipated novel about a time-travelling English teacher who inherits a dying man's quest to stop the assassination of the 35th US President pretty much lives up to the hype that has surrounded it since the publishing world first got an inkling about it.

Jake Epping is, in his own words, not a crying man. But an essay by one of his adult students, janitor Harry Dunning, manages to make him weep. It's not (just) the atrocious grammar and spelling. It was a horrific account of how, as a child, Dunning survived his father's drunken, murderous rampage that claimed the rest of his family.

Then he meets Al Templeton, the owner of a diner that has a portal to an exact time and date back in time: 11.58am, Sept 9, 1958. Who cares how the portal came to be, as long as Templeton gets to buy cheap, good-tasting, chemical- and hormone-free beef from the good old days. A sceptical Epping goes through the portal, and falls in love with the root beer he buys at a store – no preservatives, Templeton guesses. We never know if it's A&W's.

Of course there's a catch. On his shopping trips back in time, Templeton had toyed with the idea of changing American history by saving JFK. But Templeton gets cancer before he can do anything, and he's not sure when his time will be up, so he appoints Epping as the heir to his mission. But when Epping has second thoughts after his attempt to fix Dunning's future backfires, Templeton commits suicide. With the weight of a dead man's last wishes on his shoulders, our sentimental English teacher takes a seemingly permanent step into the past.

King is said to have done heaps of research for this book. Through the words of Epping, now George Amberson back in 1958, we experience the life of an ordinary American in the golden post WWII era. Much of the book really is about how Epping/Amberson adapts to and lives in the past, which he does perhaps a little too well. We look into his head, see through his eyes, hear with his ears.

The book tries to help us experience those days. Store signs, newspaper headlines and billboards are announced in capital letters and different fonts. Phonetic spelling of some words in the dialogue goad us to read them aloud. Go on, say "beer” the Maine way: "beeyah”. It's fun ... for the first two times. Yes, I heard about the Easter eggs, too. However, I could only spot references to The Shawshank Redemption and It in the pages; fans of King will undoubtedly find more.

It's quite some time to 1963, so Epping/Amberson passes the time by teaching at a school in Texas. And getting involved with its pretty, popular librarian, Sadie Dunhill. But it's only a matter of time before someone discovers the truth about him.

This is quite a good read despite the heavy American flavour, the long drawn-out build-up to the confrontation with JFK's assassin, and the shocking consequences that follow, not to mention the multi-font all-caps assault on the eyes. The boring and incredible parts where Epping/Amberson stalks Lee Harvey Oswald and the explanation of time travel physics barely register on the disbelief suspension scale. It's Stephen King, after all.

Wish I could say you can't put it down, but if you're reading the hardcover version, you'll have to or you might develop a cramp bearing the weight of this 840-page tome in your arms. Looks like King threw just about everything he'd researched into this book.

Hints at a yearning for a rose-tinted past echo throughout King's almost fairy tale-like depiction of the US half a century ago, calling to mind the Camelot myth spun around JFK not long after his death. Perhaps the question, "what if Kennedy survived?” is a yearning for a return to those days, when a charismatic young senator took the White House against all odds and, later, as president, faced up to a belligerent world power an ocean away under the shadow of a mushroom cloud – and won a desperate gamble.

Not only does today's US hardly resemble that storied Arthurian realm, its people might also be wistful about a return to Camelot. King's 11/22/63 gives us a tantalising peek at such a possibility, but also cautions us that it is perhaps better to let the past be and work on the now – and towards the future.

---

11/22/63

Stephen King
Scribner (2011)
849 pages (Hardcover)
Fiction
ISBN: 978-1-4516-2728-2

Like This! David Kirkpatrick's The Facebook Effect

I pounded this out rather quickly, but because the book was old (published last year), I wasn't sure if they would use it. ...I do sound a bit "optimistic" about Facebook in the review, don't I?

I know about Facebook's attitudes towards user data privacy, and how they slip some design tweaks under our noses and slap us in the face with others - not to mention the annoyances posed by other Facebook users. How many have abandoned SS Zuckerberg because of these? Not enough, it seems, as its user count continues to grow.

Let no one deny that Facebook is big now - and set to get bigger. Rumours of Facebook getting listed on the stock exchange next year has gotten investors excited; some really optimistic estimates say the company could be worth up to US$100 billion.

On the user front, the character limit on FB posts jumped from 500 to a little over 60,000 in just four months. PCMag.com did some math and gleefully concluded that one could share a whole novel in just nine posts, a boon to long-winded oversharing emo types everywhere - and a possible threat to blogging platforms. Somebody please tell me this is a hoax.

Watching the development of a juggernaut like Facebook must feel like watching the progress of a monster hurricane. One can't help but be fascinated and frightened at the same time. I wonder if this was how David Kirkpatrick felt as he did his research.

---

Like this!

This year's political upheavals, like the Arab Spring, that used social networking so effectively, prompts our reviewer to dig up and re-read a book published last year. He reckons it should be required reading for anyone who has a Facebook account.

first published in The Star, 02 December 2011


AS a Facebook user, I've wondered about the oodles of pages with titles that start with "One Million". Why this magic number?

If David Kirkpatrick, author of The Facebook Effect, can be believed, the number's story began in Columbia, South America, in 2008. Ticked off at a certain paramilitary group, Oscar Morales created the Facebook page, "One Million Voices Against FARC". The page morphed into a movement that eventually pushed an estimated 10 million demonstrators against FARC, a leftwing rebel group, onto Columbia's streets. FARC has since seen some of its greatest setbacks, including the rescue of former Colombian presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt after six years as a FARC hostage and, recently, the death of one of its leaders, Guillermo León Sáenz, aka Alfonso Cano.

The Facebook-spurred demos against FARC is used with great effect by Kirkpatrick to showcase the social network's ability to hook up and unite like-minded people in championing a particular cause. But The Facebook Effect does not just shed light on the mechanics of the social network in general. It's a peek under the hood and a look at the history of Facebook, now considered to be the social network.

A lot of the background information – warts and all – on the rise and rise of Facebook can be found, appropriately enough, online. However, Kirkpatrick, former senior editor for tech and the Internet at Fortune magazine, has dug a bit deeper and put it all together into what I'd consider to be the only book to read about the history of Facebook, its impact on the world, and where it might be headed in the future.

As such, it's meant to be mined by tech enthusiasts, students and anyone looking for offline sources on Facebook. Not for lazy Saturday afternoons in a rattan chair with a cocktail in hand – though I'm sure there are types out there who will feel differently.

To me, it reads like a modern-day fairy tale. I mean, who'd believe that a vanity platform for rating the "hotness" of Harvard students would one day evolve into something that can mobilise regime-toppling movements (read: Arab Spring).

One could say that Facebook is merely the latest front-end interface for a social network concept, ie, the Internet. We've used real-time chat programmes (ICQ, Orkut, Yahoo!Messenger and GChat), online journals (Wordpress, Blogger, Livejournal) and Facebook's predecessors (MySpace and Friendster) before. To me, the book suggests that none of the above have come quite as close as Facebook to being the "face" of the Internet. And in a few decades, if Zuckerberg keeps getting it right, they might talk about him like that other tech icon.

In an interview about the book, Kirkpatrick suggests that part of Facebook's success can be attributed to the Google-like bare-bones interface that also, "Kept the ads to the bare minimum, and what I think that did is, not only made it look cool and clean, it made people feel that, it could be for anyone and everyone. So it didn't have the feeling of just being for kids, it was so neutral that, anyone felt that they can use it and that has been the key to its growth."

Kirkpatrick has done a great job with The Facebook Effect. However, I feel no book or research paper can adequately describe, explain or demystify the energy that is the collective goodwill or outrage contained in this gargantuan hive-mind of over 800 million Netizens and its effects on governments, businesses, and how we make friends.

---

The Facebook Effect

David Kirkpatrick
Virgin Books (2010)
374 pages
Non-fiction
ISBN: 978-0-7535-2275-2

Under The Pear Tree

Nope, no long preamble for this. Not much I can add to the review, either. The covers, though...

---

Under the pear tree

There are exotic characters, tropical settings, intrigues and conflicts galore in these re-issues of the works of an author from a little-written about community.

first published in The Star, 13 November 2011

One of two books by the late Eurasian author Rex Anthony Shelley released by Marshall Cavendish in 2009 was The Shrimp People, a novel about Eurasians originally published in the 1990s. It was the first of what has been dubbed as Shelley's "Eurasian quartet". This year, Marshall Cavendish re-issued the three remaining books in this quartet: People Of The Pear Tree, Island In The Centre, and A River Of Roses.

So, why now? "Rex Shelley was an author whose works we felt a new generation could benefit from," said Chris Newson, general manager of Marshall Cavendish.

"We didn't want his books to be consigned only to the archives, and so decided to republish them with more contemporary covers."

It was said that no one else before Shelley had written so much about this particular demographic. In his own way, Shelley was the spokesman for his community, offering glimpses into the lives and history of Singapore's Eurasians through his works of historical fiction.

"It is all fiction," says the author in the preface. "But the settings are in real worlds of the past. I have tried to keep the facts generally correct."

And, lest we forget, there are many more components in our country's demographic makeup other than the oft-mentioned trio of Malay, Chinese and Indians. Because many of my generation would probably never learn about the Eurasians (or the Serani), Shelley's Eurasian quartet is the closest thing we have to a time capsule about a people and an era.


Thy surname is pear
People Of The Pear Tree is told largely from the viewpoint of the Perera family in the 1930s and 1940s. Augustine "Gus" Perera ("pear" in Portuguese) falls in with a bunch of British-backed Communist insurgents.

Gus's sister Anna is courted by Japanese army officer Junichiro Takanashi ("high pear" in Japanese) and later, becomes entangled in a love triangle of sorts when British guerrilla trainer John Pearson (see where this is going?) is drawn to her.

We are also introduced to Ah Keh, a Communist guerilla. He's the one who drags Gus into the Communists' anti-Japanese struggle and continues to be nothing but trouble to the Eurasian protagonists in the three books.

When the Japanese land in Singapore, a bunch of Singapore Eurasians, including the Pereras, are transplanted to a swampy malarial hell in Malaya, where nothing grows well and the living is hard. Then, the fighting starts....


Welcome to Singapore
Part diary and part narrative, Island In The Centre begins in the 1920s in Japan. A conversation among a bunch of human traffickers foreshadows the fates of village girls Yuriko Sasakawa and Hanako Ohara.

Meanwhile, electrician Tomio Nakajima writes in his diary: "Today the starting is. My English Diary. To help learning English language it is. But a English-learning book it is not. A life-details record it will be."

Posted to Singapore, Nakajima is dazzled by his new home, an "island in the centre" like himself ("naka" means middle, "jima" means island). His grammatically clumsy description of a Deepavali celebration is almost poetic.

Nakajima later saves Hanako from a brothel and marries her. But things get complicated when he embarks upon an affair with Eurasian hottie Victoria Viera who sells sports equipment (hey, don't look at me) and is also involved with Ah Keh.

With the imminent Japanese invasion of Singapore, Nakajima is roped in for intelligence work.

At this point, the timeline intersects with that of the previous novel, and we learn more about the events that led to Nakajima's fate.


Not all rosy
The last of Shelley's quartet, A River Of Roses, continues the story of our Eurasians from the previous books. It's the 1950s, and the Japanese have left.

Feisty 50something Philippa Rosario (Portuguese for "rosary", or rosa, ie, "rose" and rio, ie "river") is a junior college teacher and believer in the Chinese and Western zodiacs. A side story involves the past: the war, how Philippa and Vicky met, and a substantial chunk of backstory on Philippa's brother Antonio, all of which is inserted intermittently between the novel's current timeline.

It wouldn't surprise anyone to learn that Philippa is friends with Vicky Viera, sporting goods salesperson, and that Vicky is still carrying on with Ah Keh, who manages to drag our Eurasian teacher into an underground resistance movement.

Too bad our amateur zodiac reader couldn't see that Ah Keh is bad news, or that a love affair with a Kassim Selamat-type would end in tears....


Tantalisingly testing
Personally, I'm not sure how the Eurasian community would be served by a trio of novels that feel like a Latin American telenovela. The exotic, often lusty characters, tropical settings, familial and community intrigues and conflicts and all the Pereras, de Britos, Vieras, Rosarios....

And with all the supporting characters and the tangled skein that is whomever's family tree, it becomes hard to keep track of who's who. After some time, I just tossed my hands up and kept my nose on a few key characters.

Or you could get a paper and pen, which is so, so wrong. Novels shouldn't test you.

Also, there is nothing remarkable about the tone of the narrative, which is mostly descriptive and tends to rush the reader towards the rather abrupt endings. A River Of Roses, for instance, ends with one cul-de-sac of a conclusion.

I think there's more colour and character in the characters' dialogue. Perhaps this was the author's intent.

Don't be too shocked by the racist or bigoted statements, which were probably part of the times before political correctness became trendy. Though I didn't find them as outrageous as, say, the notion of adding grilled unagi to char koay teow....

Don't let all this stop you from picking up these three books, though. Until the next great Eurasian novel comes along, you won't find a better window into this community.

And don't worry, just take it slow, 'cause no one's going to test you.

---

People of the Pear Tree

Rex Shelley
Marshall Cavendish Editions (2011)
270 pages
Fiction
ISBN: 978-981-4346-24-5

Island in the Centre

Rex Shelley
Marshall Cavendish Editions (2011)
271 pages
Fiction
ISBN: 978-981-4346-25-2

A River of Roses

Rex Shelley
Marshall Cavendish Editions (2011)
471 pages
Fiction
ISBN: 978-981-4346-26-9

Plotting Marriage With Eugenides

Weeks ago, I jumped the gun at a quasi-review of this book. I wasn't impressed with it the first time around. A colleague's e-mail prompted another go at it. Though my overall verdict on the book hasn't changed, the book wasn't as bad as I first thought.

I'd only punched this out and submitted it several days ago. Didn't expect it to be out so quickly.

---

Love and marriage

Do they go together like a horse and carriage, as the old song would have it? Persevere through the many details in this exploration of the theme and you will find a good love story.

first published in The Star, 30 October 2011


The "marriage plot" categorises a storyline that typically centres on the courtship between a man and a woman and the obstacles faced by the potential couple on their way to the altar. You'll find it in the works of Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters, in most rom-coms and Bollywood productions.

But with the hallowed halls of the institution of marriage sullied by gender equality, rising divorce rates and the like, whither the marriage plot in modern times?

That's the question explored in a thesis by bookworm and Brown University English student Madeleine Hanna, the heroine of Jeffrey Eugenides's The Marriage Plot.

Though it's the 1980s, one of her lecturers has already, apparently, pronounced the marriage plot in literature more or less dead, except in places where traditional cultures are still strong. (A Malaysian might start thinking about rice mothers, mango trees and silk factories....)

Thing is, Maddy soon finds herself navigating a love triangle with two fellow students in a version of the trope she's studying.

Though he's the one who gets to hook up with Maddy, manic-depressive Leonard Bankhead's status as a fluffy grey ball of gloom threatens the relationship – again and again.

Her old friend Mitchell Grammaticus is a spiritual hippie-type who's immersed in Christian mysticism – and the idea that Maddy's destined to be his wife.

The Marriage Plot offers wit, humour and fine storytelling.

The author displays a certain degree of sensitivity for his subjects, who go through the usual painful motions of the young in love: sometimes happy, often funny, and at times heartbreaking.

But we get too much background on characters we don't care about.

For instance, do we need to know that Maddy's semiotics lecturer is a former English department renegade who's hygienically bald, has a seaman's moustache, wears wide-vale corduroys and has a reading list comprising Jacques Derrida, Umberto Eco and Roland Barthes?

By page 28, I was desperate for a drink of water and an open window.

But had I put down the book and never picked up again, I'd have missed out on some pretty good stuff.

Like the story of the mystery stain on Maddy's borrowed dress.

Why Maddy hooked up with Leo, the walking stormcloud. And how crazy Leo can get.

The drama that set Mitch and his friend Larry on their Big Fat Greek Adventure and Then Some.

The drama that is Mitch and Larry's Big Fat Greek Adventure and Then Some.

The realisation that hits you when Mitch asks Maddy if there's an Austen-esque book that ends happily, even if the girl doesn't end up with the right guy.

Mitch's time in Mother Teresa's Kalighat, the Home of the Pure Heart in India. And what sends him fleeing from there in a rickshaw, repeating the "Jesus Prayer" over and over again in his head. Oh, that bit was hilarious.

The author of Middlesex, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 2002 , seems to be having fun in attempting a smart and entertaining rewrite of the marriage plot for an era where the very definition and idea of marriage itself is being rewritten. A little too much fun, perhaps, as I feel the book is about 100 pages too long.

Throughout history, courtship and marriage are often tricky affairs. If anything, they should be simplified, rather than complicated. And, as Maddy would learn, no amount of reading can prepare anyone for the pitfalls.

Stripped of the reading lists and textbook extracts, The Marriage Plot is a good love story that would also translate well into a screenplay.

---

The Marriage Plot

Jeffrey Eugenides
Fourth Estate (2011)
360 pages
Fiction
ISBN: 978-0-00-744128-0

Not Quite Paradise

Overall, pleased with this, as I'd taken several days to draft and finalise it.

The title for this post was the original title of the piece; who knows why it was changed. Nor was the standfirst, shown below, used for the final versions. Perhaps I'm not obliged to provide either, but from my brief stint in journalism, both can be hard to come up with.

The review copy was not the one the bookstore wanted to promote, but the hardcover movie-poster version which you can buy online.

---

Tale of human courage

From above, the hidden valley seemed like the Garden of Eden. Then the plane went down...

first published in The Star, 28 August 2011


Once upon a time, the US media went nuts over the abduction and eventual rescue of one Private Jessica Lynch in Iraq in 2003. But hers was not the only dramatic one of a female soldier in American history.

Professor of journalism Mitchell Zuckoff was doing some research when he stumbled upon an article about a rescue operation that took place towards the end of World War II. He eventually came back to it, did some reading and leg work and put it all into a book.

Zuckoff's Lost In Shangri-la: A True Story Of Survival, Adventure, And The Most Incredible Rescue Mission Of World War II – breathe, soldier, breathe! – also features a female member of the US Armed Forces. Corporal Margaret Hastings of the Women's Army Corps (WAC) was part of the Far East Air Service Command (shortened to "Fee-Ask") based in Hollandia in the Dutch half of New Guinea (the island is now split into West Papua and Papua New Guinea). But the circumstances from which she needed rescue were quite different from Lynch's situation.

On May 13, 1945, Hastings and over 20 crew members and passengers boarded the Gremlin Special, a C-47 transport plane, for a sightseeing tour of a remote jungle valley surrounded by mountains. Colonel Ray Elsmore, also based in Hollandia, supposedly discovered this valley which was later dubbed "Shangri-La" by two war correspondents, George Lait and Harry Patterson. Sightseeing tours of Shangri-La, inhabited by supposedly savage, spear-wielding Stone Age tribes, became a treat for those stationed at Fee-Ask.

At that time, the only way into Shangri-La was by plane, which was a risky undertaking. Mists often hid nasty surprises for unwary or inexperienced pilots. On the day of the crash, Zuckoff writes, such a pilot may have been at the helm of the Gremlin Special. Of the passengers and crew, which included nine members of Hastings' WAC unit, only three would ultimately survive: First Lieutenant John McCollom, Tech Sergeant Kenneth Decker, and Hastings.

Though meant to be a journalistic record, this book feels a bit like a documentary or film. A series of events come together to form a credible historical narrative of not just the rescue and the profile of the key figures, but also of the natives, the valley and those who were there before, and the war raging around them.

Among other things, we learn of C. Earl Walter Jr and his Filipino-American paratroopers who were sent to rescue the three. We discover that Colonel Elsmore was not the first to discover Shangri-La, now called the Baliem Valley. We observe breathlessly as the daring rescue plan unfolds. We look on in horror as a drunk rogue filmmaker parachutes out of a plane. We are also given a glimpse of the lives and cultures of the Papuan natives, who are more than what the reporters say they are.

And as more and more Yankees and their allies pour into the valley, a whiff of danger arises as the natives' regional leader feels threatened by the foreign presence and begins plotting....

Just as it was in the tale of Jessica Lynch, Margaret Hastings is very much the heroine and pivotal figure here, even though other key figures are given more or less equal time. The book starts and ends with Hastings. She was even crowned "Queen of Shangri-La" by the press then, a title she would come to loathe. Another edition of this book, Lost In Shangri-la: Escape From Another World, is done up with a movie poster of a cover (pictured here) that rubs that fact in.

One could perhaps sigh at the author's apparent sexing up of a dramatic rescue operation by centring the whole thing on the attractive female survivor. But Zuckoff keeps the narrative chaste by sticking to the historical and journalistic aspects of the rescue. And there's lots of history, with bits of anthropology and anecdotal accounts. However, some attempts at philosophising, like how the act of war is more crucial to the natives' way of life than ours, sound laboured.

It could've been written with a bit more dramatic flair, but judging from the extensive bibliography, one supposes that the author may have been worn out by all the research he'd done – look at all those notes at the back!

Then again, perhaps not. Poignant, gritty, engaging and occasionally comic, Lost In Shangri-La can stand on its own as a compelling tale of human courage, camaraderie and survival without any embellishment.

---

Lost in Shangri-La

A True Story of Survival, Adventure, and the Most Incredible Rescue Mission of World War II

Mitchell Zuckoff
Harper (2011)
Non-fiction
384 pages
ISBN: 978-0-06-209358-5