China’s Hong Kong has the rare privilege of being a book made extremely timely due to current events. The anti-extradition bill protests that have raged for months have made Hong Kong’s governance—normally interesting only to those that live in the city—a topic of global concern.
What exactly is a tourist? Briefly, it means someone who travels not for a particular purpose such as exploration, pilgrimage, missionary work or archaeology, but a person who does it for fun. Tourists may have specific places in mind or specific things they want to see, but the overall “purpose” of their travels is pleasure….
Japanese literature isn’t always neatly accommodated by the buckets often set out to categorize novels. Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police, about an island where entire classes of things, and the memories that go with them, just disappear, a state of affairs enforced by a malevolent and menacing special police force, could be placed in several…
A sentient rock tricked into a familial murder, a toilet wall reimaged as a stage for revolution, and a lowly maid’s spicy Indonesian dish reworked for terror are just some of the mischievous and engrossing tales recounted in Eka Kurniawan’s Kitchen Curse. Translated from the original Indonesian by Annie Tucker, Ben Anderson and others, the…
Krishan Kumar, who teaches sociology at the University of Virginia, is a child of empire. His parents lived in Lahore (then India) prior to the end of British rule and the subsequent partition that created the modern state of Pakistan. Kumar was himself born in Trinidad and Tobago, then part of the British Empire, and…
Readers from places other than India may need reminding the reference in the title of Manreet Sodhi Someshwar’s latest novel is taken not from Robert J Oppenheimer’s famous phrase describing the atomic bomb, but rather the Bhagavad Gita. This story of Niki Nalwa and her quest to find Jyot—a survivor of the 1947 Partition and…
Robert Macfarlane and Kathleen Jamie are the two most critically vaunted practitioners of the wildly fertile British publishing phenomenon known as “new nature writing”—though both reportedly resist that genre designation, and both are as much writers of history and human culture as of nature. Both explore these themes in similarly exquisite prose, but their tones…
We first meet Kazu Mori, the protagonist of award-winning Japanese author Yu Miri’s newly translated novel Tokyo Ueno Station, after his death. Unable to move fully into the afterlife, Mori seems condemned to merely observe his former abode, its visitors and its inhabitants. Through his eyes we learn about the park’s history as, variously, a…
While one might expect a text on linguistics from the title, An English Made in India is fact rather closer to travel-writing: no bad thing, for Kalpana Mohan in an engaging writer and the result is a pleasant and often erudite ramble around India. Along the way, she talks to school teachers in the hills,…
Despite the growing tensions between China and the West, one East-West relationship has endured with a continuing mutual fascination: that of Jews and Chinese, one increasingly reflected in literature and film. In particular, the story of the Shanghai Jewish refugees has enjoyed a resurgence over the past decade; Kirsty Manning’s novel, The Song of the…
It is tempting to label Rollan Seisenbayev’s The Dead Wander in the Desert as an early example of what has now been come to be known as “cli-fi” (“climate fiction”): the book’s central motif, after all, is the human-engineered collapse of the Aral Sea.
The first Hawaiians ran late. Sumner La Croix claims they first voyaged from the Society Islands around 1250 when Kublai Khan was a boy rather than, as some others have it, twelve centuries earlier while Christ was awaiting death and resurrection. Discovery fed flood, with the long century that followed bringing new waves of immigrants…
It requires an inventive streak to write extensively of a person whose known biography might only fill a few pages. This is the long shot taken in The Chinese Lady: Afong Moy in Early America, by historian Nancy E Davis, who refers to her as “the first Chinese woman to arrive in America.”
A compilation of reviews and other coverage in the past twelve months for Women in Translation month (August 2019): by author, translator and language. Click on the “link” symbol over each cover for the review, author, translator and publisher information.
This year Singapore celebrates its bicentennial, or rather, the 200th anniversary of the founding of the colonial city. Because of this milestone, there has been considerable soul-searching about the role of history in creating a people and WW2 naturally comes to mind. The war was not only one of the most traumatic episodes in the…