Glenda Larke

There’s a whole website up now to describe the insanity of the restricted/banned books issue. Do take a look here. This is so insanely ridiculous that one bookseller was prompted to mutter about Kafka, andI can see why.

The Malaysian Home Ministry (Kementarian Dalam Negeri) could not have found a better way to ridicule themselves, and their country, than this one. And the totally irrational decisions of their officers down in Johor have certainly made people wonder if they are on the take and will clear a book if they are paid under the table. After all it’s the only real reason most of us can think of for them to “restrict” (arbitarily forbid entry to, and confiscate without compensation) these books:

Well Women’s Sourcebook: Guide to Women’s Health and Wellness (The particular edition restricted has a large yellow daisy on the cover.)
Bali Style. (Publisher’s blurb reads: “A dazzling celebration of the traditional Balinese architecture, interiors, arts and crafts”)
The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey by Salman Rushdie. (As this is more a critical travelogue, I think it must be the author’s name that has aroused the ire of the Johor Thought-Policers. Perhaps reading the words “Salman Rushdie” is corrupting? Beware, you have just read it twice. You will never be the same again…)
Breastfeeding Your Baby. (There is a shocking pix on the cover. Maybe that is why it’s restricted. It shows a woman’s bare arm and shoulder as she looks down on her newborn. Or is it restricted because the baby appears as though it might possibly be naked?)

And that’s just four books from apparently endless lists of books.

Maybe the officers have the best personal libraries in the country? Maybe they need something to read to wile away the tedium before another consignment turns up for them to look at? Maybe one of their kids had a birthday coming up?
The whole thing is so ridiculous (and yet tragic) that we can only think of this kind of explanation, because there simply cannot be a rational way to explain banning a song book for 3 year olds – other than that they wanted a free book for their own kids. Especially when the officers or their Ministry refuses to give their own explanation.

[The Beauty of Chinese Yixing Teapots and the Finer Arts of Tea Drinking : pix courtesy of Amazon.com where you can read an extract to see why it is banned. Or maybe you can read the extract and NOT see why it was banned.]

This blog post is all true, or based on things I believe to be true. I just thought I would make this clear, because you are going to have trouble believing it.

Let’s go back a bit in time, to 1992. I am sitting on a large cardboard packing box on the wharf in the port of Tunis, North Africa. There’s a truck behind me with a container. The contents of the container have been unloaded and are piled up around me – boxes, furniture, all out household goods. We are moving to Tunisia from Austria.

It’s a hot day and the truck driver has been sitting on the wharf for seven days, guarding our load and eating packaged junk food because he dare not leave the truck unguarded. He hasn’t showered in a week…but there’s hope. Finally things are moving. The Tunisian customs men have arrived to check our things. I had chosen my seat judiciously; it contains the contents of our bar, which I thought might arouse some problems, this being an Islamic country even though they have their own vineyards…but they weren’t interested in that.

A customs officer points to a box and asks us to open it. It is full of books. He takes out the one on top. It is a coffee table book, a gift from someone who lived in Papua, and it portrays the face art of tribal people. The customs officer looks through the book, staring hard at the pictures. Luckily there are only faces and not penis adornment. Then he picks up the next book, which is a Malay dictionary. He stares at that a long time, puzzled by the language. How is he going to tell if it is worthy of being banned? He tries another book, I can’t remember which one. And then another. And another.

The sun is hot, and we are all wilting. My husband says, poker-faced, ‘We have six thousand books.” A slight exaggeration, but I translate it anyway for the customs men. My husband waves a hand at the many unopened boxes around us in illustration of his point. You can see the customs officer thinking – how the hell is he going to check for banned books when none of our library is in a language he can understand?

Finally he brightens. “Avez-vous un télécopieur?”
“Oiu,” says I. “Nous avons un télécopieur.”
“Get it out,” says he. “You cannot import a fax machine until it has been tested.”
So, after some rummaging, we extract the fax machine and, after much filling in of forms, we and the truck are on our way.

It is three months before we get the fax machine back, but that is another story.

Down in Johor they do things differently. Book distributors have to run their imports from Singapore through the officers of the Malaysian Ministry of Internal Affairs. And they have a remarkable system of “restricting” books they don’t like, which can be anything from most books by Salman Rushdie to the obviously subversive book pictured above, about the pornographic art of sipping tea while discussing terrorist subversion. Or something.

For a look at the list of books that one distributor had restricted, see here and read Raman’s comments here .

And if you want to laugh – or cry – here are just a few:

Robert Jordan’s “Knife of Dreams”
Lots of things with Religion/Sex/Gay in the title – we mustn’t be well informed on any of these things, of course. And that can mean everything from “Introduction to Islam”, to “Poems and Prayers for Children” (I’m not kidding, remember), or the Kama Sutra.
Anatomy for the Artist: The Dynamics of Human Form
Mao: A Life
Feel: Robbie Williams

Sigh. I wish they’d just take a dislike to fax machines instead. Subversive things, faxes.

First person writing has a long and illustrious history – from older classics like Dickens’s Great Expectations or R.L.Stevenson’s Treasure Island, to more modern classics such as Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, Kerouac’s On the Road, Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath or Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, to modern prize winners like Pierre’s Vernon God Little and, if I remember rightly, Martel’s Life of Pi. These are books that jumped into my mind as I am writing this – I hope I have remembered their first person PoV correctly! (If not, tell me.)

So it has come as quite a shock to me to realise – relatively recently – that there are a stack of people out there who simply won’t pick up a book written in the first person, on the apparent assumption that they won’t like it. Not just a few, but a surprisingly large percentage.

Now I can understand John Doe saying, “I don’t read chick-lit” or his wife Jane saying, “I don’t read Westerns”, on the grounds that there is a very good chance that they won’t like that particular genre. We all have our preferences. But the books within each of these genres have a lot in common within one another, and it is probably this commonality that John and Jane don’t like. John doesn’t like kiss and tell, Jane loathes horses and ranches.

But to say you won’t read something written in the first person kinda sounds to me like saying, “I don’t read books with red covers”. First person stories have only ONE thing in common – the first person viewpoint. To say you won’t like it, is to banish a slew of stories on every conceivable subject matter and theme, set anywhere on, or off, earth, many of them brilliantly written, and certainly not necessarily particularly simplistic or even linear. You can still have sub plots!

Would John and Jane also say they don’t like it when their friends tell them stories of what happened when they broke a leg mountain climbing and were then attacked by a bear / had a flaming row with their girlfriend only to be arrested for disturbing the peace / made a fortune on the stock exchange? All first person stories. We listen to first person stories all the time.

The reasons people give for not liking the first person written narration are often odd.
Take the “too linear” excuse. Yes, I agree, it can be linear, although there are ways of minimising this (see yesterday’s post). And if you look at many novels, you will find that they are often related from one point of view, the main third person character. Absolutely linear even though they use third person. A good example of this is (once again if I remember correctly) Challion’s Curse by Lois McMaster Bujold. As I recall, it didn’t waiver from the PoV of the main protagonist. A very popular book – and it could easily have been written in the first person. Wouldn’t have made a whit of difference to the story. And that doesn’t automatically make it a bad book.

So I don’t really understand the viewpoint of John and Jane. Not understanding is not why I am rethinking using the first person, though.

I am rethinking because, as a non-bestselling author, I cannot afford to have potential buyers browsing in a bookshop put the book down the moment they pick it up, on grounds that have nothing to do with quality of writing, or subject matter, or theme, or genre. I need readers, and it is just plain silly to put so many people off reading my work on the grounds of my choice of narrator. I don’t want to limit my reading public.

So, at least until I make it ‘big’ (when or if?), I am not going to write another book in the first person. Call me silly, if you like, but I’ve caved in to the exigency of earning a living from writing.

Things can grow large in the tropics.
Millipedes, for example, longer than my foot.
Or leaves. Yep, that is a single leaf. I always did wonder how one could be modest with a single figleaf. Now I know. You just have to choose the right leaf…

Just been told that the “in-store” date for The Shadow of Tyr (in Australia) is December 11th. In other words, in theory, you should be able to buy it for Xmas.

Sometimes, though, bookstores get snowed under with new stock at that time of the year, and it may be difficult to get them to open the box in their backroom. (Be kind to your bookseller at Christmas time, ok? Keep your harrassment to a minimum – confine it to my books. ;=). Better still, pre-order.)

And let me take this opportunity to remind you to buy books as presents, to ask for books as presents, to get Father Christmas to give books as presents, to fill your house and everybody else’s house with books, books, books…

And if you need a reason, read the previous post. Fiction makes for balanced, nicely behaved human beings!!