'A VIEW FROM THIS BRIDGE'
Rebecca Carter is on holiday.
This post is written by Stuart Williams, Harvill Secker Editorial Director
Let’s take it for granted that you are an avid, engaged reader of the best contemporary international writing in English and in translation. You are, as fast-food chains charmingly denote their loyal customers, a ‘heavy-user’. Your homes will be librarynths, your leisure dominated by the twinned pleasures of silence and the written word (on which subject I urge you to read Tim Parks’ Teach us to Sit Still – just published to deservedly superb reviews). That The Book has endured unchanged for centuries is now remarked on with tedious regularity. But we live in interesting times. Two recent trips to America, the first last October and again this month, prompted me to wonder how many of you, a rough cross-section of readers of literary fiction, read your books as e-books?
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JULY'S BOOK OF THE MONTH
A Different Sky, Meira Chand
Singapore - a trading post where different lives jostle and mix. It is 1927, and three young people are starting to question whether this inbetween island can ever truly be their home. Mei Lan comes from a famous Chinese dynasty but yearns to free herself from its stifling traditions; ten-year-old Howard seethes at the indignities heaped on his fellow Eurasians by the colonial British; Raj, fresh off the boat from India, wants only to work hard and become a successful businessman. As the years pass, and the Second World War sweeps through the east, with the Japanese occupying Singapore, the three are thrown together in unexpected ways, and tested to breaking point.
Richly evocative, A Different Sky paints a scintillating panorama of thirty tumultuous years in Singapore’s history through the passions and struggles of characters the reader will find it hard to forget.
ARMCHAIR TRAVELLER: SINGAPORE
Novelist Meira Chand tells us why Singapore is only just developing a reading culture
As a nation Singapore is a little over 40 years old. Although today it is a stable and affluent oasis in a region known for corruption and instability, it is breathtaking to realize how recently it was something entirely other; a lawless, poverty-stricken country, with no sense of itself.
No more than a dot on the map of Asia, only 247 square miles (London by comparison is 659 square miles), the nation state of Singapore at the time of its independence had no natural resources, no agriculture and not enough water. The shadow of communism was everywhere and the larger part of its multiracial population had neither a bowl of rice a day to eat or a roof to shelter under. These things must be understood if one is to understand the way today’s Singaporeans read.
Education was the only road to survival. Doctors, teachers, engineers, lawyers, technicians etc were needed to establish a nation. The feeble, introverted output of such wasters as writers and artists, actors and poets, had no place in the new hard-working nation. Men and women who, left to their own devices, might have become writers or artists focused their energy on becoming doctors and lawyers, engineers and technicians. There was no time to dream, no time to waste and, dutifully, Singapore grew quickly in powerful ways. But along the road to prosperity it lost some part of its soul.
This is the dilemma of today’s Singapore, to regain its inventive soul, and it is not something easily achieved. Singapore’s bookshops are packed with customers, but a recent survey found most of them were buying self-help manuals and career-orientated books. Fiction, that dangerous elixir of emotions, had only a miniscule showing. Everyone was reading to educate themselves just as they had been instructed to do for 40 years; no one had time to read fiction, no one yet had time to dream, even though the miracle of transformation had been achieved and the streets were now paved with gold.
From its new state-of-the-art library building, Singapore’s National Library Board initiated an outreach project. ‘READ Singapore’ was modeled after the many ‘One City One Book’ reading initiatives around the world. For three months of the year, the city of Singapore would be encouraged to read novels and dream a little, to enter the minds of diverse writers and touch experiences beyond their everyday lives. Yet, Singapore being the multiracial city it is, always politically and correctly mindful of the various races and cultures that form its society, books had to be chosen from the full stratum of languages; English, Chinese, Malay and Tamil. This was done and READ Singapore is now in its seventh year.
Each year the number of people drawn into the initiative’s net has increased. READ Singapore has made efforts to reach diverse and unlikely communities to whom the alternative worlds entered through reading fiction may be something not willingly experienced before. Yet what is important is that a growing number of people are reading and meeting to discuss this new-found enjoyment in community centres, local libraries, schools or cafés; Chinese taxi drivers, prison inmates, Malay hairdressers, Tamil hospital nurses, hotel service staff and many more. Those who chose to read in the English language have now read and discussed Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, Dai Sijie’s Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, Jumpa Lahiri’s, The Namesake and Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s The Shadow of the Wind, to name but a few of the English language choices over the years.
The fact that the number of readers is growing annually with this outreach says something for the human need to enter the world of the imagination. Only in the imagination can one dream, and only through dreams can new vision be born. Slowly, hopefully, through this small reading initiative, Singaporeans are reclaiming a part of their lost soul.