As a huge international paperback publisher, Penguin inevitably possesses a massive back-list of titles which they own the rights to but can no longer expect to sell in significant numbers.
While promoting their newest acquisitions, their executives can be imagined looking at this back-list in impotent frustration and asking "How on earth are we going to re-ignite the public's interest in at least some of these?"
Last year they came up with the idea of re-issuing a handful of assorted books under the title Essential Asia. The scheme apparently worked well, and here now is their second set, seven books that they would like to have us believe are required reading on the fabled Orient.
Given that Penguin is in the business of publishing paperback editions of books other publishers have labored to commission, edit and promote in hardback, these items must rank as re-issues of re-issues. And seeing that they are retailing at around NT$300 a volume, they are not substantially cheaper than their original paperback predecessors.
Some people, though, will collect more or less anything, from Swatch watches to books like these. But the publishers can't be too upset at the observation that their first set inevitably bagged most of the real blockbusters.
Adeline Yen Mah's Falling Leaves on her abused Chinese childhood, Paul Theroux's Chinese rail travelogue Riding the Iron Rooster and early novel Saint Jack (set in Singapore), Iris Chang's historical reconstruction The Rape of Nanking, Colin Thubron's travel journal Behind the Wall, Alex Garland's teen novel The Beach, and two Gavin Young books, Slow Boats to China and In Search of Conrad -- these were all top-rank volumes that well deserved all the new sales Penguin's repackaging could win them.
This new list isn't quite as stellar, but it contains some good reading for all that.
Pride of place must go to the two novels by Hwee Hwee Tan, Foreign Bodies and Mammon Inc These are astonishingly good -- alert, funny, spot-on in their satiric humor, and relatively up-to-the-minute -- they were first published in 1997 and 2001 respectively.
Tan was brought up in Singapore, studied in the UK (at East Anglia and Oxford universities), and lived briefly in Holland. She now resides in celebrity splendor in New York, and well she deserves to.
Foreign Bodies is a youthful vehicle for the display of the author's caustically addictive observations on the places she knows best and despises most. Few books on Singapore, for instance, can have got closer to its soul than this one. "Nature ... after it's been dry cleaned, mass-produced and sold in shiny pink plastic vials" is one of her zestful mini-encapsulations of the city. Elsewhere a character describes himself as a "non-practicing atheist." Tan, in other words, is very smart and very funny.
The most remarkable feature of this re-issue, however, is that Penguin has opted to place on the front cover the Singapore Straits Times tight-lipped critical judgment -- "an impressive achievement." With the book's foray into child abuse, its hilarious analysis of why UK soccer is so popular in Southeast Asia (there's a version of Manchester United's fans magazine in Thai, apparently), and its many insights into youth culture on two continents, this is far better than that note of measured approval implies.
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