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.
Similarly, Mammon Inc allows the author to register her impressions -- equally apt and equally satiric -- of contemporary life in both Oxford and the fastest of New York's fast lanes.
Singapore features prominently in this collection generally. Nigel Barley's In the Footsteps of Stamford Raffles retraces the career of the Lion City's founding father, for instance. But Frank Owen's The Fall of Singapore is another matter.
Originally published in 1960, this book sounds the one sour note in the series. Its attitudes are unambiguously chauvinistic and anti-Japanese.
Instead of taking what would surely be the appropriate stance these days of historical neutrality, it instead demands to know why "the Japs" (a frequently repeated term) were allowed to overrun this jewel in the crown of the British Empire.
If this was in dubious taste in 1960, it is surely totally unacceptable today. This is one book Penguin should never have added to an otherwise commendable series.
There is nothing wrong with Simon Winchester's tour up the Yangtze, The River at the Centre of the World, first published in 1996. Winchester is a reliable, hard-working writer, and with its extended observations and historical digressions, this is acceptable reading, though with little of the skepticism of a Thubron or the elan of a Theroux.
And it's a mark of Paul Theroux's pervasive talent that even when he's not on top form he's still immensely entertaining. Included here is the novel he wrote to coincide with the handover of Hong Kong to China in 1997, Kowloon Tong. It's not one of his finest creations, much inferior to Hotel Hawaii, My Other Life and a string of others. But even so it captures many of the more insalubrious aspects of Hong Kong with what feels like effortless ease.
The list is completed with George Orwell's, Burmese Days, dating from 1934.
Orwell's reputation has fallen somewhat in recent years. With his over-plain style, his humdrum subject-matter, and his half-concealed self-righteousness, he's less compelling now than he was when the claims to invincibility of the political left (of which he was the hammer) were at their strongest. It became his fate to delineate, in two depressing masterpieces, the face of 20th century totalitarianism in its most loathsome form.
But he began life in the UK's colonial police force in Burma, and this first novel exposes the pretensions of the expatriate British in no uncertain terms. It remains less than "essential" reading, however. His single essay, A Hanging, in which a stray dog jumps up to lick the faces of both the condemned Burmese man and the be-medalled officials, damns human self-importance and role-playing, in Burma and anywhere else, far more effectively in just a few pages.
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