Literature

[reader]

From the BBC

The greatest summer novels ever written

It’s a season when normal rules are suspended and the temperature rises in more ways than one. So it’s no surprise that it inspires heady literature, writes Neil Armstrong.

Novelist Meg Rosoff has an indelible memory from a summer in the early 1970s. She was 16 and on holiday with her family on Martha’s Vineyard, off the coast of Massachusetts. She had met a boy who was also spending summer on the island, and she was mad about him.

“He would just show up and then we would go off at night to these completely deserted beaches,” recalls Rosoff. “It was the most romantic thing in the entire world. I remember us swimming late one night and then lying on our backs on the sand afterwards looking up at the sky which was suddenly full of shooting stars. It was the Perseid meteor shower, which happens every year, though I didn’t know it then. It just seemed like our personal miracle.”

Elements of the experience found their way into her new book, The Great Godden, a coming-of-age love story which spans a summer holiday in England, and is being marketed as a “summer novel”.

There might not be a special section for the classic summer novel in bookshops but there should be because, although its precise lineaments are slightly hazy, like something seen in the distance on a dog day in August, it’s definitely identifiable as a distinct genre, characterised by particular tropes.

For a book to be a classic summer novel, key plot points must occur during that season. If it’s a long, hot summer – the sort of summer no-one thought would ever end, the sort of summer during which time seems to stand still  –  so much the better. Because that’s the sort of summer during which the usual rules are suspended. People do things they wouldn’t normally do. All bets are off.

Ideally, there will be a love story – maybe young love, maybe unrequited – and possibly a sexual awakening. There is often a loss of innocence.

There should be a feeling of transition; one part of life’s journey is coming to an end. Nothing will ever be the same again. Often there is a sense of unreality, “the feeling of being in a dream” as Rumer Godden said of the real-life experience that inspired her classic of the genre, The Greengage Summer. And sometimes the story is told in the form of a recollection. The narrator is looking back with a twinge of wistfulness on the events of a summer long ago, the effects of which might still be rippling out. “I think the main appeal for this kind of novel lies in its ability to play into readers’ nostalgia,” says Waterstones fiction buyer, Bea Carvalho. “Most readers can relate to a long, lonely school break, a family holiday, or a summer romance.”

A summer novel doesn’t necessarily need all of these factors but it does need some. Examples might include LP Hartley’s The Go-Between, Alan Garner’s The Owl Service, or JL Carr’s A Month in the Country. “A classic example that springs to mind is André Aciman’s Call Me By Your Name which displays all of the tropes: the beautiful summer setting, the sexual awakening, the brilliant sense of nostalgia,” says Carvalho. Ian McEwan’s Atonement – heavily influenced by The Go-Between – sneaks in because of its first part, set on an oppressively sultry day in the middle of a heatwave.

Five all-time summer classics

The Go-Between by LP Hartley

In this mid-century British classic, the narrator remembers the hot, golden childhood summer, spent at his schoolmate’s family estate, when he helped facilitate an illicit romance.

The Greengage Summer by Rumer Godden

Two teenaged sisters of an English family holidaying in France fall in with a charming Englishman who is especially interested in the older of the pair.

The Owl Service by Alan Garner

An ancient myth threatens to repeat itself as cultures clash and adolescent tensions reach boiling point in a secluded Welsh valley.

The Magus by John Fowles

An arrogant English teacher working on a Greek island is caught up in an elaborate, theatrical game – or is it a psychological experiment?

Sag Harbor by Colson Whitehead

“There was summer, and then there was the rest of the time.” It’s 1985, and awkward, 15-year-old Benji is on vacation in the Hamptons, and intent on reinventing himself.

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https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20200717-what-makes-a-great-summer-novel

[reader]

From The Thai Enquirer

Review: Sunisa Manning’s ‘A Good True Thai’ is a timely novel

Every few years, it seems, Thailand is convulsed by the throes of protest. People fill the streets with waving flags, witty posters, and vicious slogans – sometimes directed at the powers that be, sometimes directed at fellow citizens.

Each time, the protests feel unique: the 2010 red-yellow shirt protests distinctive in their polarizing effect, the 1992 protests in their bloodiness, the 1973 protests in their unifying, national character, and the 1976 protests in their geopolitical resonance with the global Cold War.

The ‘newness’ of current protests is once again touted by the press: this is the first time we’ve seen open protest of the monarchy! Never before have students so young led protests! No Thai movement has embraced such a progressive agenda!

The protests are pivotal and it is the work of the press to capture what is so topical about them. On the other hand, it is the work of political scientists and novelists to reach for the deeper truths of any particular moment – to put into words the traces of frustrations, anguish, heartbreak, and hope.

Maybe the most remarkable thing about the current protests is not how new they are but just how much they have in common with ghosts of protests past.

In that sense, no book is timelier for the current political moment than Sunisa Manning’s ‘A Good True Thai.’

The book is a vibrant, captivating story about three students navigating the 1973 – 76 protests and brings to life a period that was equally tumultuous and equally pivotal for Thai politics.

Written long before the current protests exploded across the country, Manning paints a vivid portrait of a nation gripped with frustration at the tyranny of military dictatorship, of students unafraid of being deeply critical of the systems that created ‘Thainess’, the cross-generational and cross-class fractures of protest politics and, more than anything, the deeply human struggles that meet those willing to challenge the status quo.

The struggles are animated by the interpersonal tensions between the novel’s three main characters: Det, Lek and Chang. Det comes from a prominent family, his father the Minister of Education, and his mother a royal descendent with the title Mom Rajawongse. On the opposite end of the social spectrum, Chang grew up in the Khlong Toey slums, living with his single mother who is a factory worker in a leather handbag factory. Lek rounds out their trio, a sharp, beautiful Chinese immigrant and scholarship kid with a passion for literature.

Det and Chang become best friends at officer training camp. In Thailand, the military still facilitates the few spaces in Thailand where the rich and poor meet – at ror dor, on draft day. Despite – or because – of this, they are spaces laden with class tension and caste-like privilege. Rattawut Lapcharoensap’s ‘Draft Day’ lays bare the tragedies of being poor in a Thailand where this means all the difference between a two-year conscription sentence and a get-out-of-jail-free card. For Det and Chang, however, the shared experience forges a friendship that forces both outside of their comfort zones. 

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https://www.thaienquirer.com/19241/review-sunisa-mannings-a-good-true-thai-is-a-timely-novel/

[reader]

From the BBC Culture / Books Section

Yukio Mishima: The strange tale of Japan’s infamous novelist

This photograph – taken a few days before his death – shows Mishima with his loyal cadets (Credit: Getty Images)

By Thomas Graham

Standing on a balcony, as if on stage, the small, immaculate figure appeals to the army assembled below. The figure is Yukio Mishima, real name Kimitake Hiraoka. He was Japan’s most famous living novelist when, on 25 November 1970, he went to an army base in Tokyo, kidnapped the commander, had him assemble the garrison, then tried to start a coup. He railed against the US-backed state and constitution, berated the soldiers for their submissiveness and challenged them to return the Emperor to his pre-war position as living god and national leader. The audience, at first politely quiet, or just stunned into silence, soon drowned him out with jeers. Mishima stepped back inside and said: “I don’t think they heard me.” Then he knelt down and killed himself by seppuku, the Samurai’s ritual suicide.

Mishima’s death shocked the Japanese public. He was a literary celebrity, a macho and provocative but also rather ridiculous character, perhaps akin to Norman Mailer in the US, or Michel Houellebecq in today’s France. But what had seemed to be posturing had suddenly become very real. It was the morning of the opening of the 64th session of the Diet, Japan’s parliament, and the Emperor himself was present. The prime minister’s speech on the government agenda for the coming year was somewhat overshadowed. No one had died by seppuku since the last days of World War Two.

In 1949, Mishima arrived on Japan’s literary scene with Confessions of a Mask, a kind of autobiography, thinly veiled as a novel, that made him famous in his early twenties. It tells the story of a delicate, sensitive boy who is all but held captive by his grandmother. She is ill and he is made to nurse her. Rather than playing outside with other boys, he is confined with her for years in the sickly-sweet smelling darkness of her bedroom.

The boy’s mind develops in that room. Fantasy and reality are never quite separated; fantasy, the stronger twin, grows dominant. By the time the grandmother dies and the boy emerges, he has developed a fixation with roleplaying, with life as theatre. He cannot resist layering fantasies over life around him. Men and boys, especially muscular, straightforward ones, are assigned roles in his vivid, often violent daydreams. Meanwhile he obsesses over his own deviance and appearing normal. He learns how to play his own role: “The reluctant masquerade had begun.”

Confessions of a Mask continues up to the end of the boy’s adolescence, detailing the entwined evolution of his internal and external lives and his homosexual awakening. In many ways, it is the key to understanding Mishima’s later life and works. It reveals the roots of the aesthetic sensibility, so tied to his sexuality, which proved to be Mishima’s steering obsession. The narrator writes that he “sensuously accepted the creed of death that was popular during the war”, when conscription and self-sacrifice seemed certain and imminent, and indeed Mishima was forever fixated on the idea that beauty is most beautiful when it is transient – and above all on the cusp of destruction. This creed mingles with admiration for the male form, a form the frail narrator lacks, to produce fantasies of brave warriors and their bloody demises. This private world of “Night and Blood and Death” was filled with the “most sophisticated of cruelties and the most exquisite of crimes”, all recounted with a cool detachment.

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https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20201124-yukio-mishima-the-strange-tale-of-japans-infamous-novelist

 

 

[spoon]

I came upon this book titled "Thai for gay tourist" and wondering if anyone have read it. 

[vinapu]

Quite a literature I must say !

[Guest]

I had one lad ask for KY.   I pointed to the "Watson's Lubricant", branded only in English, despite it  being purchased in Thailand.    He took some considerable persuading before accepting that it was not antiseptic hand gel.

Meanwhile, I know of a couple of north Asian students who purchased lubricant early in the covid pandemic, when they were looking for antiseptic hand gel.  Despite very high proficiency in English.

I can see the benefits of learning the vocabulary.