The Best Fiction from the Second Half of 2012

Before we get too far into 2013, and following on from my half-year round up, here’s what I thought worth reading fiction-wise in the second half of 2012:

Mission to Paris – Alan Furst – As ever Mr Furst is firing on all cylinders with his evocation of pre-WW2 Paris and a visiting Hollywood film star caught up in espionage. For my money Furst remains the preeminent spy writer with his always excellent evocation of pre-war Europe.

Toby’s Room – Pat Barker – Barker continues to milk the Great War generation. This one continues again themes she’s explored before – what the trenches did to that great and talented pre-war generation, the role of the Slade Art School in particular and here also weaving in the true story of the Slade students who sketched the horrific injuries that resulted from the conflict. Familiar ground and well trod but always readable.

Sweet Tooth – Ian McEwan – I’m hit and miss on McEwan – loved Atonement and others though Saturday remains for me the worst novel of recent years for its moronic depiction of working class Londoners. Still, here McEwan is on better ground with a back and forth spy story set in the 1970s – the recruitment scenes are by far the strongest.

The Girl on the Stairs – Louise Welsh – I’m a fan of Welsh, she is a master of the set scene as she showed in previous novels (see her antique traders in a Glasgow pub scene in Naming the Bones as a masterclass). Here she returns to Berlin, a city she’s written about before (all the grit of her native Glasgow but with a little more mysteriousness) for a tale that sees a British ex-pat caught up in Berlin’s past.

Dare Me – Megan Abott – I loved Abbott’s noir style books (and hope she does more) and The End of Everything. I then got to meet her and be on a panel with her in Adelaide this year and we got on like a house on fire. But I wasn’t overly convinced I’d like Dare Me – the tale of the shady and sordid goings on in a suburban American High School girls cheerleader team – a wee bit out of my scope of cultural references that! However, Abbott’s writing is so toght and great she carries you along and it’s another great book – about time Ms. Abbott won some awards I me thinks!

The Shameful Suicide of Winston Churchill – Peter Millar – a cracking, one sitting of a read. Counterfactual history with Churchill disgraced, London conquered by the Russians after WW2 and now a divided country (everything north of Bedford is sort of West Germany, everything south like the GDR) and London is divided into a West and East with those in the East stuck in a North Korean (and, naturally as this is London, Orwellian) state. But worms turn – very enjoyable.

Istanbul Passage – Joseph Kanon – Kanon is a massively popular writer but new to me. His just post-war Istanbul here is reminiscent of the Eric Ambler’s in his classic Journey into Fear. Spy goings-on allow for descriptive passages of the great city, the new Cold War mentality and one man’s largely accidental role in it.

NW – Zadie Smith – I inwardly groaned when I heard Smith’s new book was more North West London nostalgia, but it has to be admitted she does pull it off. She captures the character types and rhythms of the area brilliantly and interweaves the stories of a disparate group of inhabitants. Anyone who thought too much gadding about in New York has blunted Smith should read this.

The Harbour – Francesca Brill – the story of Emily Hahn and Charles Boxer retold in novel form. I wrote a slightly longer review of this and the problems with the Boxer as collaborator trope here.

Before the Poison – Peter Robinson – The creator of the Inspector Banks series (which I always note in my review of the pulps) writes a different sort of story. I haven’t much liked Robinson’s non-Banks work previously but this is a good story looking back on a woman’s mysterious life and with a little Singapore internment thrown in for good measure – hence a slightly longer review here.

The Melrose novels – Edward St Aubyn – it took me a while to get around to reading these books as I thought they’d be too much about posh people. They are, but they’re brilliantly written – Never Mind, Bad News and Some Hope. Patrick Melrose is at once witty and idiotic, stupid and clever, lovable and horrible.

A Chinoiserie Poem for Chinese New Year from WB Yeats

Chinese new year…snakes and all that malarky…but at China Rhyming it’s an excuse to print another Chinoiserie poem for you holiday delectation…..this time Mr WB Yeats and a snippet of Chinoiserie from his poem Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen, first published in 1921. You can read the whole thing here if you like.

Loie Fuller, the way, was a real dancer and a pioneer of modernist dance techniques in America and a big success in Paris. I’m not quite sure whether she actually had any Chinese dancers or danced in a Chinoiserie style but anyway…

When Loie Fuller’s Chinese dancers enwound 
A shining web, a floating ribbon of cloth, 
It seemed that a dragon of air 
Had fallen among dancers, had whirled them round 
Or hurried them off on its own furious path; 
So the platonic Year 
Whirls out new right and wrong, 
Whirls in the old instead; 
All men are dancers and their tread 
Goes to the barbarous clangour of a gong.

Recovering Lost Jewish Lives in China: Yiddish Tears on the Bubbling Well Road – HK Jewish Historical Society – 28/2/13

This event was originally planned for last December but unfortunately I had to cancel due to a family death and quick dash to London. However, the good people at the Jewish Historical Society of Hong Kong were kind enough to reschedule and now we’re on for 28th February….

Recovering Lost Jewish Lives in China: Yiddish Tears on the Bubbling Well Road

We are pleased to host a talk by author Paul French, who participated in the recent Hong Kong International Literary Festival where he presented his novel “Midnight in Old Peking”. While researching for this book, French came across some interesting stories, quite unrelated to his subject, which he felt deserved to be told. 

Hardoon, Sassoon, Kadoorie, Ezra… all familiar names whose histories are well documented, but what of those less dramatic Jewish lives, what of those Jews in China who remained largely anonymous or lived on the fringes, in the margins or among the underbelly?

This talk will focus on those Jews in China, lost but perhaps glimpsed in new research, including where they danced all night in the 1940s Shanghai Ghetto; how Eliza Shapera was trafficked from a Bessarabian shtetl to a Shanghai bordello — and then murdered; how Mr. Kahn ended up in the Russian-Jewish slum of Yang-I-Hutung in Peking; how Joe Farren ran away from Vienna’s Jewish ghetto, nearly became Shanghai’s biggest gangster and married Shanghai’s “Josephine Baker”; and why grown men cried when Lily Flohr (above) sang in Yiddish on the Bubbling Well Road.

Join us to hear Paul’s account of this fascinating part of our collective history.

Please note that visitors to the JCC are required to register at the Reception desk upon arrival.

Should you have any last-minute questions about the lecture, please call April on 9078-6155.

Talking Chinoiserie – The Langham London’s Artesian Bar

A few posts lately on various bits of Chinoisierie I keep coming across. I’ve known about the “Orientalist” Artesian Bar at the Langham on London’s Portland Place (which has won an award for the “world’s best bar”, for some time but only visited recently.It;’s called the “Artesian” as it’s built atop a 360 foot deep artesian well by the way. Former regulars with a taste for Chinoiserie such as Noel Coward and Wallis Simpson would have appreciated it.

Hachette’s Tarzan et les Chinois

Strolling second hand and antiquarian bookshops in Paris the other weekend I came across this 1939 edition of Tarzan et les Chinois – No.6 in Hachette’s Tarzan series of the late 1930. It’s not much of a tale I’m afraid but is beautifully drawn and illustrated by the American illustrator Hogarth Burne (1911-1996) who was best known for his work on the Tarzan series in the 1930s starting in 1936. There were several editions issued by Hachette in France (see second image below).

Ding – a one-man monologue based on the short story of the same name by Lao She – March 9th Beijing International Literary Festival

As regular readers will know last year I published Anne Witchard’s study of Lao She in London, and the modernist influences he received there, as the first book in the new Royal Asiatic Society Shanghai and Hong Kong University Press “China Monographs” series (two a year, and two more to come this year in the summer). This got me thinking that not enough people now read (especially in translation) Lao She’s excellent short stories. Without doubt Ding (1935) is Lao She’s most overtly high modernist short story directly referencing European modernism in its homage to Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). It seemed to me suitable for being converted into a short one-man monologue for an actor to take it to new audiences and also compliment Anne’s book.

And so we have the world premier of Ding, the monologue (please note that’s “monologue”, not “musical” – though Les Mis is doing OK I note!). My first theatrical outing darlings and I’m thrilled (I think you’re supposed to talk like that when you do anything linked to the theatre). As Anne is speaking on Lao She, London and Modernism at the Beijing International Literary Festival at the Beijing Bookworm that seemed a good time to launch the production – so March 9th it is. The good folk at the Bookworm (Alex Pearson and Kadi Hughes) have been wonderfully supportive, and the very talented Fabrizio Massini is directing the piece.

Tickets are now on sale for the debut performance of my adaptation of Ding, at the Bookworm on Saturday March 9th at 22:00 hours (how fringe is that!) For anyone in Beijing during the Festival I do hope you can get along – it’s a great story and hopefully my adaptation will do it at least some justice.The performance will follow on after a discussion about Lao She’s work and time in London with Anne Witchard and Alan Babbington-Smith, also at the Bookworm. Tickets for both events available only at The Bookworm. Box Office hours: 10am-9pm.

“Something’s not quite right about this version of Greece here in our New China… I’m a narrow chested Apollo!!” – Ding

Chinoiserie Pianos

Chinoiserie is getting everywhere these days though fascinatingly now increasingly less to appeal to the exotic fantasies of westerners and more to turn a buck from nouveau riche Chinese themselves. Witness 1066 Pianos who advertise regularly in magazines and newspapers to the rich and are currently touting new style Steinways, art-deco style pianos (quite nice) and the “Reborn Bluthner, in decorated Chinoiserie style with lacquer artcase”

Perhaps the Grandest Chinoiserie Party Ever – Paris, 1923

A strong candidate for the best Chinoiserie party ever? La Bal du Grand Prix in 1923 held at the Paris Opera. The creative director was Jean Gabriel Doumergue, it was the last event of the Paris season on the eve of the Grand Prix of the Longchamps racing meeting. Doumergue opted for the theme of the Far East in the 18^th century – tout Paris turned out in Chinoiserie costumes that linked Imperial China to the court of Versailles (after all Marie Antoinette was apparently fascinated by China and loved the Chinese tea the Chinese Emperor sent her). The staircase and walls were draped in black velvet to symbolise a night in the East – it then got a bit confused with Rajahs and Nautch girls mixed in with Chinese style ladies, Eunuchs and  the court of Versaillies and Louis XV with the ladies carried in by black men in African costume (further confusing things somewhat). Replica Indian and Chinese treasures were paraded through the venue and the final tableau, devised by Doumergue, was of the flora and birds of the Orient followed by floral cascades of chrysanthemums, orchids, pagodas, porcelain bridges, parasols, roses and water fountains. Women gilded their eyes to appear Chinese and painted their finger nails vermillion – at 2am a band came on and everyone fox-trotted till dawn. Bet that beats the last party you went to!