Pan-Asian literary venture

Mukund Padmanabhan

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW—Summer 2008 No.8: Chris Wood-Editor-in-Chief; Pub. by Print Work Limited, 2710, Citibank Tower, 3 Garden Road, Central, Hong Kong. Hong Kong $ 99.

Ever since it was relaunched in 1979, Granta – the Cambridge undergraduate journal that was founded in 1889 – has redefined the look and feel of a literary magazine. Apart from new fiction and poetry, we have come to expect bits of reportage, analyses of current events, travel writing from places far and near, personal memoirs, and collections of photographs – all packaged together in the shape of a paperback.

For instance, the sporadically published Civil Lines – which was launched in 1994 and which based its erraticism on the ground that there was not enough new Indian writing in English to merit regularity – was modelled closely on Granta.

The Asia Literary Review, the new quarterly journal that has emerged from an earlier one called Dimsum, has a very similar feel. A good bit of the material in the Summer 2008 edition is on China, which you would expect of a publication based in Hong Kong, but there is enough to earn it its pan-Asian tag – among other things, writing and photographs from and on India, Nepal and Korea.

Like all such journals, it is a mixed bag, but the important thing is that some of it is indeed surprisingly good. Xu Xi’s story about a middle-aged editor of a journal who is aware of his eventual obsolescence even as his office struggles with a dated computer system is just one of the fine short stories in the book.

Among the other things of note is an interview with Salman Rushdie (which deals largely with his latest novel, The Enchantress of Florence); a piece on loss and longing as more and more Shangai gives itself up to real estate companies for its dizzyingly swift ‘reconstruction’; a set of pictures on Nepal before and just after the Maoists were elected to power; and a couple of very fine poems by Anuradha Vijaykrishnan, suffused with a soft affectionate lyricism.

You might have expected the Editor’s Note to make a mention of some of these contributions, but Chris Wood in his short preface refers to only two contributions – possibly because he believes they are the most important ones in the issue. These are Rob Gifford’s sad journey along the course of the Yellow River, the magnificent water body which, thanks to pollution and damming, has been “stopped dead” before it reaches the sea. And the poetic biography of the halmuhnee, Korean ‘comfort women’ who were brutalised by the Japanese Army during the Second World War – told in a language so raw, so stripped of artifice that it cannot fail to move you.

While Anne Enright’s essay is impossible to put down, what is it doing in this Asian inventory? The Writer and the Public, which recounts how winning the Booker Prize changed her life, is a wonderful read – extraordinarily honest and full of small revelations about fame and what it means for a writer’s persona. The only (very tenuous) justification for including this in the volume seems to be the fact that the essay, written as a lecture, was delivered in Hong Kong at a literary festival.

Asian literature is much too diverse and culturally distinct to be classed as a type or fitted into a category. But if the Asia Literary Review can maintain the standards it has set in this Summer edition, it would earn it the kind of broad-based appeal it is looking for and it well deserves.

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