Flesh

Flesh

By Khanh Ha

[The following review is part of the Flesh blog tour being organized by Historical Fiction Virtual Book Tours. This review also appear at the superbly excellent blog I Read A Book Once. For a full list of tour hosts, see the tour page.  For more information on Khanh Ha and his work, check out the author's website.]

I'm not an expert on the subject but I have noticed a shift in Asian historical fiction over the past decade or so. My first exposure to Asian literature tended to place an inordinate amount of emphasis on colonial powers. Whether intentional or accidental, it's hardly surprising that Asian literature would be colored by the regions tempestuous relationship with the domineering west, especially among writers writing in English, given the historical largesse that European power expansion had on the globe until well into the 1980s. Most (if not all) of the prominent Asian writers of the era were educated in the colonial education system. The end result were several generations worth of writers who examined their own culture as a reflection of a distant European culture. While the notion of colonialism was certainly one that deserved examination, it literally dominated the literature in a way that left very little room for other themes. In that sense, colonialism became the proverbial elephant in the bed for Asian writers.

However, as colonialism in Asia gradually recedes from the collective consciousness, we are presented with a second (and now third generation) of post post-colonial Asian literature (if this term is not yet coined, it's mine) come of age, there has been a sea change in the focus of literature from the Asian perspective. As a result of time and distance, colonialism has, mercifully, become less and less relevant as a theme in Asian literature. Asian writers are free to examine other, more organic experiences that have nothing to do with the White Man's Burden. Recent authors such as Jessica Hagedorn from the Philippines, Jeet Thayil from India and Amitav Ghosh from Bangladesh are just a sampling of the new wave of refreshingly innovative Asian writers on the current literary landscape.

If you are looking out for names to add to the growing list of skillful Asian writers, look no further than Khanh Ha. His debut novel, Flesh is a somber, brooding and grim exploration of revenge and moral responsibility in turn-of-the-century Annam (present day Vietnam). If debut novels are, in essence a declaration of an author's intent, then you could do a lot worse than pick up this interesting little novel by Khanh Ha.

Flesh is told from the perspective of Tai, a young Annamese boy who witnesses his father's execution for banditry in the opening pages of the book. Tai's family reclaims his father's body but not the head, which is sent to a neighboring village to be displayed. Tai makes it his own personal mission to reclaim his father's skull from the village and provide it and his father's body, according to East Asian tradition, with an auspicious resting place. This daunting mission takes Tai from his village to the city of Hanoi and under the wing of a wealthy Chinese businessman and becomes involved, both physically and psychologically, with a beautiful young woman from Yunnan.

Flesh is the quintessential story of revenge. At its heart it is a brutal tale about brutal people living brutal lives during a brutal time. But if all you take away from Flesh is its moodily executed story of revenge, you are only getting half the picture. At its core, Flesh is about coming of age and trying to be a good person and do the right thing in a world where the temptation to resort to crime and murder are all too common. Through Tai, we are exposed to a cruel and remorseless world of banditry, savagery and addiction. Tai walks the razor's edge of temptation on virtually every page of the novel and, like most people, succeeds as much as he fails in trying to be a decent human being along the way. In that respect, Flesh is as much a novel about humanity as it is about humanity's proclivities toward barbarity.

Ha's prose is dream-like and poetic. It has a lucid quality that, in it's better moments, adds volume and flair to the writing, though in portions, Ha's style gets the better of itself and becomes a convoluted morass of thoughts. I had mixed feelings about Ha's style. He tossed in enough great writing to make me sit up and take notice, but its uneven quality betrays his inexperience as novelist.

Flesh is not a great novel, but it is a very good one. As a purpose statement, even this inconsistent work is worthy of notice. I think that readers of Asian literature, and specifically Asian historical fiction, should take notice of Flesh. Ha has laid a foundation for what could be a very promising career.

In a Free State

In a Free State

By V.S. Naipaul

(This blog post concerned the third (of three) and longest story in V.S. Naipaul's novel In a Free State. The first two stories concern third world immigrants to America and England respectively and are not discussed below.... just so you know)

I suppose you just had to be there.

That's how I felt about On The Road by Jack Kerouac. I suppose if I was young and savage and living on society's fringes in the 1950s On The Road would have been a virtual bible in my hands. But by the time I read it in my late twenties in 2004 it read like so much self-indulgent hippie drivel. So irresponsibly self-absorbed and frivolous. A precursor to the Woodstock generation. I suspect that a good portion of people under the age of 40 who claim to like Kerouac do so simply because they have been instructed to like it because, at one particular point in history, Kerouac was the epitome of cool.

As was Hunter S. Thompson. and although I actually enjoyed Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, it didn't hit me the way it must have hit readers when it first appeared 30 years ago. The drug and alcohol fuelled mayhem of Thompson's novel has been repeated ad nausem by lesser writers for so long that going back to the original doesn't really cut it. I've also heard some people say the same for Catcher in the Rye, but I'm not having that. Salinger's novel is as relevant today as it ever was. And as long as there are kids falling through the cracks of the education system, it will continue to speak to generations.

1984 is another dated "classic." A scathing and terrifyingly inaccurate notion of a distopian future circa 1930. While I love old ideas of what the future holds (Metropolis, The Jetsons etc...), they don't hold up well in the common consciousness. I have no idea why 1984 is considered a classic novel. Animal Farm, sure. 1984? Never.

I suppose Orwell had all the reason in the world to believe that the world would turn out that way given the direction things were heading at the time of his writing 1984, but the book has not dated well. Turns out that Orwell's vision of the future has not come to pass and when I read 1984 in high school (in 1993, by the way) I was astute enough to tell my then English teacher, Mr. Switzer, that the book had long since passed its expiration date. Aldous Huxley was far closer to the mark with his idea of a world brimming with pleasurable distractions (Brave New World).

I guess you just had to be there?

The entire genre of colonial literature is another example of books I suspect would have been more poignant if I had grown up in that particular social environment. Since very few people of European and North American descent under the age of 65 still hold to the tenants of the "white man's burden," it is extremely hard for younger readers to connect with novels such as Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness or George Orwell's (Again! What gives, George?) Burmese Days. Most people simply don't see Africa and Asia in that same light.

This goes for V.S. Naipaul's Booker Prize Winning (1971) novel In a Free State which deals primarily with two acquaintances driving across a nameless African state (most likely Uganda or Rwanda) on the verge of a military coup against the Western-supported king. The vast majority of the story consists of conversations between these two characters, an aging colonel and an African named Peter, all of which deals with the the dying days of imperialism.

While certainly the problems that came with colonialism have not simply disappeared in Africa, the Middle East or Asia and certainly western country's have not simple "butted out" of their respective business, many of the attitudes of average Western people (especially among ex-pats living in said countries) has radically changed. Cultural relativism has replaced old colonial values among many Europeans and North American's living abroad. It seemed a little absurd to read a novel that was personifying the struggle between these two viewpoints.

But I'm no social or cultural anthropologist, so I'm not really interested in waxing intellectual on colonialism vs. cultural relativism. I am, however, a North American living (permenantly) in an Asian country I feel as though I have a valid opinion. Naipaul's novel seems as though it would have been a bombastic novel of vital importance when it was published in 1971 amid the burgeonining independence of dozens of states around the world but reading it today it seems to have lost it's cultural imortance, unless of course you are reading it as a piece of historical curiosity.

If so, it's worth a look, otherwise, In A Free State is, like so many other novels of their particular place and time, out of place in 2011.