SINGAPORE – In this week’s book box, The Straits Times reviews three books that add to the legacy of celebrated authors. Buy the books at Amazon. These articles include affiliate links. When you buy through them, we may earn a small commission.
Book review: Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s posthumous Until August an imperfect pleasure
Posthumous publication is always thorny, especially when the author in question wanted his or her unfinished manuscripts destroyed upon his or her death.
After British fantasy writer Terry Pratchett’s death in 2015, the hard drive containing his drafts was crushed by a steamroller, as per his request.
On the other hand, Prague-born writer Franz Kafka’s last wish to have all his work burnt unread was disregarded by his friend Max Brod, who salvaged what would go on to be some of Kafka’s best-known work, including The Trial (1925) and The Castle (1926).
Such was the dilemma faced by the sons of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Colombian Nobel Laureate whose works such as the magical realist epic One Hundred Years Of Solitude (1967) helped fuel the Latin American boom of the 1960s and 1970s.
In his final years, as he struggled with dementia, Garcia Marquez had been working on one last novel.
Book review: In James, Percival Everett audaciously reimagines a controversial Mark Twain classic
As racial issues flare and threaten to polarise the United States time and again, the razor-sharp societal critiques by American writer Percival Everett – masked as comical parody – has gained importance.
The 67-year-old has gained a following by addressing black issues audaciously and with beguiling humour.
In his latest work, he follows the adventure of runaway slave Jim and his brave young companion Huckleberry Finn in an antebellum American South, where slaves have no rights.
If this plotline sounds familiar, it is because Everett has riffed off the 1884 Mark Twain classic, The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn, and rewritten it from the slave’s perspective.
In Twain’s novel, Jim was practically silenced as a simpleton slave in what was a coming-of-age story for 14-year-old Huck, who comes to terms with his friendship with his enslaved companion despite the learnt societal prejudice.
Book review: An exotic supernatural journey in search of nirvana in Takaoka’s Travels
The late Tatsuhiko Shibusawa, who died at the age of 59 in August 1987, was a larger-than-life figure in his native Japan.
As a translator of French literature, he was the subject of a public obscenity trial from 1960 to 1969 that was fought all the way to the Supreme Court. This involved his translation of the novel Juliette (1797) by French writer Marquis de Sade, which bore explicit scenes.
Shibusawa would often saunter into court wearing sunglasses and smoking a pipe – if he even showed up at all – and was respected by luminaries such as fellow writer Kenzaburo Oe, who spoke in his defence. He was eventually fined the equivalent of less than $300 today.
Apart from the controversy, Shibusawa was also a prolific essayist, his Japanese short stories dealing with themes such as dreams, fantasy, the occult and – unsurprisingly – eroticism.
The Straits Times’ Weekly Bestsellers April 27
Supercommunicators by Charles Duhigg tops the non-fiction bestsellers list.
