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Mario Vargas Llosa

Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa (born March 28, 1936) is a Peruvian writer, politician, journalist, essayist, and Nobel Prize laureate. Vargas Llosa is one of Latin America’s most significant novelists and essayists, and one of the leading authors of his generation. Some critics consider him to have had a larger international impact and worldwide audience than any other writer of the Latin American Boom. He was awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature “for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat”.

He is the person who, in 1990, “coined the phrase that circled the globe”, declaring on Mexican television, “Mexico is the perfect dictatorship”, a statement which became an adage during the following decade.

Vargas Llosa rose to fame in the 1960s with novels such as The Time of the Hero (La ciudad y los perros, literally The City and the Dogs, 1963/1966), The Green House (La casa verde, 1965/1968), and the monumental Conversation in the Cathedral (Conversación en la catedral, 1969/1975). He writes prolifically across an array of literary genres, including literary criticism and journalism. His novels include comedies, murder mysteries, historical novels, and political thrillers. Several, such as Captain Pantoja and the Special Service (1973/1978) and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (1977/1982), have been adapted as feature films.

Many of Vargas Llosa’s works are influenced by the writer’s perception of Peruvian society and his own experiences as a native Peruvian. Increasingly, however, he has expanded his range, and tackled themes that arise from other parts of the world. Another change over the course of his career has been a shift from a style and approach associated with literary modernism, to a sometimes playful postmodernism.

Like many Latin American authors, Vargas Llosa has been politically active throughout his career; over the course of his life, he has gradually moved from the political left towards the right. While he initially supported the Cuban revolutionary government of Fidel Castro, Vargas Llosa later became disenchanted. He ran for the Peruvian presidency in 1990 with the center-right Frente Democrático (FREDEMO) coalition, advocating neoliberal reforms. He has subsequently supported moderate conservative candidates.

Man Booker Prize Winner 2010, Howard Jacobson

Howard Jacobson (born 25 August 1942) is a British author and journalist. He is best known for writing comic novels that often revolve around the dilemmas of British Jewish characters.

His time at Wolverhampton was to form the basis of his first novel, Coming from Behind, a campus comedy about a failing polytechnic which plans to merge facilities with a local football club. The episode of teaching in a football stadium in the novel is, according to Jacobson in a 1985 BBC interview, the only portion of the novel which is based on a true incident. He also wrote a travel book in 1987, titled In the Land of Oz, which was researched during his time as a visiting academic in Sydney.

His fiction, particularly in the five novels he has published since 1998, is characterised chiefly by a discursive and humorous style. Recurring subjects in his work include male–female relations and the Jewish experience in Britain in the mid- to late-20th century. He has been compared to prominent Jewish-American novelists such as Philip Roth, in particular for their habit of creating doppelgängers of themselves in their fiction. Jacobson has been called “the English Philip Roth”.

His 1999 novel The Mighty Walzer, about a teenage table tennis champion, won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic writing. It is set in the Manchester of the 1950s and Jacobson, himself a teen ping pong fan, admits that there is more than an element of autobiography to it. Both it and his 2002 novel Who’s Sorry Now – the central character of which is a Jewish luggage baron of South London – and his 2006 novel Kalooki Nights were longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Jacobson described Kalooki Nights as “the most Jewish novel that has ever been written by anybody, anywhere.”

As well as his fiction, he also writes a weekly column for The Independent newspaper as an op-ed writer. In recent times, he has, on several occasions, attacked anti-Israel boycotts, and for this reason has been labelled a “liberal Zionist”.

9781408808870

On 12 October 2010, Jacobson was awarded the 2010 Man Booker Prize for Fiction for his novel The Finkler Question. The book, published by Bloomsbury, explores what it means to be Jewish today and is also about “love, loss and male friendship”. Chair of the judges, Sir Andrew Motion said “The Finkler Question is a marvellous book: very funny, of course, but also very clever, very sad and very subtle. It is all that it seems to be and much more than it seems to be. A completely worthy winner of this great prize.” Jacobson is the oldest winner since William Golding’s win in 1980 and The Finkler Question is the first comic novel in the forty-two year history of the prize.

The Man Booker Prize for Fiction is a literary prize awarded each year for the best original full-length novel, written in the English language, by a citizen of the Commonwealth of Nations, Ireland, or Zimbabwe. The winner of the Man Booker Prize is generally assured of international renown and success; therefore, the prize is of great significance for the book trade. It is also a mark of distinction for authors to be nominated for the Man Booker longlist or selected for inclusion in the shortlist.

Two blockbuster films adapted from Nicholas Sparks novels have propelled the author’s romantic fiction to sales of an all-time high.

Sales of Sparks’ titles across all editions have sold more copies in the past six weeks (to the week ending 1st May) than throughout the entirety of 2009 according to Nielsen BookScan. Sparks racked up volume sales of 74,111 over the period, compared to 72,485 in all of 2009.

“Dear John”, starring Channing Tatum and Amanda Seyfried, opened on 14th April, heading to number one in the UK film chart, while “The Last Song”, starring Miley Cyrus, went in at number four.

The Last Song, published by Sphere in hardback in September 2009 and in paperback in April 2010, has already sold nearly four times more than Sparks’ previous novel, The Lucky One, published in 2008. The Last Song has sold 41,760 copies since publication, while The Lucky One has so far racked up sales of 8,187.

The films also boosted his backlist, with A Walk to Remember and The Notebook, also both previously made into films, in particular receiving fillips.

(Source: TheBookseller.com)

It was at 8pm on 23rd February 2010 when I had attended Renesial Leong’s 2-hour property seminar that reminded me one of the ways of how the poor build their wealth from scratch. Below is the summary of some information that was shared during the property seminar:

The benefits of trading in properties by using the right plan include:

• Hedge against inflation
• There are always market for properties
• Peace of mind in the future
• Proven to work acid test
• You are always in control of your property

The pains of investing in properties by using the wrong plan include:

• Buying wrong properties
• Loss of income from rentals
• Hard to rent out properties
• Hard to collect rentals
• Slow in appreciation
• Missed opportunities

The most important tip to remember is to be always on a lookout to purchase properties that always have positive net income flow.

Visit PropertyMasteryAsia.com for more information on Renesial Leong.

(Ralph Tang)

Books by Renesial Leong

• Commercial Property Jewels
• Property Jewels
• The Magic of Property Investment
• Your Tenants, Your Jewels

Books by Renesial Leong

The Man Booker Prize

Back in 1971, the Booker Prize was revamped to honour the best novel of the year based on its year of publications. In doing so, many books published in 1970 were left out in the dark with no opportunity of winning a Booker Prize… until this year. The Lost Man Booker Prize is the brainchild of Peter Straus, honorary archivist to the Booker Prize Foundation.

A panel of 3 judges has been appointed to select a shortlist of 6 novels from a longlist of 22 books published during that period. They are Rachel Cooke, Katie Derham and Tobias Hill. These books would have been eligible and are still in print today. They are:

A Guilty Thing Surprised by Ruth Rendell

• The Hand Reared Boy by Brian Aldisso
• A Little Of What You Fancy? by H.E.Bates
• The Birds On The Trees by Nina Bawden
• A Place In England by Melvyn Bragg
• Down All The Days by Christy Brown
• Bomber by Len Deighton
• Troubles by J.G.Farrell
• The Circle by Elaine Feinstein
• The Bay Of Noon by Shirley Hazzard
• A Clubbable Woman by Reginald Hill
• I’m The King Of The Castle by Susan Hill
• A Domestic Animal by Francis King
• Fire Dwellers by  Margaret Laurence
• Out Of The Shelter by David Lodge
• A Fairly Honourable Defeat by Iris Murdoch
• Fireflies by Shiva Naipaul
• Master and Commander by Patrick O’Brian,
• Head To Toe by Joe Orton,
• Fire From Heaven by Mary Renault
• A Guilty Thing Surprised by Ruth Rendell
• The Driver’s Seat by Muriel Spark
• The Vivisector by Patrick White

The shortlist will be announced in March but, as with the Best of the Booker in 2008, the international reading public will decide the winner by voting via the Man Booker Prize website. The overall winner will be announced in May.

The Costa Book Awards was pretty much unheard of, here – until 2005, when Malaysian-born Tash Aw won the award for Best First Novel for his book, The Harmony Silk Factory. His second book, The Invisible Map, was released last year.

The Costa Book Awards was previously known as the The Whitbread Literary Awards.  Costa, a growing coffee shop chain in UK took over the ownership of the Book Awards in 2006. The Costa Book Awards has 5 categories and the winner of each category will win £ 5,000. The 2009 winners were announced on 5th January 2010. They are, as follows:

• Costa Novel Award: Brooklyn by Colm Tóibin
  • Back in the early 1950s, Eilis Lacey emigrated to Brooklyn, New York, leaving behind her Irish family. Though far from home, Eilis takes tentative steps towards new friendships, and perhaps a little more too. Then, she receives news which sends her back to Ireland. There, she is confronted by a dilemma – to choose between duty and one great love.
• First Novel Award: Beauty by Raphael Selbourne.
  • Beauty is a 20 year-old Bangladeshi who shocked her family by fleeing an abusive arranged marriage. Forced to look for a job, her encounters with officialdom, fellow claimants, and cityh street strangers and the restrictions (and comfort) of her language and culture, place her at the mercy of unlikely helpers such as Mark, a friendly ex-offender and Peter, a middle-class underachiever. Such ‘white’ influences conflict with pressure of her family’s religious line, but they enable Beauty to understand better how free-will and parental care can affect her personal destiny.
• Biography Award: The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Quantum Genius by Graham Farmelo.
  • Paul Dirac was one of the leading pioneers of a science revolution: the quantum mechanics. He was also pathologically reticent, literal-minded and unable to communicate or empathize. Yet, based on a previously undiscovered archive of family papers and Dirac’s massive achievements, Graham Farmelo draws  a compassionate portrait of the life and work of  this Novel Prize winner. Farmelo shows a man who, while hopelessly socially inept, could manage to love and sustain close friendship.
• Poetry Award: A Scattering by Christopher Reid
  • This collection of four poetic sequences were written in memory and in tribute to Reid’s wife following her death in October 2005.
• Children’s Book Award: Chaos Walking #2: The Ask and the Answer by Patrick Ness
  • The trilogy began with The Knife of Never Letting Go about Todd Hewitt who can hear everything other people thinks and vice versa. He finds out that his town has been keeping secrets that will force him to run. In the second book, Todd and wounded Viola runs right into the hands of Mayor Prentiss. Separated and imprisoned, Todd is forced to learn the ways of the Mayor’s new order. Questions remains: What secrets are being hidden? Where is Viola? Who are the Answer? … This is a tense, shocking and deeply moving novel of resistance under the most extreme pressure.

This year’s overall winner of the Costa Book Awards will be announced on 26th January 2010 and the winner stands to walk away with an additional £ 25,000.

(Source: Official Website of the Golden Globes Award)

I love watching award shows – though most of the time, being Astro-less, I’ll have to wait till the re-runs are on other channels. Or yes, I could just keep up with the news on the internet. So, it was with excitement that I found out that the nominations for the 67th Golden Globe Awards were announced recently. I’d scroll down the entire list and have my ”ooohs” and “aaaahs” upon seeing my favourites being nominated (again).

With trepidation, I also look out for a selection of books to read – especially those that have been adapted into movies. I prefer adaptations (book to movie) more than novelisations (movie to book). It’s fascinates me to watch see how creatively a movie could be visualised on the big screen based on a thin book or condensed into just two hours of viewing from a thick book that took us days and weeks to devour.

I’ve narrowed down some of the movies that have have related tie-ins:

1.   Best Movie Title:

• Precious: Based on the novel Push by Sapphire
  • An electrifying first novel that shocks by its language, its circumstances, and its brutal honesty, Push recounts a young black street-girl’s horrendous and redemptive journey through a Harlem inferno. For Precious Jones, 16 and pregnant with her father’s child, miraculous hope appears and the world begins to open up for her when a courageous, determined teacher bullies, cajoles, and inspires her to learn to read, to define her own feelings and set them down in a diary. The movie stars Best Actress nominee and newcomer Gabourey Sidibe and Best Supporting Actress nominee Mo’nique.
• Up in the Air by Walter Kirn
  • Ryan Bingham’s job as a Career Transition Counselor (he fires people) has kept him airborne for years. Although he despises his line of work, he has come to love the culture of what he calls “Airworld”. With a letter of resignation sitting on his boss’s desk, and the hope of a job with a mysterious firm, Bingham is agonizingly close to his ultimate goal: 1 Million Frequent-Flyer Miles. The movie stars Best Actor nominee George Clooney and Best Actress nominees Anna Kendrick and Vera Farmiga.
• James Cameron’s Avatar
  • In the futuristic world of James Cameron’s Avatar, a young man named Jake becomes part of an exploration team on the planet Pandora, inhabited by the exotic Na’vi. Scientists have created an avatar—a body that looks like a Na’vi but is operated by a human’s consciousness. When in his avatar body, Jake finds himself drawn to the planet’s way of life. But before the Na’vi will accept him as one of their own, he has to pass a series of fantastic and dangerous tests. Can Jake survive long enough to become a full-fledged Na’vi? And will he ever want to live as a human again?

2.   Best Performances by an Actress in a Movie

• Emily Blunt for A Young Victoria
  • Born in 1819, Victoria was the daughter of Edward, Duke of Kent. Left fatherless at the age of 8 months, her early years were difficult, brought up by her overbearing German mother and ambitious advisor, Conroy. Succeeding to the throne at 18, however, she began a triumphant reign where her first decree was to banish her mother and Conroy to a remote palace apartment. Yet, history and this movie, will reveal that her journey at the monarch towards her happy ending, was not all smooth sailing. The rest of the cast includes Rupert Friend, Paul Bettany and Miranda Richardson.
• Carey Mullingan for An Education
  • When the journalist Lynn Barber was 16, she was picked up at a bus-stop by an attractive older man who drew up in his sports car – and her life was almost wrecked. A bright confident girl, on course to go to Oxford, she began a relationship which, incredibly, was encouraged by her conventional, suburban parents and which took her into the louche, semi-criminal world of west London just as the 1960s began. Ruin beckoned, until one day she made an important discovery.
• Sandra Bullock for The Blind Side
  • This true-life sports drama tells of a man, born to a crack-addicted mother; who takes up American football and school, after a rich Republican family plucks him from the mean streets and adopts him. Their love is the first great force that alters the world’s perception of the boy and the second force is the evolution of professional American football into a game where the quarterback must be protected at any cost. The boy, who took on the name Michael Oher turns out to be the priceless combination of size, speed and agility necessary to guard the quarterback’s greatest vulnerability: his blind side. Directed by John Lee Hancock, the movie also stars Tim McGraw, Kathy Bates and Quinton Aaron.

3.   Best Performances by an Actor in a Movie

• Colin Firth for A Single Man
  • This movie is based on the novel by Christopher Isherwood. Set in Los Angeles in 1962, at the height of the Cuban missile crisis, it is the story of a British college professor (Colin Firth) who is struggling to find meaning to his life after the death of his long time partner. The story is a romantic tale of love interrupted, the isolation that is an inherent part of the human condition, and ultimately the importance of the seemingly smaller moments in life.
• Jeff Bridges for Crazy Heart
  • Bad Blake has been a big star, but he has not recorded in five years. He is 57 and now has a chance for a last show and a last chance at love. But can he stop living the blues, give up the booze, put three bad marriages behind him and form a new relationship? The movie also stars Maggie Gyllenhaal and Robert Duvall.

4.   Best Motion Picture – Musical Or Comedy

• Julie and Julia
  • Based on 2 memoirs, this movie is adapted (written for the screen  and directed) by Nora Ephron. The brilliant Julia Child (Meryl Streep) woke America with the pleasures of good cooking wtih her book Mastering the Art of French Cooking and tv show. In 1948, when she newly landed in France,  Julia soaked herself in the local culture – buying food at local markets and taking classes at the Cordon Bleu – that eventually led her to her success as a cook, teacher and writer. Meanwhile, in New York, Julie Powell regularly finds herself weeping on the way home from her boring job. Then one night, she notices that the few items she grabbed from a Korean grocery store are the same ingredients, as described by Julia Child, to make Potage Parmentier. And so, “The Project”  is born. Julie cooked all 524 recipes in the book, within one year and realises that this deranged Project is changing her life. The richness of the thousands of sauces she slaves over is beginning to spread into her life, and she begins to find the joy of life that has been missing for many years.

5.   Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture

• Matt Damon for The Informant!
  • Based on a gripping true account written by Kurt Eichenwald, The Informant is Mark Whitacre, a senior executive with America’s most powerful food giant, who put his career and his family’s safety at risk to become a confidential government witness. Using Whitacre’s secret recordings and a team of agents, the FBI uncovered the corporation’s scheme to steal millions of dollars from its own customers. But as the FBI closed in on their target, they suddenly realised that Whitacre wasn’t quite playing the game they’d thought. He double-crossed both the authorities and his employers in one of the most extraordinary cases of global corporate corruption in the last 30 years.
• Michael Stuhlbarg for A Serious Man
  • The book is written by Christopher Isherwood and is set in 1967. Larry Gopnik, a physics professor at a quiet Midwestern university, has just been informed by his wife Judith that she is leaving him, his unemployable brother Arthury is sleeping on the couch, his son Danny is shirking school, and his daughter is filching money from his wallet. Also, a graduate student is trying to bribe him for a passing grade while threatening to sue him for defamation. His search for some kind of equilibrium is conveyed with humor, imagination and verbal wit by the Coen brothers. Julianne Moore is the nominated best actress for this comedy.
• Robert Downey Jr. for Sherlock Holmes
  • Sherlock Holmes first appeared in publication in 1887. He is the creation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. A brilliant London-based “consulting detective”, Holmes is famous for his intellectual prowess, astute observation, deductive reasoning and forensic skills to solve difficult cases. In this movie, Holmes and his assistant, Dr. Watson must hunt Lord Blackwood resumes his killing spree. Contending with Dr. Watson’s new fiancée and a dimwitted head of Scotland Yard, Holmes must unravel the clues to the mystery through a twisted web of murder, deceit, black magic and the deadly embrace of temptress, Irene Adler.

6.   Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture

• Matt Damon for Invictus
  • Based on a true story, Matt Damon plays the captain of South Africa’s rugby team (Springboks), Francois Pienaar, who joined forces with Nelson Mandela to help unite their country. Then, newly-elected Mandela believed that he can bring his people together, through the universal language of sports. He rallied Pienaar’s rugby team as they make an unlikely run to the 1995 World Cup Championships match. The men shared one goal with the motto, “One team, One Country”.
• Stanley Tucci for Lovely Bones
  • Lovely Bones paints a painful picture of a girl, who was raped and murdered, and now watches over her family – and her killer – from heaven. Stanley Tucci plays the George Harvey, the man, who killed Susie Salmon.

The winners of the Golden Globes will be announced on 17th January 2010, and the awards are usually used as a marker – the run-up to the prestigious Oscars (Academy Awards). 2009 saw the success of Vikas Swarup’s Slumdog Millionaire become an overnight sensation when it won the Oscar for Best Movie. Perhaps another author is crossing his/her fingers that he/she made the right choice to have his/her book turn into an award-winning movie.

Golden Globes Award Trophies

The diverse culture of Malaysia invites travellers both local and foreign to marvel at towering cityscapes where modernity dazzles with luxury or go through old trunk roads surrounded by oil palm plantations to get to breathtaking mountains, caves, beaches and the tropical rainforests. And, of course, every traveller is amazed by food that can be exotic or a fusion of everything you know!

Perhaps during a jungle trek, you stumbled upon an enchanting place, or had a (nonfatal) swim with wild animals. Maybe you once spent an afternoon befriending villagers who had never met an urbanite off the beaten track before. If you were a journalist invited on a ‘famtrip’, did you encounter something outside the usual itinerary of visiting the most popular marketplaces, skyscrapers and restaurants? You might have enjoyed the tranquillity of a hideaway before it was discovered and destroyed in the name of progress and development. Here is a chance to recapture those scenes.

MPH GROUP PUBLISHING is looking for true travellers’ tales, preferably on places outside the tourist hubs in Malaysia. Stories should be in the form of travelogues with rich, firsthand descriptions of sights and sounds and even tastes. We want engaging stories that will move us to visit the places for ourselves and also to understand why we should preserve the beauty of such places. This is not a travel guide; we do not want to know just where to visit and how to get there. We do not want photographs; the words in the story should capture all the wonders. Tentatively entitled Sini Sana: Travels in Malaysia, we aim to publish the book in 2010, depending on the number of submissions we receive.

Travel stories must be original, nonfiction, between 3,000 and 5,000 words, and must not have been previously published. We invite submissions from both emerging and established writers. Manuscripts must be edited, typed double-spaced with 12pt font and emailed to editorial@mph.com.my. Please include your name, address, telephone number and email address. You may submit as many pieces as you wish. Faxed or handwritten submissions will not be entertained and manuscripts will not be returned. We will contact you only if your piece has been selected for inclusion in the compilation. Writers whose submissions are selected will be expected to work with the editors to fine tune their stories.

DEADLINE: 31 January 2010

PAYMENT: A small flat fee and two copies of the collection