Asian literatures

The 48-year-old Tamil language writer from India, Perumal Murugan, could never have imagined that he would have to draw an end to his literary career with a public announcement to the effect that the writer in him had died… Murugan wrote six novels, four collections of short stories, and four of poetry, before abruptly declaring himself dead as a writer.

China and Australia are roughly the same size, but with nearly 100 times our population, distribution of books in China is made easier by the simple fact of greater population density. In poor and rural areas, there can be difficulty reaching customers, but on the whole the transport systems seem much better integrated than in Australia. Around 410 000 new titles are published each year, so attracting attention is a difficult task.

Analects are gleanings, crumbs under the table, fragments of old text that, in the case of Confucius, have coalesced into a classic. Simon Leys, his latest translator and annotator, seldom misses an opportunity to remind us just how ragged and loopy this little book is — a mere one hundred pages in this edition (requiring another hundred pages of irresistible notes). The Analects consists of brief passages of partially recorded or remembered conversations between the Master and a set of often unidentified interlocuters.