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Romancing the East A Literary Odyssey from the Heart of Darkness to the River Kwai Jerry Hopkins Books

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Romancing the East A Literary Odyssey from the Heart of Darkness to the River Kwai Jerry Hopkins Books

Reading this book caused lights to go on in distant memories of mine, illuminating where ideas, impressions, fantasies, whatever had been planted in me by the authors Jerry Hopkins wrote about.

It helped me see the origins of the road that one day led me to make Asia, specifically Cambodia, my home.


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Romancing the East A Literary Odyssey from the Heart of Darkness to the River Kwai Jerry Hopkins Books Reviews

I grew up listening avidly to my uncle's tales of Shanghai in the early 1930s when he was a sailor stationed with the Asiatic Fleet. It was another world, a most exotic world. Jerry Hopkins's Romancing the East evokes that time and place. This collection of essays about writers who lived in Asia, recounted their experience in the East, told stories set in Asia, or simply used the `mysterious East' as atmosphere is engaging and well-written. My first reaction was that Hopkins has had a love affair with Asia, with the East, that has been a centerpiece of his life.

It paints a picture of the Japan that Lafcadio Hearn found in the late 19th century, the struggle and privation of peasants in Qing China in the work of Pearl Buck, the lyric beauty and terror of the early days of island warfare in James Michener's Tales of the South Pacific. The House without a Key of Earl Derr Biggers's Charlie Chan stories is still on Waikiki Beach even if the Halekulani Hotel exists in a later incarnation. You have Conrad and the incomparable George Orwell's Burmese Days. It is a feast for the mind and the imagination.

This is a collection best sipped not gulped; you will want to savor the sketch of each author and his work. Keep a pad and a pen handy. Romancing the East will add to your list of books-to-read.
Disclaimer The author is a friend of mine.

Reading Jerry Hopkins is always a pleasure. His writing is astute, insightful and witty. In "Romancing the East" he examines the lives and works of more than thirty authors who have written about Asia, with an eye to discovering any connections between who they were, what they did, and the effect they've had on the West's perceptions of the East.

Some of these authors were prolific and some were not. Some lived in Asia for decades and some just parachuted through. Some obviously loved the place and some hated it. Some were read widely and became wealthy, some were not and did not. Some were men and some were women, some were gay and some were straight, some were addicts and some were not. Some went to the best schools and some were self-educated, some were scandalous letches and some happily married.

It turns out that there's no rhyme or reason as to why one author's book becomes a cultural touchstone while another's is forgotten. There is no Unifying Theory of Writing About Asia, and in his exhaustive research and dedication to his work Mr. Hopkins proves this to us. And to his credit, he makes no effort to create some half-baked proposal to tie all these unconnected authors together.

Stephanie Meyer and JD Salinger both wrote about teen angst, but you would be hard pressed to find any other connection between "Twilight" and "Catcher in the Rye." Similarly, there's really nothing at all that connects Christopher G. Moore and Jack Reynolds, other than the name of the town they wrote about.

Maybe that, after all, is the Unifying Theory of Writing About Asia Once an author puts his name and his book out into the world they cease to be his own, and how his writing is received or remembered or reimbursed is forever out of his control. The last time I was in Bangkok's Oriental Hotel they had hung George Orwell's portrait in their famous Reading Room. But they had misspelled his name.
Jerry Hopkins is approaching the 40-book mark and for that alone we should all go to Bangkok and buy him a beer. His writing life has swept from rock-and-roll L.A. to Hawaii to Thailand, and his biography of Jim Morrison, No One Here Gets Out Alive, has become a classic. If there's one writer who's fully qualified to examine the lives and work of other writers, it's the redoubtable Mr. Hopkins.

His latest book is subtitled A Literary Odyssey from the Heart of Darkness to the River Kwai, and it's a trip worth taking. Think of it as a series of conversations about almost every writer who has ever made Asia their subject matter--thirty-four writers in thirty-two essays. It's far too lively a discussion to be thought of as a survey course of literature about Asia--the opinions and insights found here are born from a barroom, not a classroom. And that is a very good thing indeed.

Hopkins examines the lives, work, and settings of other authors in a way that makes you want to read the books he writes about and find out more information about their authors. Each essay is carefully and thoughtfully written by a man who obviously loves to read and who respects the writers whose books come into his life.

Not for him the cheap shot--he uses humor in his portrayals of writers but he is never snide. It's difficult to imagine that anyone could find something new to say about Anna Leonowens, the lady whose book is still banned in the Kingdom of Thailand, as well as the movies that were spawned by it, but Hopkins does. "...Anna Leonowens was the Victorian era's version of a "gonzo" journalist, a predecessor to Hunter Thompson, a writer with imagination and bravado who didn't let facts get in the way of a good story." Suddenly a picture of a hoop-skirted lady sitting beside Hunter in the backseat of a convertible with the top down, "just outside of Barstow when the drugs kicked in," is rooted in the imaginations of readers, and Anna and the King of Siam will never be the same.

"Elfish everything seems, for everything as well as everybody is small, and queer, and mysterious," Hopkins quotes Lafcadio Hearn in 19th century Japan and then remarks, "It is as if the writer were describing a visit to Middle Earth, where hobbits lived." Hopkins is a master at hooking his readers with a well-turned description and then launching into a provocative literary discussion; his essay on Kipling alone, with literary criticism by Teddy Roosevelt included, is enough to bring a whole new wave of readers to Kim.

Hopkins is not, as he terms W. Somerset Maugham with a fair degree of asperity, "a predatory gossip." In his examination of Marguerite Duras, he tells about her sexagenarian habit of downing "up to nine liters of cheap Bordeaux a day" as a way of explaining her limited literary output at that time ("as little as one sentence a day.") And he all but cheers for her when she "sobers up in 1982 at a Paris hospital" and finishes the book that will make her famous, The Lover, when she is 68 years old.

Even when he could rightfully be vicious, when he writes about what he knows well that has been claimed by men who know it far less thoroughly, Jerry Hopkins is kind, fair-minded, and insightful. Michel Houellebecq and John Burdett are followers of a time-honored tradition, come to Thailand, find the sex industry, and write about it. "Their novels placed in Thailand," Hopkins says, "...were among the better crafted of the lot, but none of the others exceeded them in grisly exploitation, creating a Thailand that was not only licentious, but also ridiculous." He goes on to back up this assessment by letting the writers' books prove it for him, which they accomplish masterfully.

"For those who enjoy sleeping with literary ghosts," Hopkins provides locations where these august shades might still be hanging around. Although by no means a guidebook, tucking away a copy of Romancing the East in the bottom of a carry-on could be one of the happiest decisions that a traveler to Asia will make. Take it on a plane with you; give it to a friend; find Jerry Hopkins and buy him a beer.
Reading this book caused lights to go on in distant memories of mine, illuminating where ideas, impressions, fantasies, whatever had been planted in me by the authors Jerry Hopkins wrote about.

It helped me see the origins of the road that one day led me to make Asia, specifically Cambodia, my home.