
Reading in Myanmar: Text and sub-text
I was reading in Myanmar. It was my time, my panel appearance at the Irrawaddy Literary Festival with Canadian literary prodigy Karen Connelly. We were to be speaking about my novel As the Heart Bones Break. We ended up speaking about Myanmar. Not of course in so many words… But as I learnt last week in Mandalay, there’s text and then there’s sub-text. As the Heart Bones Break is a novel about Vietnam but it’s also about division, isolation and transition. It’s about layers o