C
Sally Bong is an NPC protagonist. She allows life to happen to her because she has never felt strongly for anything, and yet possesses a strong moral compass that makes her hard to dislike. Her personal entanglements with fellow everyday folk lead her to discover a myriad of social issues that marginalised communities face in Singapore, and she is driven by her commitment to these human relationships--rather than any socio-political alignment--to make life a little easier on everyone.
Sebastian Sim's writing goes down easily. The language is entirely straightforward, with cause and effect explained in every line, and plot points are introduced and resolved within the chapter--sometimes even within the paragraph! Sim effectively uses a mixture of kooky situations, local history, and characters' naïveté to expose hypocrisy within the system, but the whole novel lacked any real tension point and felt more like a laundry list of issues presented in a rushed first draft. It read less like a narrative and more of a collection of short stories: every chapter dealt with a specific marginalised community, and characters did not seem to have any meaningful interiority explored beyond the sentence / paragraph / section they were allocated. What compounded this issue was the unchanging English-language register used to illustrate their multilingual speech (and the language they were speaking was not clearly indicated, which made some plot points confusing). Regardless of whether one spoke English / Malay / Mandarin / Chinese dialects, everyone's speech was peppered with overly English, overly formal, multi-syllabic adjectives and terminology that did not quite give off the unique texture of these languages, spoken in real life.
Sim's style might have been better suited for satires like his preceding Let's Give It Up for Gimme Lao! . Here, his attempts at sincerity sometimes fall flat. Still, And the Award Goes to Sally Bong! is a light and enjoyable read, seeking to dignify the life of the little man in prestige-seeking Singapore, where life (and general humanity) is validated through awards doled out by the ruling party. Sally Bong shows us that there is honour in simply being a good friend to those around us, with or without state-sanctioned recognition.
I really wanted to like this book, AND get through it. After all, I like wordplay, postmodern art, and difficult reads. However, I just don't like Ali Smith('s writing).
It's been close to a decade since I tried finishing this novel, and I hoped my attempt this year would be a successful one, given how tech and surveillance have become issues that are more pressing than ever. Unfortunately, the over-indulgent punning and one-dimensional villains ofThere But For The simply proved too much for me to handle. That, and the unrealistically precocious child character that was nothing but a mouthpiece for the 50-something (at the time) author and her views.
The whole novel deliberately starves readers of relational sincerity--here, Smith is making a point about our contemporary world--which is frustrating for me as a fan of Smith's earlier Girl Meets Boy, which was, in my memory, full of tenderness. When the author spares us some honesty, like in Anna's decision to care for Miles, her anguish at West Asian lives measuring up to be less than a lightbulb in the Home Office's eyes, and Mark's recollection of Jonathan's love for him, as mediated through a shaky camcorder (possibly my favourite description in the genre of contemporary prose), it feels like a hard-earned reward. I simply wished I didn't have the suffer through such dry and humourless text to get there though!
"For there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; neither hid, that shall not be known. (Luke 12:2)" // "In all desire to know there is already a drop of cruelty. (Nietzsche)"
So opens Maggie Nelson's The Red Parts. Reading it felt like holding your hands up to your face and yet watching something terrible unfold through gaps between your fingers. Precisely what that terrible thing was (is?), however, remains elusive: the speculation and recreation of how one murder (or a couple dozen) unfolds? The way suspected criminals and the victim's families are treated throughout a judicial trial? The wider ecosystem of the patriarchy that normalises violence against girls and women? Or that creeping horror directed at my own self, the reader, in my incessant need to know "the root of the matter"?
Nelson is frustrating, saintly and all I wish myself to be in the face of repeated tragedy and manmade horror. All I wanted of the book was a chance to dissolve my person, my own history of childhood abuses, into the rest of the faceless, angry mob that demands a verdict and a tell-all: justice for the deceased. Yet Nelson implodes that idea entirely, asking what justice means for those already dead, how resolution can ever possibly be offered to those who remain, and what we are to do with the emotions that we're left with.
Midway through the book, Nelson attends a vigil for a serial rapist sentenced to the death penalty. Despite how her own life has been affected by the murder of her aunt (possibly linked to a string of other related rapes and murders), she insists on attending, considering herself a bodhisattva, someone who "[enters] challenging situations in order to alleviate suffering" (p. 79). I am conflicted, myself an angry mobster, but one against capital punishment. My latter persuasion wins over, but this only lasts for an instant as Nelson's next line again disturbs whatever stable moral ground I thought to anchor myself on.
An essayist on ethics proffers this: "'My own view is that [a transfer of concern from victim to criminal] occurs in large part because of our unwillingness to face our own revulsion at what was done. It allows us to look away from the horror that another person was willing to cause. ... By repressing anger at wrongful violation, we may be attempting to deny we live in a society in which there really are fearful and awful people.'" (p. 80) Indeed, what is there to know beyond the painful possibility that sometimes violence is random, hate is unjustified, and all we do is continue to suffer through hurt?
The Red Parts, at least to me, is an astounding, baffling exercise of begrudging compassion for the hurt parts of myself and other people. I have no doubt that the finer points of Nelson's exploration of the issue are lost on me in this current state, but this only means I will be back for another re-reading or two as I interrogate the limits of my own care and understanding afforded to all of us whose lives have been affected by male violence.
An illuminating meditation on desire, connection and women in society, as screened through the lens of a so-called "murder mystery". I found Butter really refreshing for how it refused to fit nicely into the aforementioned genre, and for how it deliberately spent more time on its reflections on Japanese society instead. While it seems like the issue of beauty and body image struck a chord in other reviewers, the novel's musings on idol culture, paedophilia and acts of care/desire within relationships resonated with me more, as someone born outside of the West.
Asako Yuzuki writes beautifully and incisively: her descriptions of food were some of the best I've ever read, and her main characters feel real and fully fleshed out. I particularly enjoyed her depiction of Rika and Makoto's lukewarm relationship, perhaps because I've been lucky enough to have never experienced that kind of dulled, monotonous mix of care and obligation. This, in contrast with the alluring pull of Manoko Kajii and (my?) frustrated attempts to understand her through Rika's interactions with her, was something of a masterful juxtaposition.
The last third of the narrative felt very rushed however, speeding through an array of new and underdeveloped characters, surprise backstories (that don't satisfactorily resolve imo), lingering queerbaiting, and sudden reflections on God (and Ramadan!). In contrast with other reviews, I wish this book could have gone on for longer! The world of Asako Yuzuki's Butter is deliciously rich and complex, reminding me of Banana Yoshimoto's Kitchen in their sensitive exploration of relationships and care in Japan.