24 posts tagged “books”

A summary of the reasons why writing Singaporean literature is so difficult, if not impossible, according to Joon and Yasmine, or why all the existing novels written by Singaporeans that we have read are so unsatisfactory.

1. The language. Singaporeans generally speak, well, Singlish, and even if we don't, we often mix languages even within the same sentence. As Joon pointed out, sometimes when we want to really express ourselves truly and honestly, we automatically switch to Malay even though we speak English 99% of the time. How do you translate "ghetto step kental", "YA ALLAH (must be all caps)", "amik kau ubat" and the hilarity of the word "snek"? How do you explain why the word "korek" is so dirty-sounding, when the direct English translation, "dig", is not? Or "sumbat", which means "stuffed"? You either write in English and sound really fake or write the way people really speak and alienate 90% of potential readers. Unless you can find a publisher daring enough to print a Singlish version of Trainspotting or A Clockwork Orange. Otherwise, film is a better way to portray the country.

2. The urge to explain everything about Singapore and living here. A lot of the Singaporean novels/short story collections out there cram all the cultural references they can into one sentence and history lessons into one paragraph. We picked up a book just now that had a story about a fashion student who was dyeing batik until "his fingers turned red, like a Malay bride's". So unnecessary. There are descriptions of HDB flats in all of these books. There is always, always, an old Chinese person feeling disconnected from their offspring, who were English-educated and don't understand the traditional ways. If someone takes the MRT, there will be a description of the cleanness and the crisp announcer's voice. At some point we have to stop telling and start showing.

3. A lot of these books have also been written by people who don't seem to know all that much about Singaporean life across all classes and ethnic groups, and hence have to prove their knowledge by dropping as many cultural references as they can. (We have insider knowledge that the author who wrote about chinese boys playing "sepak tawak" at community centres once asked a colleague, "Where is Yishun?") The authorial voice is always of someone from outside Singapore looking in, not of a local writing while living in Singapore itself.

4. Good grammar does not equate to good writing lah ok.

Did I leave anything out, Joon?

Joon and I have started a page on our shared blog, The Portable Reader's Guide to Good Things, on contemporary novels/short story collections that are worth your time.

We read a lot of junk so you don't have to.

Oh my god:

Be pleased then, you, the living, in your delightfully warm bed, before Lethe's ice-cold wave will lick your escaping foot.

-- Goethe, Roman Elegies

Lethe: In Greek mythology, one of the rivers of Hades whose waters will cause complete forgetfulness.

I must read Goethe.

(I found the line from a review of You, The Living.)

Why is it that whenever I finish a book, I can never decide what to read next, despite the fact that I have close to 40 unread books on my shelves (and table and floor)?

Anyway. How effective would a theme-based reading regime be? I just read this weekend's New York Times reviews, which focus on Chinese books and now of course I want to read Chinese books. If I spent a month or two reading only Chinese books, or Jewish or African or whatever, would it make me want to shoot myself?

You think me jaded and effete. You are mistaken. If you are delicious, if you have lovely eyes,..., if your body and mind... are so lithe and tender that I feel I could mingle more intimately with your thoughts by sitting on your lap..., there is nothing in all that to deserve your contemptuous words.

- 16-year-old Marcel Proust, to a classmate who had jilted him

1. Read for yourself
Find the people you know in the books you read. Find yourself, even, in the characters of 200 years ago. They say things you have never dared to speak aloud, they feel things you have tried to suppress for fear of being perverse. The author, if he/she is a good one, will describe these feelings better than you can and you will learn that you are not alone. Even Anna Karenina, after all, is petty, insecure and irrational in ways that you have always found shameful in yourself.

2. Take your time
If it takes 17 pages to describe how you can't fall asleep, then take 17 pages. N'allez pas trop vite. Don't jump straight to the meeting, speak first of the rustling of papers, the false sincerity of handshakes, the sweetness of the macaroons. There is more to every story, and anything can be a starting point from which your masterpiece will bloom.

3. Suffer successfully
It's only when you suffer or feel pain that you'll learn something. You wouldn't read up on gastrointestinal machinations until you've suffered indigestion or gastric flu. Suffering is the root of great ideas. If you have syphilis, go and write Fleurs du Mal. Don't be a bad sufferer. Apologise after committing a faux pas, don't take your bitterness out on someone else, don't pretend not to care when you truly desire something that someone else has, if you're ignorant about something, don't be afraid to ask. You can feel sorry for yourself but be honest to your pain.

4. Express your emotions honestly
Avoid clichés. Find your own way to describe the rain, the moon, the Angkor Wat. To rely on worn out phrases is to shut yourself out of your own personal experience and feeling, and to deny that each sunrise, each storm is unique. Don't try to write like someone else. Don't try to talk like someone else. Don't pick up expressions that you've heard other people say just because you think they will make you sound worldly or attractive.

Hey Ire.ne! Hope your morning's going well... I left the office at 10 pm last night thanks to BL. And now it is 1 am and for some reason instead of sleeping I decided to think about The Sun Also Rises. Well since only the two of us have read it, I figured I'll just send this to you in case the other two still want to read it and don't want the story to be spoilt (although it's hard to spoil a book in which nothing happens).

So after reading Wikipedia's entry on the book, here are some thoughts:

Although it's all strange and aimless to us, the novel apparently made waves among young people when it was first published. The story is set in the 1920s and it was published in 1926. I'm guessing the people of the time saw themselves in the book, it was a kind of writing they'd never seen before, this was an author who knew what they were going through, and the people in the book reminded them of their own friends (and in fact Hemingway based all the characters on his real life friends and Jake is based on himself). Maybe it was something like how young people felt when MTV first appeared in the 80s? You know like, wow, somebody out there understands us finally. So anyway even if we don't really get why the characters in the book behave the way they do, the novel I think is probably a good snapshot of what life was like for that generation of people, the "lost generation", after the war ended. Just wandering around aimlessly getting drunk trying to get over their war wounds and memories. So even if we can't appreciate it as the best plot ever, we can appreciate it as a historical tome, maybe.

On Brett -- apparently decades' worth of critics are split on whether her character is just an expression of misogyny on Hemingway's part or a depiction of a strong, sexually liberated woman. I just think she's a bitch, and I'm only interested in her character to the extent that her relationship with Jake forms the basis of the story arc, i.e. as the back of the book says, the story is about how Jake has to learn to let her go. I think he does this by pimping her to Romero (I think this is the climax, though honestly I'm not sure). I'm very interested in this quote: "That seemed to handle it. That was it. Send a girl off with one man. Introduce her to another to go off with him. Now go and bring her back. And sign the wire with love. That was it all right." Sign the wire with love -- how does this relate to his process of letting her go?

(More interesting quotes from the book highlighted here.

I'm more interested in Robert Cohn than in Brett. Did you notice that Robert Cohn is always Robert Cohn or Cohn, whereas all the other characters are referred to by the first names only? What's the significance behind that? Many people think Hemingway's portrayal of Cohn is anti-semitic and of course a lot of anti-semitic things are said by the characters throughout the whole book. But then Hemingway himself has been quoted as saying that Cohn is the hero of the novel, and his friend Harold Loeb, on whom Cohn's character is based, has defended Hemingway from accusations of anti-semitism. What's it all mean? Did Hemingway really mean it when he said Cohn was the hero or was he just trying to bat off all the critics?

If Cohn is the hero, what makes him admirable? My take -- he's the only one among the men who did not fight in the war, he's the only one uncorrupted by the war and probably because of that he's the only one among them who still has the capacity to love someone whole-heartedly and give himself over to one person. Brett's obviously not worth his time but he still lays himself at her feet. Whereas Mike, her own fiance, lets her sleep around and does nothing about it. When she sleeps with Romero it's Cohn who gets angry like a proper boyfriend, and even beats up the bullfighter but Mike just flails about, gets drunk, whines to Jake and doesn't do anything. Cohn is the one who acts like what a "real man" should in the situation. (And since Hemingway is well-known for his love of all things macho, can we take this as a glorifying moment for Cohn?) Cohn is the only character who's still able to simply have feelings and express them. The other characters (even Brett? I don't know) are all "hard-boiled", as Jake says.

I like that word, and that quote -- "This was Brett that I had felt like crying about. Then I thought of her walking up the street and stepping into the car, as I had last seen her, and of course in a little while I felt like hell again. It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night is another thing." Mike and Jake can't express their jealousies and sadness about Brett because the war has taught them to suppress all their emotions or else go insane. In this they remind me a bit of Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse-Five -- remember how we talked about Billy's inability to connect to people after the war, and how that's reflected in the way he becomes a zoo exhibit on Tralfamador? Soldiers just can't function as human beings in normal society after a war.

And of course Cohn is the first person you meet in the book, even before Jake himself. I still don't understand the significance of the long introduction for Cohn. Do we need to know all about his education and family background? Why does he tell us so much about Cohn? (And leave everything else unsaid?)

I think TIME magazine sums it up really well (and makes the book sound more exciting than it really is): "Meet Jake Barnes: working journalist, expatriate, tough talker, tragic hero. Jake was horribly wounded in the war—in fact, he was effectively gelded—so he spends his time in Paris getting drunk in cafes, nursing his ennui, bantering with his hard-boiled friends, and mooning over his unconsummatable love for a beautiful, aristocratic Englishwoman named Bret Ashley who dines on men three meals a day. This doomed pair, plus a lively cast of romantically reckless expatriates, head to Pamplona for the annual fiesta, where they drink vast amounts of wine, hook up, betray one another, and try to forget the caverns of loss and emptiness that gape inside them. The Sun Also Rises popularized the idea of the "Lost Generation"—but the anomie and disappointment at its heart seem to come around for every generation, sooner or later."

But note that the original TIME review of the book from 1926 wasn't so enthusiastic: "The ironic witticisms are amusing, for a few chapters. There is considerable emotion, consciously restrained quite subtle. Experts may pronounce the book a masterpiece of sex-frustration psychology. But the reader is very much inclined to echo a remark that is one of Jake's favorites and, presumably Author Hemingway's too, "Oh, what the hell!"" (The original review is here.

So basically it went from blah in 1926 to Top 100 Best Books Everrrr in the space of 60 years... I will never understand who decides these things and how.

Ok sorry for writing so long... I hope you still have space to think after reading all this. I want to hear your thoughts too.

Our day today was lightened, if that is the way to put it, by a visit from Ms Vavasour's friend Bun, who joined us for Sunday lunch. I came upon her at noon in the lounge, overflowing a wicker armchair in the bay window, lolling as if helpless there and faintly panting. The place where she sat was thronged with smoky sunlight and at first I could hardly make her out, although in truth she is as unmissable as the late Queen of Tonga. She is an enormous person, of indeterminate age. She wore a sack-coloured tweed dress tightly belted in the middle, which made her look as if she had been pumped up to bursting at bosom and hips, and her short stout cork-coloured legs were stuck out in front of her like two gigantic bungs protruding from her nether regions. A tiny sweet face, delicate of feature and pinkly aglow, is set in the big pale pudding of her head, the fossil remains, marvellously preserved, of the girl that she once was, long ago. Her ash-and-silver hair was done in an old-fashioned style, parted down the centre and pulled back into an eponymous bun... She really is of a prodigious bulk. I thought that if her belt buckle were to fail and the belt snap her trunk would flop into a perfectly spherical shape with her head on top like a large cherry on a, well, on a bun.

-- The Sea, John Banville

John Banville always demands to be re-read.

    ...Yes, this was what I thought adulthood would be, a kind of long indian summer, a state of tranquility, of calm incuriousness, with nothing left of the barely bearable raw immediacy of childhood, all the things solved that had puzzled me when I was small, all mysteries settled, all questions answered, and the moments dripping away, unnoticed almost, drip by golden drip, toward the final, almost unnoticed, quietus.
    There were things of course the boy that I was then would not have allowed himself to foresee, in his eager anticipations, even if he had been able. Loss, grief, the sombre days and the sleepless nights, such surprises tend not to register on the prophetic imagination's photographic plate.

On all sides there were portents of mortality. I was plagued by coincidences; long-forgotten things were suddenly remembered; objects turned up that for years had been lost. My life seemed to be passing before me, not in a flash as it is said to do for those about to drown, but in a sort of leisurely convulsion, emptying itself of its secrets and quotidian mysteries in preparation for the moment when I must step into the black boat on the shadowed river with the coin of passage cold in my already coldening hand.

On his second day. Billy was cleaning behind a radiator, and he found a spoon. To his back was a vat of syrup that was cooling. The only other person who could see Billy and his spoon was poor old Edgar Derby, who was washing a window outside. The spoon was a tablespoon. Billy thrust it into the vat, turned it around and around, making a gooey lollipop. He thrust it into his mouth.

A moment went by, and then every cell in Billy's body shook him with ravenous gratitude and applause.

-- Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut