Rasdhar

This book wasn't on my list of Singapore and Malaysia books to read, but I ran across it in the library and it looked interesting. The book traces the life of young Lao Chee Hong (whose name translates to 'Grand Ambition') from his birth to death, amidst Singapore's rapid development and transformation. An English speaking neighbour, Elizabeth, gives him the western name of 'Sidney' (after Sidney Poitier) - unable to pronounce it, he's known forever more to friends and family by his version of the name, 'Gimme'. From his birth, to his death, Gimme is both, a representative, and a critique of the Singaporean dream - a 'man in white' who conforms to social expectations, follows the expected path to professional success and political power, and gains respect and standing at any cost - but is hampered eventually by his own conformity. The world is changing around Gimme but Gimme cannot, or will not, adapt - this is ultimately his downfall.

Gimme is born on the day Singapore becomes independent and splits from Malaysia, but because of a nurse who bears a grudge against his mother, he is not recognised for what he is: the first child born in the nation of Singapore. This is one of three secrets about his own life that Gimme doesn't know - the second relates to the circumstances of his parents' marriages (exiled from a rich family, disgraced because they're cousins), and the third is the unspeakable suicide of a young man, who is terribly affected after witnessing a humiliating, public punishment imposed on Gimme in primary school. Gimme follows the footsteps of his ambitious, but abrasive mother, who soon outstrips her lackadaisical, passive husband. When rebuked for her aggressive approach to professional success, she tells her husband, “I don’t aspire to be nice. I do what is necessary to get what I want." It's a principle that Gimme follows, but towards the end of the book, as he and his mother reflect on their choices, she asks, "...where did that lead us? Alone. You and me. With all our impeccable achievements to flaunt and no one dear to celebrate with us."

A key theme in the book is Gimme's (and by extension, Singapore society's) struggle to come to terms with homosexuality in society. Gimme himself is straight and homophobic, and when he encounters homosexuality within his own circle, homophobia causes him to lash out. The backdrop of the novel sees how queer people in Singapore lived hidden, but proud lives, and how they struggled to come to terms with social discrimination and harassment. Section 377A of Singapore's Penal Code, introduced under British rule, criminalises homosexuality between men: it has been repealed in 2023, after much struggle, but the book takes place against nascent movements arguing for its removal. Although the author was clearly critiquing social homophobia, the depictions of homophobia in the book were a difficult read, and often very distressing. At the core of the book is the enduring conflict of Singapore society: reconciling individual will and freedom with social pressures of conformity and obedience to law. The book is full of little local references that bring the book to life for anyone familiar with Singapore: thinly veiled allusions to actual political scandals, a depiction of the way Singapore handled the SARS outbreak, life in an HDB flat (government housing, which is still about 90% of housing in Singapore). Even for the non-Singaporean, Sim's wry, satirical tone keeps you engaged.

While this book is not perfect (and could have used some hefty editing), I found it an interesting, valuable - and for the most part, enjoyable read.

I saw a few reviews that suggested an intriguing premise, so Tara Isabella Burton's Here in Avalon ended up on my TBR. Unfortunately, it doesn't live up to the fulsome praise it seems to have received. I notice, increasingly, that reviews are starting to look more and more like rephrased publicity copy. 

The protagonist of this book, Rose, is a 28 year old coder living in New York. Her childhood was chaotic: a largely absent mother left Rose and her older sister, the beautiful, witty, and talented Cecilia, to fend for themselves. Largely through Cecilia's ingenuity, they remained clothed, fed, and moderately educated. Both Cecilia and Rose, as adults, have reacted to this childhood. Cecilia sees romance and adventure in everything, flitting from opportunity to opportunity without ever really following through, and slinking back home whenever things fall apart. A talented pianist, she turns down a music scholarship to play in bars. Rose, organised, efficient, and responsible, lives a tightly-controlled life. Her fiance, a finance bro, and she, listen to improving podcasts and go the gym. He disapproves of flighty Cecilia and the way Rose is constantly bailing her out. 

Cecilia returns home one summer, more distracted and confused than ever. One night, drunk, she confesses to Rose that she impulsively married a man named Paul, and then abruptly leaves him. She's become involved with a strange group of people, perhaps a cult, who perform a cabaret on a boat. It culminates in a vicious argument, and the next day, Cecilia vanishes. For a while, Rose assumes she's just off once again, but the more Rose hears about the cabaret called Avalon, the more concerned she is that Cecilia might be in danger. Over her tech bro fiance's distaste, Rose teams up with Cecilia's husband Paul, and together they begin to hunt for Avalon. When she finds the cabaret troupe, Rose starts to wonder whether they are truly real, or if she has stumbled into some sort of alternative reality. Is Cecilia really ‘away with the fairies'? 

The story had an interesting premise, as I said, but the author cannot carry it through. Every single point, every aspect of every relationship, every character development, is beaten to death with a club from the Department of the Painfully Obvious. It's clear that the author is trying to develop a very romantic story, but it's not romantic, it's just annoying. There's a certain character type she's aiming for: highstrung, damaged women, who yearn for sentimental, magical worlds. Done well, it can be enchanting; done badly, it will make you (horrifically) sympathize with the actual villain of the story, a finance bro who just wants to listen to his podcasts and drink his protein shakes. 

 Japanese honkaku (tr: orthodox) mysteries are structured around rules of deductive reasoning. Through the strategic disclosures of clues, the author leads a careful and attentive reader to the book???s conclusion, sometimes around a twist as well. Honkaku novels emerged in the 1920s, in direct response to the western ???Golden Age??? of detective fiction (Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, etc). Pushkin Vertigo has been translating these to English of late, and last year I read several of them. This book, The Aosawa Murders, by Riku Onda, is part of a newer generation of shin honkaku novels, which advocate a return to this classical style of mystery novels, with ???fair play to the reader??? as a guiding principle. 

In The Aosawa Murders, the identity of the killer is made clear quite early on; you are told that they were identified but killed themselves before they could be convicted. Initially it looks like the mystery we???re untangling is not who did it, but why they did it ??? but by the end of the book, you???re once again asking, was it really that person???s fault? Or was another hand involved? 

This complex story is also narrated in the form of a book about a book about the murder. We are told early on that the crime being investigated is the mass murder of the rich, well-known Aosawa family, through poison delivered in the form of a gift of bottled drinks at a multigenerational birthday celebration. Twenty-seven people are killed, leaving only a housekeeper, who swallows some poison but survives, and young Hisako Aosawa, the beautiful, visually-impaired daughter of the family, who didn???t drink anything. The delivery man, thought to be the killer, is tracked down by detectives, but not before he has already committed suicide. Decades later, Makiko Saiga, a neighbour and one of Hisako???s many admirer-friends, writes a book about the murders, trying to uncover why a seemingly unconnected man would want to kill so many people in an apparently motive-less crime. Her book, The Forgotten Festival, is the only thing she ever publishes, a deeply-researched nonfiction account that has since been forgotten. A few decades later, the Aosawa Murders is purportedly a book about this book, looking back at the events of the murder, the book that followed, retracing Makiko's steps, and re-examining the clues that have since emerged. 

If this sounds too complex, it doesn???t feel that way when you read it. Each chapter is in the form of an interview with the nameless author, who talks first to Makiko about her book, and then to various people involved, including the detectives, a friend of the killer, the housekeeper Kimi, the book's publisher, and finally, the beautiful Hisako herself. On first reading, the end of the story might seem ambiguous ??? but if you???ve been paying careful attention, and you go back, all the little clues fall into place, and you???ll know exactly what happened, even if the author hasn???t laid out explicitly in so many words. The careful, attentive reader is rewarded (which explains so many discontented Goodreads reviews). I enjoyed it. 

 Earlier this year I read Mary Roberts Rinehart's Miss Pinkerton, which is about a nurse named Hilda Adams. Perceptive, organised, and efficient, she occasionally assisted the police with delicate inquiries, enabled by her work providing at-home care, usually to the very rich. Her usual partner in these efforts was Inspector Fuller, a policeman who vociferously defended her talents to all doubters, insisting she was as effective as any of his policemen. Fuller affectionately calls her ???Miss Pinkerton??? for her detection skills.

The Haunted Lady is the fourth, and last of Rinehart's Hilda Adams novels. She did have a small run of short stories to follow, but the series ended here. It really is a shame that we got so few of these, because they are quite charming, and on the whole manage to avoid the common pitfalls of mid-century mystery novels such as overt anti-Semitism, classism, sexism, and racism. I say “on the whole” because these books are, after all, a product of a certain time and era and it's a bit hopeless to expect them to reflect our sentiments today. But problems, as there are, are less obvious than those I encountered in books by Ngaio Marsh or Agatha Christie, for example. Really the only jarring note in this book is when Inspector Fuller says he'd like to take Hilda over his knee after she does something that puts herself at risk - the kind of thing that might happen in I Love Lucy. I know it's meant playfully and is supposed to show how he's concerned about her and also, that it doesn't actually happen (she'd kick his ass) , but I still didn't like it, even as a joke. What I did like most about these books is Hilda's inner conflict: she's constantly torn between feeling revulsed at poking around the private lives of people she's meant to care for, and at the same time, her strong commitment to seeing justice done in the face of crime. It lends the books a nice depth and tension that a boilerplate mystery might lack.

In The Haunted Lady, an elderly, wealthy woman named Mrs. Eliza Fairbanks is perturbed by a series of occurrences in her house. She hears odd noises, finds rats and snakes released in her chamber, and finds her belongings disturbed despite locking her door. Given her age, most people assume that she???s approaching senility, or is paranoid. Mrs Fairbanks, though, is strong-willed, decisive, and firm, and insists she isn???t imagining things. When the sugar for her strawberries is found to be laced with arsenic, she is finally taken seriously. Inspector Fuller of Scotland Yard calls up Miss Hilda Adams, the efficient, observant nurse, and asks her if she will stay at the Fairbanks residence and keep an eye on the old lady, while they try to find out what is happening. 

At the Fairbanks House, Hilda finds a whole cast of suspects. There???s Marian, Eliza???s daughter, who divorced her unfaithful husband, resulting in scandal and ire from Eliza. There???s Frank, Marian???s husband, now married to their former governess, Eileen, who is broke and still paying alimony. There???s Jan, their daughter, seemingly the only guardian of Eliza???s welfare, but Jan is in love with Eliza???s doctor, and they both need money to get started in life. Of course, there???s the doctor too. And then there???s Eliza???s son and daughter-in-law, weak-willed, impoverished Carlton, and Susie, his gauche, ill-mannered wife, who need money as well. When Eliza Fairbanks, who holds the purse strings, is stabbed inside her locked room, Inspector Fuller and Miss Hilda Adams have to figure out who it was that killed her ??? and how? 

The mystery is of the ???had I but known??? variety, combined with a standard locked-room setup, with plenty of clues sprinkled in to aid the reader, but still a satisfying twist at the end. It???s actually Hilda who does most of the detecting, putting herself at risk sometimes, and amassing a series of clues. When she explains it at the end to Inspector Fuller, he is mixed with frustration and admiration and perhaps something more. ???Oh, subtle little Miss Pinkerton!??? he tells her. ???Lovable and clever and entirely terrible Miss Pinkerton! What I am to do about you? I???m afraid to take you and I can???t leave you alone.??? The reader may well agree. I really enjoyed it. 

 Balli Kaur Jaswal is an author with Singaporean roots, now living in Australia. This book won the Sydney Morning Herald???s Best Young Australian Novelist Award in 2014. It traces the evolution of a family, originally from India, living in Singapore from the 1970s to the 1990s. Jaswal writes particularly about the Sikh diaspora, their religious and social cultures, and the struggle to adapt to modernity, particularly outside India and the Punjab region. 

Inheritance is about two generations of a family, living with Singapore and struggling with reconciling their identities amidst a rapidly changing social and economic environment. Harbeer Singh moves to Singapore with his young wife, Dalveer. While he embraces Singapore???s competitive, rigid social environment, she struggles to adapt. They have three children, and she dies in childbirth, never knowing her youngest. The book is divided into three sections, each with a chapter focusing one of the four remaining members of the family. Each family member faces their own, specific peculiar challenges. While Harbeer assimilates into Singapore???s tight, conformist society, he finds that his children do not, and he is trailed constantly by the ghost of his dead wife. The oldest, Gurdev, is most like him but cannot understand his own three daughters, who have different ideas of success and freedom, nor his wife, who hates how society gossips about the rest of his family. Narain, his second son, is gay: homosexuality is illegal in Singapore and Harbeer cannot comprehend nor comes to terms with this: Narain, in turn, can't fit in and struggles to maintain covert relationships. The youngest, Amrit, has mental health issues, struggles to keep a job, has problems with alcohol, and is not diagnosed until late in adulthood: all anathema to the conservative Sikh diaspora, which is quick to condemn them.

The title, ???Inheritance??? refers not only to the property and money that Harbeer thinks his younger children ought not to inherit, for their many ???sins??? but also to the genetic links: a family history of mental health issues, so visible in his daughter, possibly emerging in his grand-daughter, and in himself. It refers as well, to their culture and upbringing, and how they carry it from country to country, struggling to adapt and evolve. This was a very well-written, but sad book. It did end on a note of hope, and I???ll definitely be reading her other books. 

Eileen Chang's The Rouge of the North is actually the fourth iteration of a story that she wrote and re-wrote through her life. It was published first in 1943 in Chinese as The Golden Cangue; cangue being a sort of wooden pillory, used to penalise criminals in imperial China. The story had some success at the time; she subsequently translated into English and published it, and it can still be found (with difficulty) in anthologies of her stories. Much later, in 1967, not long after the death of her second husband and amid financial troubles, she substantially rewrote the same story in English as the The Rouge of the North, an expanded version of her well-received short story. It did not do well in English at the time, but a serialised Chinese version saw substantial success, sparking a brief revival of her career before a long, slow, lonely decline, both professionally and personally. I learned much about this process of writing and rewriting from a detailed introductory essay by David Der-Wei Wang in this Harvard University Press edition of the English version of The Rouge of the North, although looking back, I wish I had read the novel first and the essay after because it undoubtedly shaped my understanding of the book. With that said, I think for non-Chinese readers like myself, the essay is vital, because this is a story full of complex allusion and metaphor, and would have been much harder to appreciate without the context and explanations he provides. I was also lucky to have a colleague who recommended this book to me, having read the first version in Chinese when he was in school, whom I frequently bothered for explanations or clarifications.

The Rouge of the North traces the life of Yindi, a beautiful woman, born into an impoverished family. Living with her brother and sister-in-law, and their children, she sells sesame oil, and resists, enraged, the overtures of local men, who come by the shop to tease the 'Sesame Oil Beauty'. Although she harbours an interest in the quiet, reclusive pharmacist's assistant who works across the road, she recognises his utter lack of ambition does not match her own desires for a better, richer life. She accordingly accepts a proposal from a wealthy, aristocratic family to marry their second son, described to her as a blind man, but kind and gentle. On marriage, of course, she discovers that she has wedded an invalid, addicted to opium and in no way a suitable partner, and the life of wealth and comfort she had imagined is instead a cold, dispiriting prison from which she can't escape. A southerner in a northern family, a poor girl amidst rich people, her marriage is a series of humiliations, to which she reacts by becoming increasingly selfish, arrogant, and rebellious. Desperate for romantic love, which her husband cannot fulfil, she embarks on a doomed affair with one of her brothers-in-law; he in turn, ultimately rejects her. Through the story, we see her ire directed towards the matriarch of the house, her mother-in-law, who holds the keys to her fate. As the novel progresses, Yindi slowly becomes the woman she despises: the family's wealth crumbling, her unhappiness spiraling. Towards the end of the book, she is matriarch of a small household, respected but not loved, deferred to, but friendless, and defined by her strict adherence to the customs and traditions that she once strained against. Sitting on her bed, she drifts back into memories of being a young unmarried girl, fending off suitors at the sesame oil shop. "Everything she drew comfort from was gone, had never happened. Nothing much had happened to her yet."

In David Der-Wei Weng's preface to this story of Yindi's spiralling decline, he asks what we are to make of the way Chang wrote, and rewrote, and wrote again the same story, over and over, wrestling with ideas of female agency and victimization, of the way in which women sought to reach for power within constrained domestic spheres. It's too facile, he argues, to suggest that she is, through this story, reshaping and retelling her own life's story in different ways. Rather, he looks at the way she didn't just write and rewrite, but also how she moved between two languages, creating and recreating the same story (translation does not seem to be an appropriate word here) to create a more realistic account. Weng writes that the character of Yindi goes from the first version of the story to the last in progression, changing from "...a tragic monster into a desolate woman." As I have only read one of four versions, I can't confirm: but in The Rouge of the North, Chang writes almost dispassionately, recording Yindi's eventual ensnaring into the traditions she tried unsuccessfully to escape. As Weng put it, "She wants to find her own man and is rewarded by a living dead man; she is torn by adulterous desires in her younger days only to settle into her widowed life with formidable stoicism; she seeks to end her life in the middle of the novel, but outlives all the other major characters. Shuttling between the possibilities and impossibilities of her life, Yindi is never what she appears or wants to be; her transgressive desires continually throw her back into the closure of repetition."

Even though this is a short novel, really a novella, it is a challenging read because each sentence is carefully crafted, and I'm not surprised it took me most of the month to get through this carefully. For all that Yindi is increasingly unlikeable, it is difficult not to feel your heart break for her, or to be transported by Chang's very evocative account of her life.

 Ambedkar is one of India's most significant legal and political scholars, and an icon of social transformation. A member of the historically oppressed Dalit castes, at the bottom of the caste hierarchy, he surmounted incredible challenges to achieve education, then higher education, and then political power. He is best known for the vital role he played in drafting India's Constitution (as a qualified lawyer, and also a well-regarded economist). Many know of Gandhi; not as many know of Ambedkar outside in India, and particularly of Ambedkar's criticism of Gandhi for his failure to tackle caste discrimination coherently. To many belonging to the oppressed castes, he is known affectionately as ‘Baba Sahib' - a term of respect and endearment. Columbia University in the US has a significant Ambedkar archive, because he studied there, and was a student of John Dewey, who influenced him greatly. His work in the US, therefore, is comparatively better documented, including his correspondence with civil rights activists there, and their common understanding of the situation of oppressed castes and Black people across nations. But, he also studied in London, at the London School of Economics, later joining the Bar, and building support for his activism. This book fills a vital gap in the Ambedkar canon by examining his time in London, his work as a lawyer, and the society he lived in. It's an edited volume, consisting of chapters by various scholars. 

The last few years have seen a resurgence of Ambedkar scholarship. I made a list of ten books recently released that I wanted to read, and this is the first one. I think it's a great collection. The first three chapters study his time at LSE: the curriculum he covered, his contemporaries and friends, and his legal education at Gray's Inn. The next two cover his involvement in political efforts towards independence in the 1920s, engaging in the round table debates that brought India partial franchise at this time, under colonial rule and his particular advocacy for representation for the Dalits. Jaffrelot's chapter in particular, is really good: he examines how Ambedkar went from seeking reform in the Hindu religion to rejecting it altogether on the basis of caste. Ambedkar later converted to Buddhism, and even today it is not uncommon for Dalits to engage in conversion en masse, in response to ongoing caste violence. The second half of the book is really new material, documenting his engagement with international activists. 
 

Cristina Campo (1924-1977) translated extensively from English to Italian, but wrote only a small amount of original works - some scripts for radio, some poetry, a few stories and essays. These were collected and published in 1991, and this 2023 NYRB is the first English edition. The translator, Alex Andriesse, tells us that Campo, a highly competent translator from English, wrote in a style was almost deliberately inaccessible to non-Italian readers, distinguished by her particular use of 'Italian's nontransferable resources'. I don't read Italian myself, but it is impossible for me to tell whether the particularly labored, affected style is her own or Andriesse's. I found Campo hard going, in particular because I think she was writing for a small, select audience of which I was not an intended member. She drops references, and quotes in quotation marks, but does not attribute them: extensive endnotes from Campo herself and the translator are sometimes useful, sometimes not, and if you have not read what she has read, or been in her milieu, then a lot is likely to go over your head, as it did mine.

Having said that, there are some wonderfully incisive aspects to her non-fiction writing. Here are short essays on Donne, a neatly constructed account that goes from his life, to his influences, to those that influenced him, and particularly the way he balances romantic imagery with precise depiction ("...thhe enduring mystery of an art informed and illuminated to the end by a more or less arcane symbolism that walks along with him and follows him and is inseparable from him...") and on Simone Weil's Venice Saved ("Only such an undivided sense of reality has the power to create, in a work of poetry, a corresponding measure of truth..."). Included here also are some of her essays on the subject of fairy tales, which she was entirely enraptured by. She writes in an essay titled 'A Rose' about the fable of Beauty and the Beast, in which the Beast is depicted as a suffering martyr, every night subjecting himself, his intellect, and his appearance to ridicule and mockery. To Campo this is not a Sisyphean project, but a Persephonian (?) one. On the Beast, she says, "Girded in the age of horror and ridicule...he risked hatred and execration of what was dear to him; he descended into the Underworld and made her descend there too."

The title of this collection comes from Campo's best known essay, 'The Unforgivable', which is included in this book, but I found another translation and commentary by Andrea di Serego Alighieri and Nicola Masciandaro, available online here https://glossator.org/volumes/ as well. Campo draws from an Ezra Pound poem ("Come, my songs, let us speak of perfection -/We shall get ourselves rather disliked.") to make the case against criticism; and particularly, against the performative public life of the writer in society, instead lauding those like Djuna Barnes who live as recluses. To her, above all is style - which is culture, solitude, a 'heightened feeling for life'. Such writers, she argues, "have looked at beauty and not withdrawn from it," but are a fading group. She closes with advice: "Sit with your back to the wall, read Job and Jeremiah. Wait your turn. Every line read is a gain. Every line in the unforgivable book." While much of this is deeply moving, there are also the well-worn iterations familiar to anyone on facebook today - people don't read anymore, no one understands language, younger people are far too simplistic; at one point she questions whether her own generation is even capable of reading Proust anymore (reminder that Campo died in 1997, and fortunately never lived to be horrified by Booktok). I find that kind of thinking unimaginative, and indeed, a little lazy; Campo seems unaware that the same might be said of her beloved Proust by those that pre-dated him, or indeed of her own rather laborious and florid style.

All in all, this is a challenging, but worthwhile read. It was released this year, so hasn't been reviewed much apart from one essay in the TLS, which is far more useful than my wittering.

This book is about the healthcare industry, medical care, and wellness, chiefly in an American context.

I should clarify that I personally, staunchly stand by scientific research in this regard, and am dismayed by the rise of anti-vaccination movements, and the general distrust of medicine during Covid. Having said that, I do understand that the way healthcare is structured in the US, and more globally, the history of discrimination on gender, race, and sexuality in health care, do provide grounds for doubting the industry as a whole. There's a tension between these two concepts in Ehrenreich's book that she can't quite resolve, so she goes back and forth between “the insurance companies are making you take medicines you don't need” to “stop believing junk you read on the internet”. I believe the goal was to establish nuance, but her style is very anecdotal, and so easy to be skeptical about in itself. Even when she's debunking points, her tendency to draw conclusions based on singular examples that range from op-eds to twitter posts is very disconcerting. I'm not saying all writing should be data-driven, but surely claims about scientific research should be somewhat better sourced.

On the plus side, there's a lot of interesting fact and detail in the book that I wanted to follow up on. In particular, she discussed the work of Robert Trivers, a scientist, member of the Black Panther Party (they later ex-communicated him), and one of the first to identify the genetic stakes in parenthood. She referenced his book, Wild Life: Adventures of an Evolutionary Biologist, which I immediately wanted to read. 

The book in general is quite glum. Her theme seems to be largely, ‘death is inevitable, why even bother'. Consider this excerpt: “So much then, for the hours - and years - you may have devoted to fitness. The muscles that have been so carefully sculpted and tone stiffen when calcium from the dead body leaks into them, causing rigor mortis, and loosening only when decomposition sets in. The organs we nurtured with superfoods and supplements abandon their appointed functions.....Everything devolves into a stinking pool, or what may sound even worse, a morsel in a rat's digestive system.” She wrote this book at 76, after surviving cancer, and deciding for herself that she was done with scans and checks and probes. I understand that she was tired. But this isn't a model for everyone, especially the young. While we are all going to die, we do have to live until death. The inevitability of death is no reason at all to give up on living, or living well. In an NYT review, Parul Sehgal wrote, “It???s reasonable, even honorable to so coolly make peace with the inevitable. But I confess wanting a bit more raging against the dying of the light.” I agree! 

I read and reviewed Sim's other book Let's Give it Up for Gimme Lao! earlier this year. I quite enjoyed that book; it was a fun read, with sharp satire and humour. I was therefore looking forward to this book, but I feel rather let down. I don't think it lived up to the promise of its predecessor, and despite the fact that it won the Epigram Prize in 2018, I didn't think it was particularly good. 

The Riot Act presents a fictionalised account of the 2013 Little India riot in Singapore, where migrant workers, primarily from India, attacked a bus after it fatally struck a migrant labourer. The event and its aftermath not only displayed the powerful control and censorship exercised by the Singapore government, but also the terrible plight of migrant workers, who build the city's infrastructure but are treated with disparate, exploitative, and often cruel regulations and behavior. T

The events that followed (a targeted alcohol ban, heavy fees to be paid by political bloggers, a public protest, scandals concerning the rich and powerful) are all well known in Singaporean politics, but Sim deals with these issues with a tone that isn't sharp, satirical,or even particularly funny. The tone instead is of a sniggering schoolboy who has yet to outgrow his fear of girls. The book is narrated from the perspective of three women, and while I don't think that men should not write from the perspective of women (or vice versa), this book is a great example of how some men are unable to write about women at all. Each woman in a book that focuses on women is depicted as malicious, manipulative, cowardly, and stupid; the only characters positively depicted are gay men or dead migrant labourers. It certainly says a great deal about the author; I don't think it says very much about the events he is claiming to portray. This is a mean-spirited, unpleasant little book and I did not care for it. 

Magadela Zyzak is a Polish-born writer, now living in the US, and this novel was written in English. Set in the imaginary Slavic country of Scalvusia, in the 1930s, the book follows Barnabas Pierkiel, a young swineherd, very enamoured with his own beauty, and bent upon seducing Roosha, the mistress of another man. It's difficult to describe what this book is like: I've seen it called a picaresque, a folk tale, a satire, and an adventure. The truth is it is all of these at once and none of them. It's written in this mocking, absurdist style that will either annoy you or thoroughly entertain you (I found it funny in a slightly dark, terrifying way, but I can see how some might not). The book is often ribald, rife with references to Scalvusia's imaginary history, customs, and practices, and full of remarkable small asides that merit close and careful attention. Reading this book was like enjoying a really unusual meal, to me - I ate it slowly and found each bite interesting. Like very successful writers who write in their second-language, Zyzak takes the rules of English and twists them to produce something completely new.

Barnabas Pierkiel believes himself to be very beautiful: the first chapter is titled, "In which the hero self-admires". Indeed, you could spend a fair bit of time on the index alone, which has chapter titles like little gems: "In which Barnabas discovers an arboreal abomination"; "In which too much transpires to be summed up," and "In which Barnabas encounters Satan". Living in a small village called Odolechka, Barnabas tends his pigs, admires his own jawline reflected in a pan full of water, and clumsily tries to woo Roosha, a beautiful Romani (the author says 'gypsy') woman who is the mistress of a local wealthy businessman, his rival, von Grushka. Among the cast of this absurd set up are Barnabas' grim grandmother ("endowed with negligible imagination and no tolerance for daydreaming"), a priest, Kumashko, tormented by his own desires and driven insane by pondering on a fig tree, Apollonia, the athletic and miserable wife of the ineffective local police chief, Barnabas' murderous cousin, escaped from a local asylum, and Duchess Dorotka, Barnabas' prize pig. To win Roosha, the naive Barnabas performs a series of increasingly absurd quests: in the background, the slow infiltration of Nazis into their village turns the comedic tone to something darker, as Barnabas bumbles through.

Zyzak is leaning heavily on stereotypes of rural people, whom she describes as unintelligent, violent, and narrow-minded, but her portrayal is not without sympathy. The broader picture she's trying to draw is of the effect that the Soviet regime has had on the lives of these people, and of the looming threat of Nazism to come, as well as the social discrimination directed towards the Roma people. The plot is minimal, and I think the focus really should be not on what happens, so much as how it unfolds - slowly at first, and then with stunning rapidity. This was a very unusual book, and I'm still not sure if I really liked it or if I was just fascinated by how bizarre it is. I'll leave you with a little quote, to taste (it is both, violent and ribald, so be warned):

"One harvest afternoon, his mother (who, sadly, not long after that harvest, had perished, it was said, of acute incomprehension after being shown into the private back room of the tavern to identify the corpse of Barnabas' father, who had stripped nude with his drinking buddies to play what later were reported as "men's games," which, harmlessly enough began with Olek the carpenter drinking a liter of vodka from Boleswav Pierkiel's boot, but then escalated into Kazhimiezh the shepherd cutting off his big toe with Olek's hand-cranked spinning saw. At this point, the archived police report maintains, Boleswav, not to be bested, grabbed the still-spinning saw and shouting, "Watch this, then!" swung it at himself, to the detriment of the connection between head and neck. "It's funny," says the testimony of Kazhimiezh in the report, "when he was young, he once put on his sister's underclothes. But he died like a man.") had left the cottage door ajar, and Barnabas had crawled into the field." (p.9)

Do you see what I mean? It's very strange, and very dark. Zyzak is better known now as a film director, and this is her first novel. She will have a second book out this year, and I'm likely to read it too (and hopefully, I shan't 'perish of acute incomprehension'). I am very interested in seeing how she follows this up.

This is a book about the Sri Lankan civil war, but it is not just a book about the Sri Lankan civil war. It is really a book about justice, indifference, and courage, amidst unspeakable violence. Early in the book, Ganeshananthan narrates how Sinhalese men went down the street, seeking out Tamil homes and businesses to burn, Tamil people to slaughter, in the middle of riots. They used electoral rolls to find and identify these people and places. In 1992, when Mumbai, India was gripped by riots, the Shiv Sena party did the exact same thing - using electoral rolls to find Muslim houses, drag out the men and beat them, drag out the women for worse. I know, because I was there, and because I belonged to a family that had Hindus, and Muslims, Christians and Jews, we had our front door marked in the middle of night by rioters who left posters identifiying us that said 'Garv se kaho hum Hindu hain' ('Say with pride we are Hindus'), and we had friends and families who tried to help us by printing signs to cover up these posters, which said 'Prem se kaho hum insaan hain' ('Say with love we are human'). In her late dementia, my grandmother, gripped with memories of those days, would wake up at night, saying 'They're coming, they're coming'. So, I didn't live through the civil war in Sri Lanka, and I can't speak for this experience, but my own lived experience is caught so acutely in her finely-crafted expression of this kind of violence that I wept, and so I cannot be objective about this book; only to say that I was gripped by it.

We could not believe it - to begin to believe all this, we had to write it down. You must understand: I have to tell myself again, because even though I was there it seems impossible.

I can, however, tell you what it is about: in Jaffna, 1981, Sashikala Kulenthiren, known as 'Sashi', grows up in a Tamil family that prizes education above all. Her four brothers are dedicated to their education: Niranjan, the eldest and gentlest, is almost qualified as a doctor; her next two brothers, Dayalan and Seelan are studying to be engineers, her youngest brother, Aran, is still in schoo, like her, and Sashi and her neighbour, a boy she calls K., are both hoping to get into medical college. As the Sri Lankan civil war begins, and signs of ethnic violence emerge, Sashi loses her brothers one by one: to violent death, to those that join in groups for reasons just and unjust, and ultimately, to those that escape the conflict altogether. The book follows Sashi's life; through medical school, through her family's travails, through until she is in New York, in 2009, making a futile bed to have the U.N. intervene in a bloody conflict that world ignored. Although this is a fictional account, it was built on two decades of research, Sashi's mentor in the books, Anjali Premachandran, is based on the real life doctor, human rights activist, Rajani Thiranagama, who was assassinated after publishing a book documenting the violence, torture, and rapes committed by both, the Indian Peacekeeping Forces and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. Sashi's story may be fictional, but the extraordinary courage that she showed, in her profession as a doctor and her work, is based on the works of dozens of real people who put their lives on the line to document horrors that the world ignored. Ganeshananthan handles this complex, difficult, subject matter with a touch so deft that it never feels overwrought or exploited for sensational effect. There is emotion, but not melodrama.

Early in the book, the local library where Sashi and her brothers study is burned down by Sinhalese policemen. As a young teenager, she insists on going to see the damage despite the risks; her brothers take her. As she says:

They had torched the elegant palace of white rooms where Seelan and K and I had studied, its clean and well-lit shelves, the rare book section with the beautifully lettered palm leaf manuscripts. Dayalan had shown some to me when had first begun working there. Ninety thousand volumes gone, some of them original and single copies. Our past, but also - oh, the beautiful wooden tables where I had turned the pages of my textbooks and my brothers' textbooks! - the future. Imagine the places you grew up, the places you studied, places that belonged to your people, burned. But I should stop pretending that I know you. Perhaps you do not have to imagine. Perhaps your library, too, went up in smoke.

Towards the end of the book, as Sashi is without any of her brothers, without her friend K, without her mentor, without her family, she says, "I want you to understand: it does not matter if you cannot imagine the future. Still, relentless, it comes." This is how the book is written, directly addressed to the reader. It is a difficult approach to sustain, but Ganeshananthan does it, so that you turn page after page with Sashi, following her fight through her fear and loss and grief until it has honed her into a woman who is walking into a future she can't imagine, but with her spine held straight, no matter the cost. I can't even tell if you I liked this book or I hated it: only that I wept through it. If that's not a testimony to the skill of the writer, I don't know what is.

 When I had hit chapter 7 of this book, I went back to the front page to check the title. The author calls her book a “mind-bending journey”, but halfway through the book, my mind was not only unbent, but actively bored. A full half of this book is dedicated to chronicling the author allowing herself to be ritually humiliated in new and inventive ways by a young, spoiled, insufferable, trust-fund brat who runs a gallery, doesn't want the average “schmoe” to have access to the art world, talks about everything around art except the art itself, and will spend entire hours criticising her appearance, writing, ethics, clothing, and marriage. I don't know what she gained from this experience; fortunately, she doesn't either - and it hardly needs to be said, it tells neither the author nor the reader anything about understanding art. There's a pervasive internet myth that all of art (not some of it, but all of it) is an elitist conspiracy to launder money, prevalent among people who have access to an unprecedented amount of information on art at their fingertips without any inclination to ever exercise that access. Bianca Bosker's book is for them. It is not for me. 

Here are the insights that bent her mind, apparently. There many rich white male people in the art world. Some of them are sexist and racist. Money determines a great deal of things. Elitism is not uncommon. Bullying is not uncommon. I defy you to find anyone who spent five minutes on the subject and did not figure this out for themselves without having to turn one lousy internship into seven chapters of excruciatingly dull complaining. All of this true. None of it is surprising, and it is not at all mind-bending. If she wanted a famous artist to sit on her face for the experience, she could have done so without trying to convince the rest of us we'd get our minds bent by the experience too. Towards the end of the book, having failed the ‘mind-bending' bit of the title, she finally turns her attention to the ‘learning how to see' art aspect. It turns out you have to look at it. She learns this by working as a security guard in a museum. It's an insight that apparently could not have been gained by simply going to the museum and looking at art. Some pop science detours later, she concludes that the meaning lies in what you draw from it. This is a very roundabout way of saying, “I don't know anything about art but I know what I like.” Yawn. 

Susan Casey's The Underworld, a book about deep sea exploration, has received rave reviews, but I found myself underwhelmed. Substantively, her book contains very little information that isn't already online: this is not new information, but old material, presented newly. Unfortunately, this leads to two major shortcomings.

First, the chief value she adds to existing information is a series of in-depth interviews with people engaged in exploring and studying the deep sea. Her interviews, however, border on hagiographic - in fact, she goes out of her way to dismiss and defend some of them against serious concerns about the colonial nature of their endeavours, instead of taking these arguments seriously, as they ought to be. It feels as though she uncritically accepts and believes anything she's told: her scepticism is reserved only for a museum docent who mansplains, she says, and has nothing to do with the subject material of the book. I'm not the only one to feel this way: in the Scientific American, a review notes that “Although Casey pays lip service to Vescovo's critics, The Underworld would have benefited from a more thorough examination of ocean exploration's politics and power dynamics. In the 21st century, must our most celebrated adventurers remain impossibly rich white guys?” https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/todays-deep-sea-explorers-are-mineral... It is particularly acute when you realise that Vescovo, a rich hobbyist explorer who receives fulsome praise from Casey, is also known for doing reckless solo dives and freewheeling on safety precautions. After the Triton sub incident, and the vast amount of public funds expended on attempting to rescue the rich and reckless, can we afford to be so flippant about the subject? 

Second, when you have no new research to contribute, but you write an essay, the expectation is that you write in a manner that presents the information lucidly, in a way that is engaging to the reader, and a pleasure to read. Otherwise, you're writing a high school science report. I found her writing passable at best, and often amateurish, bordering on egregious. Debris around the wreck of the Titanic is described as a “pi??ata of tragedy”. When she's not being flippantly funny, she's buried deep in the purplest of prose, as though she had never come across an adjective or a cliche she didn't immediately want to insert in her book. Perhaps I'm being a little harsh - it's clear that she's passionate about the ocean, cares deeply about conservation, and loves the water. Still, when the quality of nature writing is set to a high bar by authors like Helen MacDonald, Robin Wall Kimmerer, or Camille Dungy, it's hard to accept this level of glib, uncritical pedestrian prose.
 

Anthony Berkeley originally published this as a serialised story titled Cicely Disappears in the Daily Mail, under his pseudonym, A Monmouth Platts. It remained out of print for years, until it was reissued in 2021 by the Collins Crime Club. A classic, country house mystery, that typifies the Golden Age of Crime Writing in English, it nonetheless raises some uncomfortable questions for the reader about class and wealth, antisemitism, and other forms of implicit prejudices.

In The Wintringham Mystery, we begin with our protagonist, Stephen Munro, who, having returned from military service, squanders his fortune and consequently finds himself impoverished. The opening scene consists of Munro relating to Bridger, his valet (and former orderly, in the military) that he has to let him go as he can no longer afford to pay his salary. Instead, Munro has - horror of horrors - found himself a job, as a footman, in the house of Lady Susan Carey, an elderly, wealthy woman with a country estate. In a deeply uncomfortable scene that was clearly written to be funny, Munro repeatedly mocks Bridger for failing to react with adequate shock and astonishment to this fall in his employer's status; today, we know that Bridger's lack of response may not only be due to the emotional deficits that Munro attributes to him, but also to the fact that he is employed by Munro, and bound by conventions of class that will become more apparent as we go on. If I'm to be uncharitable, I could also say that Bridger isn't particularly shocked by the concept of working for a living, more generally. In a touching display of devotion (or lack of self esteem), Bridger refuses to take Munro's recommendation letter and find himself another valet position, and instead accompanies him to Lady Susan's house, where he takes, I imagine, a substantial paycut to work as under-gardener.

At Lady Susan's, Munro has difficulty adjusting to being a footman, after having been a gentleman of leisure. The hours are long, the butler, Mr. Martin, does not take a shine to him, and Lady Susan informs him that his name is now William ("We always call the footman 'William'). Lady Susan's upcoming weekend party entails a lot of work, and Munro is clearly unaccustomed to work. When the butler, Martin, lists out his duties, Munro marvels, "It seems to me that the footman's life is not an idle one." Oh, I wanted to smack him! His life is further complicated by the arrival of two people he knew from his former life: Freddie Venables, Lady Susan's nephew and Munro's former classmate from school, and Pauline Mainwaring, his former fiance. In response to Munro's fall from status, they respond differently. Freddie continues to awkwardly treat Munro as an old friend even as Munro serves him drinks, valeting, carries his luggage, getting in his way and drawing Lady Susan's ire, and Pauline Mainwaring cuts him dead. It turns out she is engaged again, this time to a wealthy financier, who is naturally, Sir Julius Hammerstein, and in accordance with Golden Age Mystery writers' tendencies towards anti-semitism, described unkindly and with reference to all the usual stereotypes. At the garden party are a cast of characters with all sorts of motives and intentions. It doesn't take long before Freddie Venables blurts out to the others that Stephen is one of them, albeit in footman's livery. Pauline unbends and chats with him normally. The others refuse to be valeted by one of their own class, unpacking their own clothes.

The plot get started with two key developments. The first, is that Cicely, Lady Susan's beloved niece, vanishes. Evidently distraught, she initially skips the party to go sailing with friends, but then changes her mind and returns. During an attempted seance (rich people goofing around), the lights are turned off, and when they come back on, she's gone. Meanwhile, the butler, increasingly resentful at the way Munro is treated with casual friendliness, unlike all the other servants complains to Lady Susan about him, as does Sir Julius Hammerstein, who doesn't like Pauline and Stephen resuming a friendship. Lady Susan decides to solve both problems with one stone: she fires Munro as a footman and rehires him as a detective. Munro moves out of servants quarters into a bedroom in the same house and proceeds to spend the rest of the book ineptly investigating Cicely's disappearance, and trying to decide how he can have his Pauline back, when he's unable to support her in the lifestyle within which she (and he) were raised. The resolution of the mystery is sufficiently twisty: when first published, the Mail offered prizes for anyone who could solve it before the last chapter was out, and among the unsuccessful applicants was Agatha Christie. While entertaining enough, it is difficult for the modern reader to get around the deep-rooted classism, resting on an implicit, unstated assumption about the intellectual and moral superiority of the rich (in case you were wondering, yes, (spoiler for the ending) a servant committed the various crimes in the book . When Pauline tells Munro that she won't mind being a poor man's wife, and cooking and cleaning, he disputes it, telling her that her enthusiasm will eventually wear off, and she'll grow to resent him and the domestic labor. I'd imagine the very stoic Bridger might have had something to say about that, atleast internally, but instead, he is her "servant for life," because she once greeted him politely and shook his hand. To sum up, the mystery is a nice puzzle, the rest of the book is just out of sync with today's times.

 This is a book that made a lot of best-of lists last year, but unfortunately, the interesting premise did not pay off in good execution. The setting of the story is the fictional Alaskan town of Point Mettier, based on the actual town of Whittier. The reason that this city has the name of ‘city under one roof' is that all the 250-odd residents quite literally live in one massive, interconnected apartment block. The city itself is only accessible via a tunnel, and in case of storms, access is cut off. So this is an excellent setting for a locked-room mystery, either traditional, or with a twist. 

The book opens with a local teenager, Amy, discovering a dismembered hand and foot on the shore of a local lake (something like the real Salish foot mysteries). Quickly, a local mentally-ill woman, Lonnie, who keeps a pet moose and was formerly institutionalised, comes under suspicion. A detective from Anchorage, Cara, who is visiting to help with the investigation, has her own secrets and reasons for visiting the town. The story is told from each of their POVs, alternating back and forth. The author is a former Hollywood screenwriter: as might be expected, the dialogue is decent, but the rest of the story is very badly narrated, almost as though they were, in fact, relying on visuals to be added later. 

The other thing I didn't care for, in this novel, was the almost-caricatured descriptions of local native populations, who are shown as crime-ridden and violent, and also, immune to law enforcement because of some unexplained ‘native protection'. Add to that some unnecessary howlers (characters described as being in two places at the same time - editors should have caught that; mentions of elk tracks (another reviewer pointed out there aren't elk on mainland Alaska) and it felt, overall, badly written. Finally, all the cops in this book behave badly, but are presented as heroes. There's the ‘good old boy' local sheriff, his naive but enthusiastic trainee, and the jaded visiting outsider, all of whom repeatedly break their own rules but are never held accountable or considered even slightly critically and are instead presented as heroes. In 2024, this just comes across as particularly deluded. 

In sum, this is a made-for-Netflix bait book. Not for me. 

Her characters remain absolutely insufferable as usual - they are largely one-dimensional (her heroines all have anxiety and complain a lot, her heroes have no personality but nice voices and nice eyes and many muscles). Look, I understand that the function of books like this is to let the reader project their own fantasies onto the minimally-developed characters, but having read good romance, I have a very low tolerance for bad romance. However, I have no one but myself to thank for subjecting myself to this, and cannot in all fairness, accuse her books of excessive whining (whinery?) if I am here whining about them too. 

I do think that she did try to tackle the typical ‘city girl goes to small town, falls in love with local carpenter, abandons evil career, discovers love and babies' trope, but the problem is that she keeps telling you how she's about to subvert it, and then she barely manages to. It would be really interesting to see the trope actually subverted by an author who understood that you can show without telling.