Month: September 2024

• To read a good story

  It is after 26 years as a self-professed avid reader (after my first self-read book at 5, on the Teletubbies), that i made the stunning revelation that I do not, in fact, love to read. It is a good story that I love.

  Before I go into the catalyst for this realization, let’s comb through the various clues to this I should have picked up.

  This is why I spend hours on Reddit, disregarding my husband’s scoffing that these supposed happenings are ‘not real’. So what? I’m in it for the story.

  This is why I find personal blogs just as absorbing as novels – if not more so – because they have the additional allure of being real, and raw.

  This is why I relish reading Wikipedia summaries of book and movie plots.

  This is why I read primarily fiction. The skill of reading was developed out of mere necessity owed to my thirst for stories.

  This is why I can and have read tons of research papers and non-fiction, but each is one too many because they are, truly, a spectacular yawn and a half to me.

  Why then don’t I love other forms of story-telling as much? Why do movies and shows, or even audio books, not hold as much intrigue? I think it is because I love so much a good story that their re-telling must be borne solely out of my imagination to be perfectly as I want it to be imagined. It is not the effects, the acting, the screenplay that moves me, but the core of it; the story. I watch something onscreen when I want to enjoy one of those. When I want a story, I read.

  Now back to the catalyst. At dinner just awhile ago, K alludes to a story he is reading in enticing bits and pieces. I know neither the context, the middle, nor the end. I instinctively knew this was a juicy morsel of a story, I felt that tang of anticipation of my tongue I get when I sink into a story I just knew would be good: ironic, surprising, teasing, satisfying.

  Experiencing a deep envy that I could not ‘have’ this story (it is written in Polish), what came next was a self-reflexive understanding of my lust for the story. Not just to have something to read, but to have this story be told in an exciting, immersive way.

  September 10, 2024

  books, literature, reading, revelation

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• Book Review: Lies and Sorcery by Elsa Morante

  

  A slow, passionate, depraved, descent into madness.

  Elsa Morante is a master at writing characters to life: each of them with their secret desires and fears unspooling like tangled yarn, knitted together into a quilt of inextricable insanity.

  And borrowing from her genius, our dear, ‘poor’ Elisa – by-product and narrator of the insanity – inherits the masterful metafictional writing of Elsa in her own retelling. At no point of her narration did I doubt the necessity of Elisa’s enervating and painful detailing of her memory.

  For those brave enough to venture forth into this complex multi-generational family drama, let it be foretold: the last two parts (400 pages long) felt like being trapped in a fever dream; a dream in which you descend an infinite and illusory stairwell that never ends and is the same as the last turn.

  Yet, it all made sense in context of Elisa’s position and motive: while Elsa is an ingenious writer (and cannot be forgiven were she the narrator), Elisa is decidedly not one. This is the reason I not merely tolerated, but perversely relished, the spiraling labyrinth of delirium that spanned 300 pages when it could have been 3.

  I love flawed characters, and in this novel you will be hard-pressed to find a single character not flagrantly flawed. I surprised myself by finding the capacity to be heartbroken for some of them (namely Francesco, Alessandra), and noted that this is not a reflection of any redeeming qualities they may have, but the depth of cruelty others’ flaws have flagellated them by.

  Indeed, this is a story about heartbreak, cruelty, delusion, derision, and obsession disguised as love. I loved it, docking one star only because I feared that if it were 2 pages longer I would have myself succumbed to lunacy.

  September 9, 2024

  book review, Elsa Morante, fiction, Italian literature, lies and sorcery, literature

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• Popo, Eih Eih

  the way i bite into a too-sweet coconut candy and remember to call my grandma. “Popo buy for you!” exclaims Eih Eih, each time. Not in her native tongue, her words belie the urgency to express another’s love.

  i imagine she thinks about her mother, back home, humming a Burmese tune that threads through her string of sisters on a straw-stuffed bed. “She prays every night,” my grandma tells me.

  Left unsaid, the ponderance of devotion. My Popo in a bone-wearied gait down the aisle for the right brand of candy; Eih Eih on her knees, palms in a pious convergence; the sweet crunch between my teeth that bids me dial that eight digits i’ve worn into numerous keypads for two decades past.

  September 1, 2024

  burma, family, grandma, love, myanmar, parental love, singapore, transient workers singapore

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