extemporally

Gone Case, by Dave Chua.

So this won a literature prize back in the 90s, when it was published, and I can totally see why. Omg! I really liked this, which was surprising, given that I tend not to like a lot of realist (and non-realist - I mean, for reasons related to the genres I've arbitrarily dichotomised these books into) Singaporean fiction, I think Daren Shiau's Heartlands (definitive Singaporean novel? really?) scarred me for life.

But this was so deft at characterisation and social commentary wrapped up in the same paragraph:

Aunt is hard to like. She always ends up doing the wrong things. She cooks dinner even though we hate it because she puts too much salt in everything, and she leaves us books - thick Enid Blyton books or Christian comics about the size of matchboxes - which we put away and place in shoe boxes when she isn't around, just in case one day she would ask for them. When we aren't around she would go to our room and put our books of Greek legends, Ne Zha, the Water Margin, the Monkey King and the Journey West below while her books take over the highest levels of the bookshelf.

There are a lot of stories about her and the people she hangs out with. They made rules in school for her, about short skirts cut higher than the knee and wearing make-up. I heard some people say she joined the cheerleaders team of a convent school even though she wasn't a student there, and even took part in their sports day and none of their teachers knew. They said even the government had to make rules for her. She was one of those who stuck gum between the doors of the MRT trains and made them ban chewing gum.

Like -- I was going to say something here about the fact that Dave Chua was so unobstrusive about gender, in the sense that he didn't say anything overtly (or covertly) faily, and that would have pleased me except that's not it even, he was unobstrusive in the sense that you can sort of tell he's there guiding the narration through, making some sly statements (they made rules in school for her!!!) about gender in, yes, the most unobstrusive way possible. It was pretty great.

Another thing I liked: the way this pretty restricted slangy point of view didn't stop him from being eloquent in the narration of, so fucking eloquent --

Something had gone wrong. And if there was anything, I know Ma would remember it all, that she is not someone who could forget easily, if she could, at all. I am still not sure of the truth about what happened, but I think as I grow older it would all make sense, that the truth would emerge if given time, like a memory.

I hear Gao was the last one to be caught. He was hiding in an abandoned flat but the police found out when he went out to buy cigarettes. I imagine the gang, sitting in jail, talking and laughing, passing the cigarettes between themselves, laughing and planning their tattoos, their shoes stepping on the shards of a broken fluorescent lamp that lie on the floor like eggshells.

♥

Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier.

So

emilyenrose and I had this discussion which involved her telling me to read The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and me telling her that I had all these FEELINGS about Wuthering Height, okay, especially a lot of the feminist critique directed at it which I feel responds to the mainstream interpretation and/or afterlife of the book, but not the book per se, in the sense that the former is mostly "oh, it's a 19th-century version of Twilight" whereas (I feel) Emily Bronte is actually pretty clued up on all the ways in which Heathcliff is fucked up and Heathcliff and Cathy are fucked up - I once heard it being said (and I quite agree) that perhaps as a writer Emily Bronte identified far more strongly with Heathcliff (he of puppy-killing infamy) than Cathy, and anyway she's kickass and fucked up - did you know she once disciplined her dog (whom she loved) with her bare hands? (Then she wrapped her arms around him and cried a little.) Or that she once cauterised her own wound after being bitten by a dog with rabies? She is far stranger than popular conceptions of her have made her out to be. And to me this pretty much ties in with the efforts to make orthodox pop culture readings of Wuthering Heights, and if I go on with this any more I am going to start foaming at the mouth and mentioning Kate Bush.

Ahem. Anyway. "In conclusion," Emily said, "Jane Eyre is about falling in love in dangerous circumstances, Wuthering Heights is about being dangerous, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is about the actual consequences of falling in love with a dangerous man." And then she went on to point out that even though Jane Eyre DOES tackle the feminist problem of falling in love whilst retaining one's moral ideals, by the end Jane & Mr Rochester's relationship isn't so much egalitarian as role-reversed -- Jane holds the power, and she does this by being his nurse. And in my head this ties into Rebecca because... it's basically the premise of Jane Eyre (inexperienced young girl marries rich older man, he has a secret in the form of his first wife) carried to a darker logical conclusion, and I appreciated that! I stand by what I quoted on Facebook (prompting quite a few people to tell me they hated the book): "Few critics saw in the novel what the author wanted them to see: the exploration of the relationship between a man who was powerful and a woman who was not."

WHICH IS NOT TO SAY, though, that it wasn't faily in its own respects: the narrator gains a sense of agency only when the ideal of Rebecca (her husband's first wife) has been thoroughly distinguished and she's reassured that he loves her completely, she doesn't seem to have a single redeeming characteristic (she's bumbling, careless, has low self-esteem, isn't particularly beautiful, is inexperienced), she DOESN'T HAVE A NAME...

But. I still do think it has a lot of interesting things to be mined from the book, about gender and particularly class -- and relatedly I do think Mrs Danvers & Rebecca were pretty interesting sociopaths (I hope I'm not bastardising the relationship too much if I say that they pretty much resembled Miss Havisham and Estella, in terms of their dynamic) -- it's just that it wasn't written compellingly enough for me to want to go back to it. I tabbed a few pages so I could quote from them, but I'm not going to, I think? It just... wasn't written that well (although atmosphere, Manderley, yadda yadda yadda).

Gaspp: A Gay Anthology of Singapore Poetry and Prose, edited by Ng Yi-Sheng.

Amongst other things discussed (such as the relevance of a queer anthology when so much of Singaporean literature is pretty queer) in the introduction was the effort to include works by newer and lesser-known (and hence more radical) writers as opposed to the same old faces who (it was argued) have arguably been co-opted into the mainstream, and I think that effort... kind of showed, in the sense that the work I enjoyed were by mostly more experienced authors (though Cyril Wong's The Queen & Her Eventual Knowledge of Love is a big exception, generally I love love love his stuff but this fell sort of flat), like Ovidia Yu's Blue Hibiscus:

If by nothing else, these people drifting into my mother's wake can be classified by their reactions to the enormous arrangement of radiantly blue hibiscus blossoms at the foot of her funeral casket. Respectable church aunties draw back apprehensively - but with awed, appreciative whispers - while retired civil servants and Nominated Members of Parliament look surreptitiously around for some hint as to the correct protocol in such a situation. But most of our friends recognise it with immediate and lavish delight, some having to be reminded that as this is a funeral posing for phone shots is not appropriate.

Like, seriously. It's a rare writer who can make such comic effect of homophobia:

"Look at you - adding irresponsibility to your sexual hedonism - do you realise what a mockery you are making of our strong Asian family values? What will you tell this poor misbegotten child when it asks you who its Daddy is? Tell me -" Aunt Sharon towers over the child (sweeping a protesting Gin back with an arm), "Tell me - do you know where your Daddy is? Huh? Do you have any idea at all? Huh?"

"My Daddy is in Bali," says little Shayli, "with Uncle Ben." She offers Aunt Sharon her pink mobile in its little Strawberry Sirotan case: "Autodial 3."

In general I found the poetry more disappointing than the short stories, which were enjoyable especially when they didn't tend towards the experimental and/or oblique (I feel like such a spoilsport saying this!), especially with such comic moments (which also - I felt - set up racial expectations before subverting them) as:

I had to admit I was disappointed. I was expecting something more sinister. More dramatic. Something similar to one of those longhouses in Sarawak, with smoke and skulls and tribal music. Anything but this stereotypical Malay home, with its pandan smells, frilly curtains and crochet.

Just as I was wondering how long I had to wait, a warm weight slithered onto my shoulder.

I nearly screamed.

It was a hand. And it belonged, not to a wizened old hag with wild matted hair, or a grinning pontianak with dripping lips, but a regular thirty-something makcik in sweatpants and a NDP shirt that read, "Together we can make a difference."

"Hello Alan," she said. "I'm Fatimah."