twice is nice but three times is just right.

[extemporally]

brb going to California for three weeks! This entry will push the number of times I've posted today to 7; for that, I apologise, but I really wanted to review these books before I left.

Corridor, by Alfian Sa'at.

Because he was 21 when he wrote this, holy shit, and you can sort of see the nascent beginnings of l'enfant terrible, but on the other hand this was kind of raw (in a... less good way) and angsty?

Um um um yet it made me feel so inexplicably fond. Here are two passages I liked from this:

"Teck How," Karen suddenly said.

"Yes," Teck How answered.

"I'm happy. Do you understand that?"

"Yes, Karen, I know."

"I don't think you really know. I like this car, Teck How. I really like this car. I was a secretary before this. And last week you helped me write my resignation letter. Do you think they'll miss me at the office?"

"I don't know."

"Because everything's going to change, right? Because I deserve this. Do I deserve this, Teck How?"

That kind of neurotic driving repetition that drives me absolutely bonkers when I'm confronted with it in real life (oh hi, mum, hi, old schoolfriend) just, when I'm presented with it here, just. How does he get it so right?

Or the way he writes about community and neighbours and society:

When the body of the murdered man was found in the corridor we were having our holiday in Jakarta. Our next door neighbours weren't in as well and nobody knew where they had gone. But we told the newspaper man not to send our newspapers for seven days. This was different from the last time when we could tell our old neighbours, Mr and Mrs DeSouza, back in Tampines to take the newspaper for us, read even if they want to, just return to us once we got back home. And even if they were to give back with, "sorry we had to cut out this coupon, the sale ended yesterday", or if one of their children scribbled someone's face with blue beard and spectacles, we would close an eye. And also please help water the plants, excpet the children's cactus, because they will rot with too much.

Thank you, and yes, we will have a good trip.

Mostly I am just really excited that he's coming out with a new book in the near future. \o/

Earlier, by Eleanor Wong.

Because she does a lot of them: angel & devil, the doppelganger, the life/art distinction (and blurring thereof), the political allegory... etc. Maybe I just wasn't in the mood. It mostly left me cold.

Because I have realise that what I want, no, what I crave from local literature is the painting of the familiar, something I have found increasingly hard to do:

ANNE (brandishing the fork and spoon). Look at this (pointing to the logo on the fork and spoon). Look at this. She stole them from SIA, I tell you. (Rummages in the drawer and finds another pair) Twice, some more!

LI MEI. (Engrossed in her ecstasy romance, but looking up for the moment) On the way there and on the way back what.

Which is a probably a failure of reading comprehension rather than failure of, after all, someone who is ♥ELEANOR WONG♥, but.

My favourite play in this collection was probably Brenda & the Backdoor Boys. It was all the things I care about: art, commercialisation, selling out, pragmatism, performance, fleeting time, and also, BRENDA:

BRENDA. (this should be a Brenda excited speech, rather than an angry speech) Shit. You are so full of it. Did you hear them tonight? Every night. They love it. The houses are packed, Ethan. We are booked solid for the next 6 months. I got interviews lined up. I'm getting calls up the wazoo from clubs, recording companies, bloody writers who want to do our official biographies. It's working! They're thinking of doing a Brenda and the Backdoor Boys night at Zouk - featuring only the covers we've been reviving. All night. Can you imagine that? Did anyone ever organise a Backdoor night for you guys?

Someone needs to stage this again. ♥

Nazi Literature in the Americas, by Roberto Bolano.

Holy shit, this was intense. "Composed of short biographies of imaginary pan-American authors, Nazi Literature describes, in fourteen thematic sections, the writers' lives, politics and literary works."

Having read The Savage Detectives, I think I know the kind of themes Bolano's obsessed with - politics, failed writers, their legacy, memory and being remembered. And the way he wrote Nazi Literature was just so intense and heady, lives and lives and lives compressed into short sections, that by the time it ended I actually felt like I needed a cigarette. (I don't smoke.)

Just the intense, driving way he writes:

And during the night Emilio Stevens gets up like a sleepwalker, perhaps he has slept with Maria Venegas, perhaps not, at any rate he gets up without hesitation, like a sleepwalker, and goes to the aunt's room, hearing the motor of a car approaching the house, and then he cuts the aunt's throat, no, he stabs her in the heart, it's cleaner, quicker; then he goes down and opens the door, and two men come into the house that belongs to the stars of Juan Cherniakovski's poetry workshop, and the fucked-up night comes into the house and then it goes out again, almost straight away, the night comes in, and out it goes, swift and efficient.

Which is not to say he is incapable of being snappy and sardonic. Because how about:

His father was the overseer of an estate called Los Laureles, whose owners had a library, and there it was that Gustavo learned to read and first tasted humiliation. Both reading and humiliation were to be constant features of his life.

(I mean I am really enjoying the fuck out of how he made them all right-wing writers and kind of viciously absurd in this fucked up and evil way but also diminished and sympathetic and now I'm just throwing adjectives down here but - yes, absurd is the best way I can find to describe it.

Especially given that most of the writers he wrote about, here, were kind of egoistic (saying that makes me wonder if he wrote it that way on purpose as a critique of the Ayn-Rand style of rational egoism) and would have thought they were above & beyond most other people, wouldn't they, but the way Bolano writes them. It's just. Absurd.)

And also Bolano writes in this viciously visceral way, but he's intellectual to the roots, oh yes, the way he thinks about what it's like to be an artist in a community and the way he goes back and forth along the disturbances created by the dimensions of art and politics, politics and art, the way they're never the same thing but never exclusive. It's dizzying. And the ending just about broke me:

We didn't talk until we reached the Plaza Cataluna station. Romero came back to my apartment. There he gave me an evelope. For your trouble, he said. What are you going to do? I'm going back to Paris tonight, he said, I've got a flight at midnight. I sighed or snorted. What an ugly business, I said, for something to say. Naturally, said Romero, it was Chilean business. I looked at him standing there in the entranceway; he was smiling. He must have been going on sixty. Look after yourself, Bolano, he said, and off he went.

Just the use of "Bolano" (the only use of!) there, bla bla bla acknowledging his participation in and complicity with a flawed community of people and moral ambiguity and kindness and politics and the personal but mostly it just broke me into tiny little pieces. ♥♥♥

Collected Plays One, by Alfian Sa'at | Trilogy, by Haresh Sharma | Weetzie Bat, Witch Baby, Cherokee Bat and the Goat Guys, Missing Angel Juan, & Baby Be-Bop, by Francesca Lia Block | Bloomability, by Sharon Creech | Sex Kittens and Horn Dawgs Fall In Love, by Maryrose Wood | High Fidelity, by Nick Hornby | Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China, by Leslie T. Chang | The Boy Next Door, by Irene Sabatini | Singapore Shifting Boundaries: Social Change in the 21st Century, edited by William S.W. Lim, Sharon Siddique, & Tan Dan Feng | The Frenzy, by Francesca Lia Block | Goodnight Mister Tom, by Michelle Magorian | The Spirit Catches You And Then You Fall Down, by Anne Fadiman | Saraswati Park, by Anjali Joseph | Eston, by Stella Kon | Rape: A Love Story, by Joyce Carol Oates | Rice Bowl, by Suchen Christine Lim | The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell | Renaissance Singapore? Economy, Culture, and Politics, edited by Kenneth Paul Tan | Miss Seetoh in the World, by Catherine Lim | Free Food for Millionaires, by Min Jin Lee | Jointly & Severably, by Eleanor Wong | Wills & Secession, by Eleanor Wong | Mergers & Accusations, by Eleanor Wong | GASPP: A Gay Anthology of Singaporean Poetry & Prose, edited by Ng Yi-Sheng | Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier | Gone Case, by Dave Chua | Sex and the City, by Candace Bushnell | The Waters & the Wild, by Francesca Lia Block | Growing Up: Getting Along in the Sixties, by Tisa Ng | Oreo, by Fran Ross | Caucasia, by Danzy Senna | Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class, by Owen Jones | Racism: A Very Short Introduction | Modern China: A Very Short Introduction, by Rana Mitter | Feminism: A Very Short Introduction, by Margaret Waters | A Game of Thrones, by George R. R. Martin | Tam Lin, by Pamela Dean | Sons of the Yellow Emperor, by Lynn Pan | Scapegoat: Why We Are Failing Disabled People, by Katharine Quarmby | Tipping The Velvet, by Sarah Waters | Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro | The Lantern Bearers, by Rosemary Sutcliff | The Silver Branch, by Rosemary Sutcliff | The Eagle of the Ninth, by Rosemary Sutcliff | The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli | Brick Lane, by Monica Ali | The Savage Detectives, by Robert Bolano | Homage to Catalonia, by George Orwell | Cat On A Hot-Tin Roof, by Tennessee Williams | Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern, by Joshua Zeitz | Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, by Jeanette Winterson | The Moon By Night, by Madeleine L'Engle | To Live, by Yu Hua | Into The Wild, by Jon Krakauer | The Next Competitor, by K.P. Kincaid | Raffles Place Ragtime, by Phillip Jeyaretnam | Bella Tuscany: The Sweet Life in Italy, by Frances Mayes | Mao's Last Dancer, by Li Cunxin | Marie, Dancing, by Carolyn Meyer | Man Walks Into A Room, by Nicole Krauss | How To Be Good, by Nick Hornby