Thiam Chin O

I'm not going to rate this book, because I would rate it poorly, & I don't generally like to do that. But I will try to give a review.

I really struggled to finish this book after reaching the halfway point. It's a very neatly structured book, which is not wrong, but oddly the 4-person structure multiplied with the narrative jumping from present to looking into their past made me a little confused -- what exactly is the book about? Is the book ultimately about the stories of their relationships? The two couples? That's the closest I can assume when I got to the end.

And if that's the case, was placing the setting against the backdrop of the tsunami necessary? I picked the book up with the assumption that the tragedy of the tsunami would figure strongly into the novel, but instead I found that it was just placed as a backdrop and the locals sort of serve as background, nameless, faceless figures. Their relationship problems could have happened anywhere then, it didn't have to disintegrate against this setting. The book didn't even deal with their trauma as well, I felt, or what it meant to have survived a natural tragedy of that scale. But that's not surprising since the tsunami was just treated as a backdrop. And it wasn't just tsunami but the way other things were cursorily thrown into as well, like for example, I am not sure how I feel about the statutory rape bit or why it was necessary.

I felt that the more 'present' situations were more interesting that the bits that flashed back to their past and how the relationships started. I was also really interested with the old woman that found and took care of chee seng but we didn't really even get to see her properly. I felt like perhaps with enough time the story could have really been more moving and delved deeper into the interiority of these characters and treated their stories with more complexity, depth.But as it stands now they seem to just scratch the surface.… (mais)

I devoured the book slowly in one sitting. In some way I can't really explain, I loved it. The prose is uncomplicated and unpretentious and somehow in a simple way, spellbinding. His characters are also endearingly, seemingly simple, with an almost banal sheen to their lives. Their desires and griefs seem uncomplicated, and perhaps all the more relatable in a way we might not have paid attention to.
As if the stories spoke to our very nature; stories as real, as humble, as important to us as the very air.

I didn't really expect to enjoy the book but found that I really did. The first story "The Cat That Disappeared" was a strong opening which I thought was quite representative of O Thiam Chin's style -- a very compressed but telling silence. He jumps back and forth the timeline for a few of the stories, but I think he does it quite elegantly. He does turn the gaze of the reader to the details, and he does explain things with some length, but the power of his telling lies very much in suggestion. He writes around the obvious fact; the unsaid; the elephant in the room of the heart.

I enjoyed "The Years" and "Third Eye" the most, along with "At the Suvarnabhumi Airport" which I felt had such a brilliant ending -- So little is said about the wife in that story, but she knows everything, or at least enough, of what is going on in the protagonist's head which readers are privy to. "The Last Voyage" & "Swordsmen" stuck out too sorely in the collection, being set in a completely different timeframe, the latter having all of the explanatory detail but really none of the subtlety and silent, mournful gaze that his strong short stories have. I've read his novel "Now That It's Over" and prefer his short stories a lot more. Perhaps his writing is best employed in the form of the short story.

My honest rating would actually hover between a 3 and a 4, but since it would be closer to the 4 (like 3.7 if I want to be exact) I'll give it 4 stars.… (mais)