2024 Best Reads: Clement Yong picks Annihilation, Sister Snake and Her Side Of The Story

Top three reads

Annihilation by Michel Houellebecq

The memory of a book reviewer is a short one. After breezing through so many pedestrian offerings, the majority are by the end of the year shrouded in haze.

What sticks in my mind is a certain tending towards mess and ugliness. The rhythms of music having long moved on from the Baroque and Classical, there is satisfaction in watching syntax and punctuation break down, the stretched sentence testing the reader’s persistence in maintaining a strand of thought.

So my favourite read of 2024 is Michel Houellebecq’s Annihilation, which proves the French author to be one of the smoothest operators of language. His cadences in the original French version have been fluidly translated by Shaun Whiteside.

Houellebecq is in cruise control as his successive clauses track the reactions and responses of dour protagonist Paul Raison, assistant to the finance minister in the lead-up to a heated French election and right-wing fundamentalists on the rise.

The novel is ambitious, naturally segueing between state and family, and encompassing everything from religion to the futility of politics to artificial intelligence.

Its real subject, though, is death. This being supposedly Houellebecq’s swansong, the cantankerous author allows himself some comforts of reconciliation and love – a rehabilitative turn delivered with incredible restraint and stoic masculinity.

Sister Snake by Amanda Lee Koe

Sister Snake is a reimagination of the Tang Dynasty tale of Legend Of The White Snake

by the star Singapore author, full of poison and reptilian glee.

The tale Lee Koe spins is propulsive and fun, particularly strong after both sisters arrive in Singapore, with a welcome injection of unpredictability necessary for retellings to tick.

A throwaway mention of the South-east Asian naga situates these snake spirits in a larger Asian and South-east Asian spiritual world. I enjoy the vernacular chapter titles, and who is not game for a little chaos in Parliament?

Her Side Of The Story by Alba de Cespedes

The

Cuban-Italian author’s period epic

has been translated to a meaty 485 pages by Jill Foulston.

The book boasts some of the most grippingly beautiful passages I have read in the first third that sets out Alessandra’s relationship with her mother.

Written in Italian in 1949 but not translated fully into English until now, de Cespedes’ masterpiece would follow Alessandra as she marries and gets involved in the Italian resistance during World War II, rendered tragically unhappy in the shadow of her mother’s lofty ideas of romance and her husband’s avoidance of it through revolution.

But the intelligence of the writing is such that the highest drama can be found in the ironing of clothes, or in watching one’s parents embrace.

The toil and joyful rhythms of pre-war living as a girl and woman in Italy come vividly to life; home and hearth eclipse the demands of patriotism and courage.

Disappointment

Intermezzo by Sally Rooney

I feel let down by

Sally Rooney’s story of brotherly conflict and depression

Intermezzo, which was mawkish and generally unbelievable.

The tensions and misunderstandings that she is such a keen observer of in romantic relationships feel overelaborate when transplanted to the relationship between two adult siblings.

The parallels of their respective age-gap relationships are overdrawn. And younger brother Ivan is much too petty to be taken seriously, despite the reader being manipulated to take his side.

Other reviewers have praised her confidence in no longer feeling a need to pack her pages with action. I think the prose is rather uninspired.