Book Box: Four novels by South-east Asian authors
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SINGAPORE – In this week’s book box, The Straits Times looks at four novels by South-east Asian authors, including the Booker Prize-longlisted The House Of Doors. Buy the books at Amazon
Malaysian author Tan Twan Eng’s House Of Doors scores Booker longlist hat-trick
The House Of Doors may be Malaysian author Tan Twan Eng’s first novel in 10 years, but one thing has remained the same: It earned a place on the longlist of the prestigious Booker Prize.
The 51-year-old former lawyer has written two other books, The Gift Of Rain, nominated for the longlist in 2007, and The Garden Of Evening Mists, which made it further into the shortlist in 2012.
That The House Of Doors is once more on this year’s longlist gives Tan a “100 per cent strike rate” – something he was told by the Booker Prize people was unprecedented.
Book review: In The Moon Represents My Heart, a Chinese family travels through time
For a Chinese person, there are few songs more iconic than The Moon Represents My Heart, made famous in 1977 by Taiwanese songstress Teresa Teng.
Yet for all that it is a classic love song, it is far from a straightforward answer to the question, “How much do you love me?” Why, if you wish to prove an unchanging, unwavering love, would you compare your heart to the waxing, waning, sometimes altogether absent moon?
Like the song from which it takes its title, Pim Wangtechawat’s debut novel leaves many questions unanswered. Pim, who is Thai-Chinese, has created an intriguing premise: a British-Chinese family whose members are able to travel through time, though their powers vary.
Joshua Wang, for instance, who grew up in the no longer existent Kowloon Walled City, is able to travel only to past Hong Kong.
Book review: Filipino love stories in screenwriter Ricky Lee’s For B are funny and full of feeling
This is a novel about love. It is an achievement, then, that the book never turns mawkish or preachy, but trains a humorous, unsentimental eye on the permutations of love among residents of the Philippines.
The premise is aphoristically summed up in a quip by one of its cynical characters: “Love has a quota. For every five people who fall in love, only one will be happy.”
For B (Or How Love Devastates Four Out Of Every Five Of Us) might be a novel, but it is composed of six shorter stories that take readers into the world of five women and their pathologies about love.
Book review: Indonesian novel 24 Hours With Gaspar melds detective fiction and sci-fi
A blend of detective fiction and science fiction, 24 Hours With Gaspar reads like an Indonesian pulp fiction novel.
The bulk of Indonesian writer Sabda Armandio’s slim novel follows the indecipherable and aloof Gaspar as he counts down 24 hours before he robs a jewellery store. He is looking, in particular, to lay hands on a black box whose contents remain a mystery throughout the novel.
Gaspar – a self-appointed private investigator – is on the street hunting for collaborators, donning a jacket with an embroidered dragon and riding the city with his sentient motorbike, Cortazar.
He is a figure central to the fictional “crime of March 4th”, which the novel compares to other dates in Indonesian history tied to tragedy, such as the 30th of September Movement, which saw the assassination of six Indonesian Army generals in 1965.
The Straits Times’ Weekly Bestsellers Aug 26
The Price Of Being Fair tops the non-fiction bestsellers for the second consecutive week.
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