Book review: Daryl Li’s The Inventors an unusual but indulgent essay collection on memory and writing
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Singapore writer Daryl Li's The Inventors proves as daring as it is indulgent, as insistently questioning as it is frustrating.
PHOTOS: TRENDLIT PUBLISHING, DARYL LI/FACEBOOK
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The Inventors
By Daryl Li trendlitpublishing.com/products/the-inventors-daryl-li
Creative non-fiction/Rosetta Cultures/Paperback/263 pages/$28/TrendLit Publishing (
3 stars
What do a suicidal beggar-monk from Qing Dynasty writer Pu Songling’s Strange Tales From A Chinese Studio, Hong Kong director Stanley Kwan’s 1991 film Center Stage and a dying cat in 2016 have in common?
Not much, but they are drawn together in the rich, sensitive inner world of Singapore writer Daryl Li, whose palimpsestic debut The Inventors proves as daring as it is indulgent, as insistently questioning as it is frustrating.
Li, writing in the creative non-fiction mode – a rare form in Singapore – is obsessed with the inaccessibility of the past, as well as the necessary failure of remembrance and writing.
Just about every single one of the compiled essays here is his po-faced meditation on the subjects.
Much like Kwan’s film about Chinese actress Ruan Lingyu, the essays are intentionally non-linear – a disruption of chronology that feels more truthful to how people remember, though also embracing an awareness of the artificiality of this process.
And so an art encounter – during which “chicken rice” rice cake is served – returns Li to his first date with a classmate, which is in turn interrupted by an exposition on the video game Soma.
A tardy friend prompts wonderment about the Mannerist faces of 16th-century Italian painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo and the imprecise science of orchid hybridisation.
All these Li inevitably reels back to his central concern: the futility of memory, and writing as further fabrication and pastiche. Not only does writing distort the past, it corrupts the present too, changing an experience even as the person becomes conscious of wanting to set it down on paper.
These circular and epistemological frustrations are dragged out over sentences, pages and chapters. The product of a particular poetic sensibility, Li’s writing is elegant, reflexive and admirably dogged with the truth.
One sentence reads: “I write in order to remember, no, to perform the memory... announcing the presence of a secret, yet, but also guiding you towards a meaning, which may belong to you or me, or perhaps is shared in the in-between.”
Later in the book, he leans into the freedom of the writer, and makes it explicit: “Perhaps it rained. Yes, let’s say that it rained. The rain was heavy yesterday when I sat in front of my door.”
Yet sustained over pages, this meta-awareness has a tendency to feel tired, the clauses too self-consciously pretty.
The expansiveness of Li’s references is also not matched by an expansiveness of interests – again, not a problem in small doses but remarkably stagnant when read as a whole.
Li almost exclusively dwells in his head, when one hopes he can just let the introspection recede a little. The most powerful works of creative non-fiction have been able to balance the inner and the external worlds to illuminate both, casting off solipsism to embrace the world.
When this relentless reflection is more constrained though, it works, as in Li’s Ghost Stories, which splits the page vertically to carry out simultaneous narratives.
On the left is a more conventional fictional tale about a ghost who comes to stay. And on the right, a metatextual commentary, constantly clarifying facts, establishing context and offering criticism.
By refusing to relegate any of what is usually treated as background noise to footnotes or marginalia, Li creates a more democratic form that manages to surface the inner dialogue of many a writer.
Whether it is worthwhile to reverse the usual order of importance altogether and focus entirely on the craft, however, is less certain. Perhaps this is a book written more for Li’s kindred writers than the general reader.
If you like this, read: The Rings Of Saturn by W.G. Sebald (Vintage Classics, 2020, $21.96, Amazon SG, go to amzn.to/3Hz11du
