Author: Fong Min Hun

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Lit Review: ‘Annelies’ by David R. Gillham

by Fong Min Hun

Who: David R. Gillham is the author of the NYT bestselling City of Women. He studied screenwriting at the University of Southern California before transitioning into fiction. After moving to New York City, Gillham spent more than a decade in the book business, and he now lives with his family in Western Massachusetts. Annelies is his latest novel based on the life of famous diarist Anne Frank.

What: What if Annelies Marie Frank, better known as Anne Frank, survived the Nazi death camps to become one of the few to return to a broken post-war Europe? Gillham’s novel explores this possibility of the return of a broken and brutalised Anne to a home in shambles where her father, Pim, is the only surviving member of the Frank family. But whereas Pim is intent on picking up from where the family left off, Anne is tormented by the horrors of the war, by the betrayal of her family at the hands of Nazi conspirators and her own deeply rooted survivor’s guilt. To top it off, the diary which had become her sole comfort and inspiration goes missing after the family’s arrest. She is desperate to flee her past, but options are few for Holocaust survivors in post-war Europe.

In Gillham’s retelling, the Anne Frank story begins in the weeks leading up to their decision to go into hiding. Anne is a vivacious and somewhat difficult 13-year old (read: typical teenager) unlike her more sober-minded and responsible older sister. Despite having fled their home in Germany and now living in Nazi-occupied Holland, the Frank family did okay for themselves with Pim having set up a fairly lucrative pectin business and the girls seemingly adjusting well to their new Dutch identities. But anti-semitism was on the rise and the Frank family opted to go into hiding, and were subsequently betrayed to the Gestapo.

Why: Few Holocaust figures have captured the imagination quite the same way as Anne Frank, whose diary provides a vivid and poignant look into life under occupied Holland. Living in a secret annex behind her father’s offices, Anne’s diary was a living record of fugitives attempting to live as normal a life as possible despite the daily threat of betrayal or being discovered by the Nazi secret police. Anne dreamed of being a writer and she filled her diaries with stories and descriptions and ruminations of life within her secret space. The real Anne would not survive the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, and would succumb to disease just weeks before the camp’s liberation by the British forces.

In Gillham’s Annelies, Anne survives — just barely — Bergen-Belsen, but she returns a changed woman. Unlike Pim whose faith in god and humanity survives the death camps, Anne, who bore witness to her mother and sister’s deaths, has now become a jaded, cynical and empty woman. Moreover, her diary which was both the literal and figurative representation of her ambition, has gone missing. Wracked by guilt, uncontrollable anger and grief, Anne can find no succour in her new life in Holland and is desperate to start somewhere else. Her desire for a new beginning puts her at odds with her once beloved Pim, who begins to find that post-war Europe has yet to come to terms with its own anti-semitic past.

The book is wonderfully descriptive and the characters well fleshed out. The development in Anne’s character is believable and the horrors of the Nazi camps — as well as life after — rigorously researched. And yet, there is a sense that Anne is somewhat diminished in the book. This may be an unpopular opinion but an essential part of the real Anne is the tragedy of her life cut short, leaving behind nothing but her living record of the days leading up to her arrest. Don’t get me wrong — there is much to admire in surviving the Holocaust but therein is the problem; Anne’s story post-war becomes a survivor’s story but it could have been any survivor, and not one unique to Anne. Ultimately, I suspect the intrigue of Anne Frank is due as much to the diary she leaves behind as well as the fact that it is the only thing she leaves behind.

Verdict: A well-researched and well-written historical fiction, and fans of Anne Frank will find the hypothetical ‘What If?’ compelling.  (7/10)

Availability: Trade Paperback, RM84.90

Special thanks to Viking Books for a review copy of the book.

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Five books to read this month for International Women’s Day 2019

In recognition of International Women’s Day on March 8, we have come up with a list of books that feature women and their experiences in one way or another. Some of the titles we have chosen celebrate the unique contributions of women while others shine a spotlight on some of the continuing challenges they face in our still flawed, but hopefully improving, gendered society. These books will entertain and edify.

The Weight of Our Sky by Hanna Alkaf (RM55.90)
 The debut novel of Malaysian author Hanna Alkaf, The Weight of Our Sky is a work of historical fiction centred on a young Malay girl caught in the crossfire of the 1969 race riots in Kuala Lumpur. Plagued by gruesome thoughts she believes was placed in her head by a malevolent djinn, Melati has imagined her mother’s death countless times. Thus when the riots finally erupt, she has but one goal in mind: to get to her mother, the one person she can’t risk losing. With the help of a Chinese boy Vincent, Melati navigates a city in flames all the while trying very desperately to shake away the fatalistic prognostications of the demon in her head. Alkaf’s novel is a thrilling ride which reveals a chapter in the history of Malaysia that is seldom discussed and more seldom the background of young adult novels. It is a sensitive retelling of a prickly chapter in the history of the country and a refreshing take on the YA adventure novel.

Her Body & Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado (RM59.90)
Machado’s collection of stories distil the variegated experiences of women in relation to their body — in particular the violence visited upon them in both myth and reality — and situates them in borderless worlds. At once horror, thriller, science fiction and comedy, Her Body uncovers the twisted logic that reduces women’s body into a cause celebre that turns people monstrous and the actual body itself becomes inconsequential. In the first story, The Husband Stitch, a woman refuses her husband’s entreaties to remove a green ribbon tied around her neck which infuriates the husband. It becomes the locus of aggression and frustration — the metaphorical value of the ribbon here is quite obvious — which can only end in heartbreak and defeat. Her Body was a finalist of the National Book Award and is one of the more unique collection of writings on women in recent years.

The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker (RM79.95)
The most memorable characters in Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey are arguably the men — glorious Achilles, cunning Odysseus, doomed Hector and cruel Agamemnon are but some examples. The women tend to be the mothers of heroes or altar sacrifices to appease the gods; in other words, not very interesting even though the entire Trojan war was sparked by the kidnapping of the lovely Helen. In Pat Barker’s Silence of the Girls, her choice of protagonist is Briseis, a captive slave from the Greek invasion of Troy. Falling from her lofty position as queen of her city, Briseis would eventually be remembered in most retellings for her role as the bone of contention between Achilles and Agamemnon. But Barker’s retelling gives Briseis back her voice and her freedom, imagining the happenings behind the scenes with the women as Greek heroes while soldiers warred with their Trojan counterparts. This magnificent novel inverts the traditional narrative, sending the war into the background and instead focuses on the experiences of the thousands of women wrested from their home and forced to survive in their new reality as slave girls and war trophies.

The Unwinding of the Miracle by Julie Yip-Williams (RM75.50)
There has been a recent spate of memoirs written by women documenting their unlikely ascent from questionable backgrounds into relatively better environs. We use the term ‘better’ advisedly because it somehow seems to diminish the value of their individual journeys and experiences, but we think it is probably suitable in the case of Yip-Williams who succumbed to cancer in 2018. Born blind in Vietnam in 1976, she narrowly escaped euthanasia planned by her grandmother only to be forced to flee because of the political upheaval following the establishment of the socialist republic. Eventually making her way to the US, she gains partial sight after undergoing surgery and beats all odds to become a Harvard-educated lawyer. She marries and starts a family only to be diagnosed with cancer in 2013. Inspiring and instructive, The Unwinding is a candid and humorous memoir of a life that was well-lived but unfortunately cut cruelly short.

The Water Cure by Sophie Mackintosh (RM69.95)
What if men were toxic, literally and figuratively? That’s the premise that Sophie Mackintosh’s haunting Booker-longlisted debut novel examines through Grace, Lia and Sky, three girls who live on an island with their parents, Mother and King. The sisters were raised to believe that men’s uncontrollable emotions and violence are the cause of the chemical destruction on the mainland, and they (the exception being their father) continue to pose as the greatest threats. To keep them healthy, the girls are forced to perform a series of elaborate purifying rituals, including the most extreme one, the water cure. But when the King disappears and three men wash ashore, a psychological cat-and-mouse game ensues, sexual tensions surface, and sibling rivalries erupt. This novel is a taut and riveting exploration of solidarity, sisterhood, the gender divide, and the illusion of safety.


This article appears in the March 2019 issue of FireFlyz, the in-flight magazine of Firefly airlines.

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Five inspiring books to kick-off the new reading year

As booksellers, we are often asked by customers to recommend inspirational books or books that can help them improve themselves. At Lit Books, we try to take a different tack to self-improvement. While we do carry a selection of self-help titles, we also believe that personal edification can come through less direct means. The following are some titles to help kick-off your new reading year!

Books for Living: A Reader’s Guide to Life by Will Schwalbe
Through books that he’s read, Will Schwalbe addresses one or more themes pertinent to our modern workaday life, usually in ways that are not readily apparent. For example, on the chapter entitled Trusting, Schwalbe’s liber of choice is Paula Hawkins’ excellent Girl on the Train. At first blush, it is not readily apparent how exactly Girl on the Train, a crime thriller, has anything to do with trust, but Schwalbe gives us an ingenious explanation. Similarly, in the chapter entitled Choosing Your Life, Schwalbe’s book choice is Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran. Azar’s book is a memoir of her last class in Iran, where she taught and read Nabokov’s controversial Lolita to a group of women in an ultra-conservative state where possession of material such as Nabokov’s book is grounds for punishment. The best thing about Schwalbe’s book is that it doesn’t just show you how books can be relevant to your life, but entices you to read the books that he discusses. (RM62.90)

The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking by Oliver Burkeman
As the title suggests, there is a certain segment of the population who instinctively push back against overtly cheerful slogans, and who believe that the trick to happiness must involve more than mere positive thinking. Oliver Burkeman’s Antidote takes a more sober approach: rather than overlaying reality with layers upon layers of positivity, he suggests that happiness is really about coming to terms with the imperfections of reality. The Antidote is a genuine attempt to reframe the definition of happiness for reasons both practical and theoretical. In the Guardian’s review of the book, the author Julian Baggini, a philosopher in his own right, likens Burkeman’s book to a shot of Pimm’s on a summer’s day: “refreshing if consumed by those already sceptical about the power of positive thinking, bracing if splashed in the face of those who aren’t”. (RM62.90)

The Courage to be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga
A unique self-improvement title which is written as a dialogue between a philosopher and his student, The Courage to be Disliked deals with a topic that seems strange at first. After all, who among us does not want to be liked, or more pertinently, who among us aspires to be disliked? In a culture where the slightest social opprobrium is grounds for isolation and alienation, authors Kishimi and Koga argue that self-actualisation, at the risk of social castigation, remains key to happiness and fulfilment. Embedding the theories of psychologist Alfred Adler in the fictional dialogue, the book shows how each of us is able to determine the direction of our own life, free from past traumas and the expectations of others. The Courage to be Disliked is the most prescriptive of the books that we are recommending in this issue, focusing on the concepts of self-forgiveness, self-care, and mind decluttering. A must-read for those of us caught in the grips of anxiety and worry. (RM79.90)

Killing Commendatore by Haruki Murakami
Killing Commendatore is the perfect introduction to one of the finest authors of this generation (and a good way to start your way into becoming a ‘Harukist’ in the new year). It is difficult to squeeze Killing Commendatore, which is 700-odd pages long, into two paragraphs, but it is a story concerning painting, love, obsession and ideas, with some surreal passages thrown in for good measure. The story revolves around an unnamed protagonist who is a portrait painter by trade. Following an unhappy separation from his wife, he moves into the home of Tomohiko Amada, an erstwhile master of Japanese painting. The discovery of a hidden painting sets myriad things into motion. The protagonist, now privy to a hidden secret, must now see out the full ramifications of the uncovering. If you’ve ever felt compelled to read a Murakami but felt intimidated by the author’s reputation, rest assured that Killing Commendatore is a gentler introduction to his world. (RM131.90)

Educated by Tara Westover
Tara Westover was born to Mormon fundamentalist parents in rural Idaho. Voluntarily cutting themselves from all worldly contact, Tara did not step into a classroom until she was 17 and was submitted to extreme religious doctrine by her prophet father. Nevertheless, a brush with the outside world inspires her curiosity to find out more, and she ends up teaching herself enough grammar, mathematics and science to be admitted to college. Her voracious appetite for knowledge and education would eventually take her across continents and earn her a PhD from Cambridge University. Despite her remarkable academic achievements, she is set for a reckoning with both her family and herself in confronting her past. This memoir is at once an inspiration and a reminder that perseverance can be rewarding but dreams can and do come with a price. (RM55.90)

This article is published in the January 2019 issue of FireFlyz, the in-flight magazine of Firefly airlines.

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Lit Review: ‘Warlight’ by Michael Ondaatje

Who: Michael Ondaatje is a Sri Lanka-born Canadian poet and novelist. He is the recipient of multiple literary awards including the Governor General’s Award, the Giller Prize, the Booker Prize, and the Prix Médicis étranger. His 1992 Booker winner, The English Patient, won the  Golden Man Booker Prize in 2018. Warlight is his latest novel, and it is longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2018.

What: It is 1945 Britain. Siblings Nathaniel and Rachel Williams are told one day after breakfast that their parents will be moving to Singapore for their father to take up a new post at one of Unilever’s regional headquarters. They will  remain in Britain under the care of a family friend, whom they know as The Moth. Their father leaves first before their mother, Rose,  is to join him later. In the last few days with their mother, Nathaniel and Rachel — or Stitch and Wren, their mother’s nicknames for them — learn that Rose, code-named Viola (“Ours was a family with a habit for nicknames, which meant it was also a family of disguises”), may not have been entirely truthful with them.

Dropped hints of her wartime contributions with the Moth suggest a mercurial, can-do intelligence agent that belies her current guise as a quiet, retiring homemaker. These suspicions are validated when, upon her departure, the children discover her travelling trunk hidden in the cellar of their home. Effectively abandoned, the children then turn to the enigmatic Moth and his group of eccentrics including a former beekeeper, botanist and welterweight boxer known only as The Pimlico Darter.

Narrated by Nathaniel years later, a significant portion of the first part of the book has to do with his coming-of-age under the tutelage of these people, chiefly the Darter. The Darter, a former boxer and small-time greyhound smuggler and tout working the local racing grounds, introduces Nathaniel to the backwaters and byways of post-war London and engages his help in smuggling racing dogs from France on a modified mussel boat through the Thames. Then there’s Olive “Not Just an Ethnographer” Lawrence who was instrumental in plotting the Normandy landings of D-Day, and a spy haberdasher filling out the Moth’s motley crew responsible for overlooking the Williams siblings.

But there is intrigue afoot, and everything comes to a head one evening at the Bark Theatre when he and Rachel are kidnapped. Rose re-emerges to save the children, but the encounter does not end without loss. Rachel, still smarting from their abandonment, severs ties with her mother while Nathaniel, perhaps more sanguine in his personality, remains with Rose. The rest of the novel sees Nathaniel slowly unravelling more of his mother’s background while he comes to terms with his own history.

Why: Warlight is a story of memory: of the things we remember and the things we choose not to remember for the sake of self-preservation and of making sense of who we are. It is a story of the consequences of the choices we make and the consequences of the choices made for us, all taking place within the backdrop of a post-war world where intrigue remains the watchword for the day. Warlight is also a reminder that ‘truth’ is always a heavily edited narrative, and that competing narratives can result in antagonism and division.

The novelist Yiyun Li admits that she has a troublesome relationship with time as memories “tell more about now than then”. Memories are thus untrustworthy companions, especially as, Nathaniel says, “I know how to fill in a story from a grain of sand or a fragment of discovered truth… We order our lives with such barely held stories.” Nathaniel’s “barely held” stories, which make up the first third of the book, are remarkable, but are perhaps incomplete as there “was just warlight and only blind barges were allowed to move along this stretch of river”.

The lack of continuity and the dramatic slowing of the momentum in the final two thirds of the book smothers the high adventure of the first third with nostalgia and sentimentality. Nathaniel takes a back seat, and the main characters seem to shrink into caricatures. But it is perhaps precisely because he consciously occludes himself from the narrative that we see Ondaatje’s world with greater acuity, where the world is lit with more than just warlight. But this clearer world is not necessarily a more enlightening one, nor it is particularly interesting one even though Nathaniel successfully pieces together his mother’s intelligence intrigues.

The Guardian’s Alex Preston describes the progression as a “knit into a work of fiction as rich, as beautiful, as melancholy as life itself, written in the visionary language of memory”, but more striking to me was the imbalance in the book. The shift in gears from first to second to third was jolting, as if Ondaatje could hardly wait to get done with the genre-fictionesque spy thriller to get back to slow, overwritten sepia-toned reminiscences of the past.

While the heart of the story is in the second and third parts of the book, it is the first part of the book where Ondaatje shows, unlike his previous writing, that he is no slouch in creating rich textured environments and characters, and pacey action sequences.

Verdict: While intriguing at times, the book feels imbalanced overall. (6.5/10)

Availability: Trade paperback, RM77.90

Special thanks to Times Distribution for an advance reading copy of the book. 

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Lit Recap: An Evening of Murakami-Inspired Music by WVC Malaysian Jazz Ensemble

It’s not often that Elaine and I are able to indulge in two of our great loves — reading and music — together at the same time. So when Tay Cher Siang from critically-acclaimed jazz band WVC Malaysian Jazz Ensemble proposed a Murakami-inspired performance at our store, it didn’t take us long to ask ‘When?’ and ‘Can we really do it?’ And do it we did.

On Wednesday Aug 15, WVC played to an intimate sold-out crowd of 40-something attendees at Lit Books. Featuring original music inspired by Japanese literary master Haruki Murakami and covers of songs mentioned in his novels (e.g. Star-Crossed Lovers and Danny Boy, among others), the band brought the much-loved stories to a new, higher level.

The connection of Murakami and jazz is evident — Murakami’s novels, like jazz, demand interpretation on the part of the reader. The playful presence of eccentric characters and surreal scenes demand that the reader conjure for themselves the significant and meaningful connections which are not always immediately evident. As most Murakami readers will readily concede, trying to ‘understand’ Murakami can be immensely frustrating. Because of his preoccupation with the subconscious and the unconscious, his characters are typically richly textured and range from the mundane to the supernatural.

Murakami’s readers, by being forced to tease through the neural maze of these rich personalities, become strangely familiar and emotionally invested in these characters who nevertheless retain an impenetrable sense of distance. And though these characters arrive at some kind of resolution in their inner lives, this sense of closure and completion is not reflected in their outer lives, which in turn preserves the distance felt by the reader. I interpret this to be  a deliberate artifice on Murakami’s part, as a comment on the vicissitudes of reality and outer life, as against the closed systems of internal life. Nevertheless, there is interplay between the two worlds: between inner and outer life, between conscious and unconscious thought, between the world of imagination and dreams, and the world of lived experience. 

This freedom and sense of play is endemic in jazz, which, of all genres of music, best incorporates the ideas of  spontaneity, unpredictability and free play. The occasional discordant note, the sudden change in tempo and the modulations from the various competing instruments and the dependence on the various players may sometimes seem chaotic, but it is, as the German philosopher Kant would call it, a “purposive” chaos. It is purposive in that there is a significant sense of agency behind the chaos; it is not random, but controlled. Jazz seems to have a purpose but to what end is uncertain. Kant calls this the “free play of the imagination and the understanding”, and this seems to suit both Murakami and jazz just fine.

WVC’s bandleader, composer and pianist Cher Siang, a self-confessed fan of Murakami’s writing, is a scholar of the Japanese master. To our ears, he has done wonderfully well to interpret Murakami as jazz, although he confesses as much himself that Murakami–a conservative jazz classicist, would find WVC’s music unbearable. We beg to differ on this point.

WVC Malaysian Jazz Ensemble will be releasing their third studio album in September 2018. 

 

 

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Lit Review: ‘Lullaby’ by Leïla Slimani

Who: Leïla Slimani is a Franco-Moroccan writer and journalist. Lullaby, or Chanson douce in the original French, is her second novel. In 2016, Chanson douce was awarded the Prix Goncourt. The story is based on the 2012 killings of the Krim siblings in New York. Lullaby was translated into English by Sam Taylor.

What: The cover of the book tells all: the baby is dead; it only took a few seconds. A grisly opening awaits on the first page. A mother has returned to her apartment. She finds her children dead and the nanny bleeding out from a self-inflicted wound. It is a parent’s worst nightmare.

The story then turns to parents Myriam and Paul Massè’s decision to hire a nanny. Myriam, a promising lawyer, had put her career on hold to be a full-time mother to Maya and Adam. But the joys of motherhood had soured to resentment over the years, and when an opportunity to resume her role as a legal eagle emerged, she made the difficult but perfectly understandable decision to put her children under care.

Enter Louise, an experienced nanny with with superb references and an almost preternatural ability to be helpful. She immediately becomes an indispensable member of the family going so far as to join them on their family vacations. But it quickly becomes apparent that Louise, for all her benevolence and proficiency with the children, is not the heaven-sent angel everyone assumes her to be.

Why: Slimani’s Lullaby is not a whodunnit, but a why-she-gone-and-done-it. Neither is it a work of redemption, but a visceral attempt at tying together seemingly disparate themes to provide an explanation.

The prose in the book is explosive and Sam Taylor’s translation greatly heightens the fraught tension in the book. Slimani’s dispassionate and clinical observations throughout — it is evident she has done some journalistic work — intensifies the atmospheric feelings of horror and foreshadowing: Yes, the reader is always waiting for the other (nanny’s) shoe to drop. And because we know she’d gone and done it from the beginning, every action, no matter how innocent, is tinged with murderous intent (or perhaps they were never innocent to begin with).

“Myriam doesn’t  know this, but Louise’s favourite game [with the children] is hide-and-seek. Except that nobody counts and there are no rules. The game is based on the element of surprise. Without warning, Louise disappears. She nestles in a corner and lets the children search for her. She often chooses hiding places where she can continue to observe them. She hides under the bed or behind a door and doesn’t move. She holds her breath.”

There are few surprises in this story, but Slimani nevertheless manages to create a compelling page-turner. Louise, despite her stabby madness, does elicit alternate feelings of sympathy and horror as more of her history is revealed. Lullaby, properly, is her story, her descent into madness and her devolution into a properly mechanistic creature who has lost the last vestiges of humanity.

Nevertheless there is a niggling sense that Slimani begs the question somewhat, and this may have to do with the “inverted-pyramid” reporting style of the book. The book opens with the headline — the “big news”: The children are dead and the nanny grievously hurt from a self-inflicted wound. We then go back to answer the next question: How did it come to this?

Myriam and Paul are modern, conscientious parents, and have been more than considerate and generous to the nanny. We conclude, early on, that Louise must either be comic-book evil or insane. But since this is not a comic book, we are really left with only insanity as the only explanation for her actions. Interestingly, this is not what the court concluded in the real-life Krim siblings case with their murderer-nanny Yoselyn Ortega deemed fit to stand trial (we never get to the trial phase in Slimani’s book so it may very well be the case that she receives the same judgement). Indeed, in the Ortega case, the judge, in pronouncing her sentence, described her as “pure evil”, thereby eliminating the latter fork of the evil/mad characterisation.

It’s by no means a vicious argument to say that a caregiver who murders her wards on the basis of unjustified beliefs is mad or evil, and we could say that Lullaby is really about the particular flavour of Louise’s articulation. It doesn’t take away from the Slimani’s accomplishments to say that we know off the bat that Louise must be mad or crazy or worse. But given the slippery nature of madness, perhaps I was looking for something for a bit more to explain the stabbiness.

Verdict: Probably shouldn’t read this if you’re a jumpy parent. The writing is sublime and the plot well-developed, but I have a feeling Slimani missed a trick although I’m not sure what. (7.5/10)

Availability: Paperback, RM47.50

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Lit Review: ‘The Maid’s Room’ by Fiona Mitchell

Say hello to our new guest contributor, Eugene Lim. He reviews a debut novel set in Singapore. 

Who: A journalist who was born and raised in the UK, Fiona Mitchell’s debut novel, The Maid’s Room, is based on her experiences living in Singapore for almost three years. She is winner of the 2015 Frome Short Story Competition and has also been shortlisted three times for the Bristol Short Story Prize.

What: The Maid’s Room chronicles the lives of three women in dire circumstances, but for altogether different reasons. Jules is newly-arrived to Singapore from the UK, desperate to conceive a baby and struggling to accustom herself to her new social circle of privileged expatriate wives whose children are left in the care of their respective maids. Dolly is a youthful, attractive woman from the Philippines who is determined to do whatever it takes to provide for a decent upbringing for her daughter Mallie, and Dolly’s older sister Tala is an experienced hand at navigating the life of a foreign domestic worker.

All three are confronted with the existence of Vanda, a mysterious blogger with an apparent vendetta against foreign maids whose blog becomes a sensation for its supposed exposé chronicling their shenanigans and cautioning against giving them basic human rights. It is a story of sadness, poignancy and redemption.

Why: The Maid’s Room is an eye-opener into our casual neglect of the welfare of a fixture in modern, middle-class Malaysian life: the foreign live-in help. In recent times we have had ample news of the mental, physical and sexual abuse of foreign maids by their employers. This book serves as a wake-up call to many, highlighting the fact that these are in fact, people with needs, emotions, fears and hopes; people who are compelled to spend years away from their loved ones in order to provide for them.

The literary style isn’t very refined; but then again, this book is meant to reflect its characters, not romanticise them. This book was a tough read as time and again, I have been compelled to pause and admit distastefully that I have borne witness to live-in domestic helpers being subjected to similar experiences as Dolly and Tala, and merely shrugged it off.

This is a humorous and heart-breaking tale about the daily life of someone who struggles to be heard.

Verdict: This is a highly captivating story that I would recommend, one that serves as a cautionary tale against indifferent neglect and taking people for granted. (8/10)

Availability: Paperback, RM49.90

Thank you Pansing Distribution for a review copy of the book. 

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Lit Review: ‘Leila’ by Prayaag Akbar

By guest contributor Sarah Loh 

Who: Prayaag Akbar is a writer and journalist. A former deputy editor of Scroll, his award-winning reporting and commentary have examined various aspects of marginalisation in India. He studied at Dartmouth College and the London School of Economics. He lives in Mumbai with his wife and their cat, and works as a consulting editor with Mint, a leading Indian newspaper. Leila is his debut novel.

What: In a near-future city in India, society is fixated on the concept of purity and people revert to communal segregation based on caste. Divided by walls, communities are guarded by brutish men known as the Repeaters and permissions are needed to enter any one sector. In this bleak world of oppressive patriarchy and ostracism, Shalini searches for her lost daughter Leila, who was taken from her 16 years ago. This is a story of suffering and redemption and what it truly means to be human.

Why: Prayaag Akbar’s writing is simple yet engaging. The story starts off slow but once the pace picks up, it becomes a real page-turner. Shalini is a compelling and flawed character where you might find yourself first feeling bad for her, and then realising that she probably did not deserve your full sympathy. That said, she is not an unlikable character and you will most likely root for her as she searches for her daughter.

It is undeniable that this story is very much like Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Female narrator? Check. Communal segregation based on social class? Double check. Non-linear narrative that jumps between past and present? Triple check. That said, Leila isn’t a mere copycat story. The dystopia in Leila is more realistic and mirrors what real-world India could become if India’s social issues persist (i.e. prohibition of inter-caste marriages; the widening gap between the rich and the poor; the oppression of women). And it is this social realism that makes Leila a much more disturbing read.

Best/Worst Line(s): To her I am an emptiness, an ache she cannot understand but yearns to fill. No. I have left more, a glimmer at least. The blurred outline of a face. A tracery of scent. The weight of fingertips on her cheek. The warmth of her first cradle, my arms.

Verdict: Dystopian or speculative, Leila is an enjoyable story that sometimes hits a little too close to home. I was just a tad bit disappointed with the ending, but I suppose it works for this story. (9/10)

Availability: Hardback, RM89.90

Special thanks to Times Distribution for a review copy of the book. 

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Lit Review: ‘The Italian Teacher’ by Tom Rachman

We’re delighted to have a new guest contributor, Emily Ding, write for us. Here’s her first review. 

Who: A few years ago, Tom Rachman — who used to work as a foreign correspondent for the Associated Press in Rome — published The Imperfectionists, his debut novel/linked short stories about a bunch of hacks working at a English-language paper in Rome, to critical acclaim. That was my introduction to his work, and because of that book I would read anything else he writes. He also wrote another novel, The Rise and Fall of Great Powers, and Basket of Deplorables, a collection of short stories inspired by Trumpian America.

What and Why: If, like me, you saw Mother! or Phantom Thread before picking up The Italian Teacher, you might initially be a little put off by its opening pages depicting a bullishly charming painter whose wife and son live in his shadow. But keep at it. It’ll very soon become clear that Bear Bavinsky is not actually the central character in this story; it’s his son, Charles “Pinch” Bavinsky, who, through boyhood, manhood and old age, never shakes off his need for his father’s approval. And the only way to win Bear’s approval is to feed his ego as an artist, even as the man is, with the passing of time and the fickleness of taste, relegated to a once-been.

Having grown up so close to fame with a celebrated father, Pinch is a young man with “needy ambitions” — expressed more as a desire to be seen and loved by his father and the world than any self-directed sense of purpose or impulse. When his budding skills as a painter —imitating his father’s work: studying parts of the human body in isolation — are abruptly dismissed, Pinch decides that he will write a biography of Bear Bavinsky instead. He can already picture it: The book will become critically acclaimed, and he will establish himself as an art critic. And yet, how can he, when everything he reveres and loathes is determined by what Bear reveres and loathes? Pinch is the guy who clings to what the people he worships say and do, and when they disavow what they’ve said or done he feels betrayed, because he never had the strength of his own convictions in the first place. Equally, his ambition sullies his friendships and relationships: He sees people for the figures of importance they might become — which would reinforce his own importance — rather than who they really are.

In less adept hands, Pinch might come across as a little insufferable, but Rachman has a knack — similarly displayed in his debut, The Imperfectionists — for exposing his characters’ foibles with clear-eyed tenderness, so that we always recognise, often uncomfortably, bits of ourselves in them. “Nobody likes to be understood without warning,” reads one line in the book.

Ultimately, does Pinch ever fulfil his dreams for his life? Does he ever make peace with being the seemingly second-rate son of a famous man? In attempting to answer these questions, Rachman asks so many more: What’s the point of making art: to create something good or how it makes you feel? What’s more important: a rich interior life or a life of public note? Can art and ambition and fame (itself a kind of love) fill the absence of real human love? I’ll leave you to find out, and just say that a twist — a secret act of rebellion — comes more than halfway through the book, so wait for it. If at other times the novel seems to be wading through the motions of a man’s entire life, with episodes of importance yet unclear, it’s because at heart, this is what the story is about: how to build a life — hopefully with a little bit of decency, dignity and accountability, whatever becomes of it.

Verdict: I wonder if the structure might have been played with a little bit to avoid a straight chronology, but otherwise, it’s funny, desperate, satirical and moving, all at once. It’s the sort of book that will make you ask yourself questions after you’ve put it down. (7/10)

Availability: In-store soon

Special thanks to Pansing Distribution for a review copy of the book. 

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The Half-Yearly Update

Hi folks,

It’s been just over six months since Elaine and I started Lit Books, and we remain amazed by how time seemed to have just flown by! It’s been a steep learning curve and I think we are now beginning to almost, sort-of get the hang of it, but only really sort-of. One of the things that we’ve really come to enjoy is ordering and receiving new books — it still feels like Christmas whenever we get a new box of books — and we are pleased to report that our stock of books has continued to grow steadily.

Our customers have been asking us to come up with a list of our bestsellers, so we have obliged and published our list of bestsellers here. While it certainly provides some insight into our customers’ reading habits, the list has to be taken with a pinch of salt as it is never our policy to purchase more than a few copies of each title. This mean that sales of a title that takes a while to restock may be lower than a title that we purchased in bulk to, for example, facilitate an in-store event.

Another interesting development is how we have really started intensifying the number of literary events at our store. Since the store’s opening, we’ve hosted several authors, live recordings with BFM’s Bookmark programme, book launches, etc. We are also going to be doing a Murakami-inspired jazz performance to show that literature isn’t confined to just the written word.

Another quick word of thanks to all, and keep following us here or on social media to keep up with developments!

Bests,

Min Hun and Elaine