Author: Fong Min Hun

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.

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. 

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

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. 

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.