The lazy native:
A convenient fig leaf for
Your colonial crimes.
#591 On Young Girls Browsing in Bookshops
Whispered giggles are
The currency of young girls
In the budding groves.
#536 Tentang Taubat Gemilang
Dua garis bersilang
Menghias medan suram
Mencalit baris dendam
Mengukir semu malam
Suatu taubat gemilang.
(sebagai suatu penghormatan buat Jon Fosse)
#409 On Knowledge and Beauty in Reading
With each page, each word
Knowledge and Beauty unfolds:
My life’s salvation.
On These Slim Volumes
Within these slim volumes Entire worlds beckon Swim through the eddies of the brightest minds of this evanescent civilisation Skim through these words Read them with deep introspection They glimmer with Wisdom's lustrous glow.
On The Norrington Room at Blackwell’s, Oxford
Subterranean
Cave of literary joys:
Euphorical me!
Tentang Nikmat Membaca
Nikmat sungguh amal membaca
Teman setia sepanjang hayat
Tiap baris mewaris makna
Segar sarat membuah nikmat
Untung sungguh insan budiman
Malar hayat berdamping makna
Tiap hari tiada rawan
Tenang dalam taman saujana.
On the Shittiest Boss in Kuala Lumpur
I was in my favourite bookshop in Kuala Lumpur yesterday, sitting in my usual spot at the staircase and browsing for books. (I eventually got myself a copy of Boccaccio’s Decameron, thanks for asking hehe.) As I was browsing, I spied at the corner of my eye, someone who used to be the boss of a friend of mine. My friend had related his travails of working for this man – the shenanigans, the tantrums, the late salary payments. I pretended not to see him, which was not that difficult, since I didn’t really know this man – only that he was a terrible boss.
Not long after, I got up and made my way to the cash register, paid for my book, and walked upstairs to the cafe where my wife was sitting, drinking water while going through her own reading.
I saw down and immediately said, “Hey, guess who I saw!”
“Who??” Kat looked at me quizzically.
“I just saw the shittiest boss in KL, just browsing for books!”
“Wow! So **** is here looking for books??” Kat asked, her brows furrowed.
“Err, nope. Not him. Guess lah. I’ll give you another guess!” I said, enjoying this little game.
“Hmm. Ah, I know! You saw ****!!” Kat made her declaration with gusto, utterly convinced that she was right this time around.
I frowned for a while and said, “Wow! Hmm you are right, that person really is a shitty boss!! Wah this is rather stiff competition! You might be right, she might be the shittiest boss in all of Kuala Lumpur! But no, it wasn’t her that I saw.” I shook my head in denial, even as I was marveling over the fact that it really was stiff competition.
“Oh, I don’t know! Who is it???” By this time, Kat’s curiosity was really piqued. She needed to know.
“Haha it’s **** lah! Remember??” It was Kat, after all, who was regaling me with stories of this man’s horrific treatment of our friend.
Kat laughed out loud and said, “Oh yes, haha yes he really is a terrible boss! But you must admit though, **** really is a terrible boss herself! In fact, I think the margin is pretty thin between the two!”
I laughed along, nodding my head in agreement with my wife. I suppose there are quite a number of shitty bosses out there!
On Mikhail Sholokhov’s And Quiet Flows the Don
One of the joys of reading is to walk into a bookshop, browse around to look at books (preferably for some hours), and stumble onto a new book that you had not meant to read, and probably did not even know about until you stepped into the bookshop that day. That was the case with me and Mikhail Sholokhov’s And Quiet Flows the Don, which I discovered as I was browsing around Kinokuniya in KLCC a few weeks ago.
What caught my eye? Firstly it was the fact that Sholokhov had won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1965, with this book being his magnum opus. The other was the inevitable blurb on the back cover, comparing the book to Tolstoy’s War and Peace.
So, having finished reading the book, here are some observations and reflections from Sholokhov’s work.
The first is that, sadly, this book is no War and Peace. The comparison is inevitable, I suppose, given that Sholokhov deals with relatively congruent themes of intertwined lives, family drama and love affairs, and how these get strained and tested amidst the horrors and travails of war. But thenceforth the comparison grows thin.
Sholokhov is a capable enough writer, and his love for his native Cossack life shines through at regular moments throughout the novel. He grows especially lyrical when describing the titular Don river, and how it frames and shapes the lives of the novel’s characters. But Sholokhov lacks Tolstoy’s supreme skill and ability as a writer, especially in the ways that Tolstoy draws very accurate psychological portraits of the main characters of his novel. Sholokhov’s characters are believable, and for the most part the very likeable, but lack the realistic depth and psychological heft of Tolstoy’s cast. Also, while parts of the book were given to expositions of Bolshevik ideology, which the reader assumes Sholokhov has deep sympathies, if not allegiance, for, Sholokhov shies away from the essential questions that form, to this reader at least, the core of War and Peace. Gregor Melekhov is an interesting and admirable Cossack protagonist, but he is no Pierre Bezukhov, with the latter’s almost desperate search for existential truth.
The other observation is that, as a paean to Cossack life, the book certainly hits all the right notes. The reader gets a panoramic sense of the daily lives of the Cossacks, deeply religious, very agrarian, and always engaged in hard and strenuous labour. The Cossack is also a famed warrior, and the Cossack cavalryman is a key linchpin of the Russian Army of that era. But what is especially poignant is the way in which the individual characters in the novel convey, through their choices and decisions, the unique way of life of the Cossacks: independent-minded, free-spirited, courageous, democratic, passionate.
The other thing worthwhile noting about the book is that it does not shy away from portraying the horrors and senselessness of war. The fact that Tolstoy took great pains to paint realistic portraits of military action during the Napoleonic invasion of Moscow, especially the battle at Borodino which takes centre stage in the early part of War and Peace, is clear to see. But when the reader steps backwards to survey the novel as a whole, one cannot escape the feeling that for Tolstoy, the war was merely one part of the overall framing of the lives of his characters, especially Bezukhov and his search for universal truth. Whereas for Sholokhov, the war was interesting and worthy of attention, in and of itself. Throughout the novel, we read of various depictions of military action, and the ways in which the principal characters – Gregor Melekhov, Eugene Listnitsky, Ilya Bunchuk and others – are shaped and wounded and transformed by the experience of war. The drama peters off somewhat in the third quarter of the novel, but this is consistent with the chaotic time between the February and October Revolutions of 1917, and the narrative has stayed largely true to the historical drama of the time.
Overall, I enjoyed reading this. A four-star read, and especially recommended as a Deep Cuts selection for readers who have gone through the Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Turgenev books, but still crave further exploration of Russian literature.
On Carson McCullers’ The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
I just read this recently, and finished the book satisfied but also deeply ruminative.
The clue to this book is in the title: it is about a collection of people living in a poor rural town in the South of the United States of America, each plagued by loneliness in their own way.
The bar owner who loses his wife. The young girl making her way awkwardly into adulthood, and nursing a passion for music that she can share with no one else. The vagabond who sees too keenly the injustices around him, and is bursting with rage and socialist righteousness. The black man who worked his way up to become a doctor, only to find himself seething and raging against the continued oppression and privations of his people.
They all gravitate around John Singer, a man that most call simply “the mute”. Indeed, The Mute was supposed to be the original title of the novel, written at the age of 23 by a precocious young author. Almost unique for her time, Carson McCullers wrote of the sorrows and joys of simple people, and masters that very difficult art of shading each character’s narrative so that the reader can almost feel themselves living in the minds of these persons as they make their way through unremitting sadness and misfortunes, in a time when very few cared for the plight of the black man, or the poor.
I enjoyed this book. Each character was believable in their own individual loneliness, and as each of them sought the company of the mute to pour out their worries and sorrows, the reader gets a sense of how difficult life can get. The mute himself, even as he plays the oblique role of being the receptacle of others’ deepest concerns, is struggling with his own loneliness, which culminates in a tragic and senseless ending.
This was a 4-star read. Some rough edges here and there, understandable in the context of a young author finding her footing, but still miles ahead of many writers out there. Recommended.
