SINGAPORE – In this week’s Book Box, The Straits Times looks at books that delve into ancestral memories. Buy the books at Amazon. These articles include affiliate links. When you buy through them, we may earn a small commission.
Book review: Vanessa Chan’s The Storm We Made an uneven Malayan espionage thriller
Opening with the disappearance of teenage boys in 1945 Japanese-occupied Malaya, The Storm We Made follows mother of three Cecily Alcantara as her worst nightmare comes true when her son Abel vanishes to the Kanchanaburi Labour Camp on the Burma-Thailand border.
Soon, the reader learns that the Eurasian woman had a part to play in the Japanese’s imperial ambition to create an “Asia for Asians”, which had seen nearly the whole of South-east Asia come under the flag of the Japanese empire, a guilt that eats at her.
Book review: Adventure in 18th-century Senegal in David Diop’s Beyond The Door Of No Return
On the island of Goree, off the coast of Senegal, is a door.
Through it, captured Africans would have emerged from dark dungeons into the sunlight of their native land one last time, before being packed onto ships and sold across the sea into slavery.
This is the titular Door Of No Return in David Diop’s third novel, in which swashbuckling adventure and doomed romance in 18th-century Senegal culminate in tragedy.
Book review: Jhumpa Lahiri’s Roman Stories sketches the Eternal City in decay
Rome is one of those cities that nigh everybody has an idea of. Whether it is the endless adventure in Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960) or the dangerous mystique in Dan Brown thrillers, its representation in popular media has given it its own mythology.
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri’s title for her short story collection is taken from another classical representation, Alberto Moravia’s Racconti Romani, or Roman Tales, published in 1954.
Except she subverts all ideas of Rome and writes from the perspectives of immigrants, the overlooked other growing in population in the Eternal City and whose place is simultaneously more fundamental to the city’s functioning, but also more precarious.
Book review: Jesmyn Ward’s harrowing Let Us Descend enters the hell of American slavery
In his pioneering 1845 memoir, the former slave Frederick Douglass recalls a horrific childhood memory of watching his aunt get whipped by their master.
“It was the blood-stained gate, the entrance to the hell of slavery, through which I was about to pass,” he writes.
This line by Douglass, who in penning his own narrative helped prove the intellectual capacities of African-Americans, finds its echo in American author Jesmyn Ward’s Let Us Descend.
Golden Mile Complex designer Tay Kheng Soon: Don’t be duped by idea of global city
In 1968, architect Tay Kheng Soon received a call from then Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew’s office. He had impressed with a paper he authored on housing and nation building, and Mr Lee, through his adviser George Thompson, wished to see him.
Ushered through the doors of City Hall, Tay was struck by Mr Lee’s “height and ruddy complexion”. Mr Lee, however, had no time for niceties, immediately beginning a thrust-and-parry with Tay on the role of Malay kampungs in modern Singapore.
The content of the discussion seemed to hardly matter, recalls Tay in his new book. “The man was sizing me up. But beyond argument, I also felt the weight of his overbearing presence. It was palpable. You could not prevail against this colossus of a man.”
Bestsellers: The Straits Times’ Weekly Bestsellers Jan 20
Theresa Devasahayam’s newest book, Little Drops, debuts at No 3 on the non-fiction bestsellers list.
