SINGAPORE – In this week’s Singapore Shelf, The Straits Times looks at four new local titles, including Singapore In The 70s by James Suresh and Tania De Rozario’s Dinner On Monster Island. Buy the books at Amazon. These articles include affiliate links. When you buy through them, we may earn a small commission.
Book review: Amoral tales of Mumbai in Meira Chand’s The Pink, White And Blue Universe
Of Swiss-Indian parentage, the itinerant Meira Chand, who received the Cultural Medallion in 2023, has lived in the United Kingdom, Japan, India and, since 1997, Singapore.
Each country has supplied fertile soil for her writing. Her last two novels, A Different Sky (2010) and Sacred Waters (2017), were fully or partly set here. The former was a panoramic page-turner of the lives of three families in the tumultuous 30 years leading to Singapore’s independence.
But perhaps no country has left as indelible a mark on Chand as India, where she lived for five years in the 1970s.
The Pink, White And Blue Universe, comprising mostly stories she wrote while she lived there, returns her to this period of rapid adjustment, shock and trauma. She writes about Mumbai with confidence, straddling insider and outsider perspectives with panache.
Book review: Jee Leong Koh’s Sample And Loop is poetic panorama of Singaporeans in America
Among the most famed Singaporeans in America is perhaps Crazy Rich Asians (2013) author Kevin Kwan. He moved to Houston, Texas, at age 11, and his great-grandfather was the founding director of OCBC Bank.
In a poem about Kwan titled The Author, New York-based Singaporean writer Jee Leong Koh takes the anecdote that Kwan was inspired to write his best-selling book in 2009 when caring for his father who had cancer, and turns it into a moment of tenderness in the diaspora.
“And yet / another privilege – the clean, white pillow / grew hot under father, and he flipped it / for a cool offertory to the head. / I know he did. Last year I did the same.”
It is a reference to Koh’s recent book of poems, Inspector Inspector (2022), which dealt with the legacy of fathers, including the poet’s own.
Long-haired men, drive-ins, Anita Sarawak: Comics author James Suresh draws on 1970s Singapore
Comics author James Suresh found himself reminiscing about his teenage years while researching and writing vignettes for his newest book, Singapore In The 70s.
Nearly a decade after his last book, Singapore In The 60s (2015), this new illustrated comic focuses on the decade when Suresh was a teenager.
Told in vignettes accompanied by illustrations from his long-time collaborator Syed Ismail, the book takes a comedic approach to remembering the past.
The 68-year-old tells The Straits Times via a phone call: “Singapore In The 60s was a book I pitched for Singapore’s 50th anniversary as a celebration of what the country was like 50 years ago. It was harder to recall because I was in primary school then and had to ask my elder siblings to get my facts right, as well as researching the decade.”
Book review: Tania De Rozario’s Dinner On Monster Island dissects queer life through horror
What can monstrous women in cinema history – the vengeful Thai ghost Natre who haunts her former boyfriend in Shutter (2004), the devilish Carrie White in Carrie (2013), Sadako with her waist-length black hair from Ring (1998) – teach one about growing up on the fringes of society?
For Vancouver-based artist Tania De Rozario, these monsters are her kin – having grown up as a queer, brown and fat girl in Singapore.
In this new memoir, published by Harper Perennial, she performs sharp, cosmopolitan film criticism from her position of alterity to dissect the horrors of her adolescence with an unflinching candour rarely seen in the genre of memoir in Singapore literature.
The Straits Times’ Weekly Bestsellers March 9
Adrian Tan’s If I Were King Of Singapore tops the non-fiction list.
