Haunted

I surprised myself by finishing Boey Kim Cheng's Between Stations a couple of days ago. It's not exactly a short book and when I bought it I envisaged it as a bit of a keeper. Basically it comprises a number of essays which whilst being thematically connected can be enjoyed as separate pieces, and I thought I'd manage an essay here and there occasionally. It turned out to be compulsively readable. I raced through quite a bit in KL and finished the last four essays in the time back at work when I had no time.

Impossible to do anything like justice to its many merits, but I just wanted to say how extraordinarily moving the work is. So often Boey returns to the raw wound of his relationship with his late father. He does so with deep feeling yet remarkably without sentimentality. The facts of his pain seem precisely that: facts that need to be acknowledged in an almost detached fashion.  

It's quite fascinating how more and more aspects of their relationship and his father's life and character are revealed as you read along. Yet eventually you know there are mysteries here, as there are about anyone's life, that will never be fathomed. The moment when the writer notes that the accident that lamed his father may also have been responsible for the blood clot that may have had some connection with his less than socially acceptable behaviour which ruined him - and his family - was particularly powerful for me. A reminder of the fierce vulnerability of us all.