Still Reading

Forgot to mention the other day in all my excitement over 'discovering' Balzac that I also finished Gwee Li Sui's very interesting anthology, Written Country - The History of Singapore through Literature. It does a pretty good job of presenting a picture of the island's history since 1942, at least to someone like myself who isn't exactly an expert. I did spot what I would have thought of as gaps regarding possibly highly contentious aspects of that history, but it may well have been the difficulty of getting permission to use certain texts, or the possible over-representation of certain writers, that acted as a constraint. It would be discourteous in the extreme given the quality of the anthology as a whole to cavil over supposed omissions - so I won't name names, or subjects.

The single biggest surprise for me in my reading was just how powerful I found the scenes excerpted from Haresh Sharma's Still Building, the ones centred on the three characters trapped after the collapse of the Hotel New World. I've never actually seen the play, and when I read it I found it difficult to figure out the relationship of these scenes to the other scenes featuring different characters played by the same actors they are juxtaposed with. In Written Country you get the scenes in a continuous sequence, and they pack an almighty wallop. I'm not sure how they'd work on stage, but on the page they capture a powerful sense of victimhood mixed with genuine affection for the characters.

I suppose I'm supposed to be a 'good' reader. My job certainly requires that, to be done well. But I'm keenly aware of how often different kinds of failure are involved in my encounters with texts. Must get back to the full play and see what I obviously missed.