Evening Is The Whole Day

(This is not a review but just a collection of thoughts on Preeta’s debut novel)

First, I would like to confess that I’m one of those who are reluctant to read fiction by, and on, Malaysians. I would be extra critical of narratives produced by a fellow countryman (or woman) and would usually find more riveting reads sometime through a Malaysian story. I cannot tell you when this reluctance first seeded, nor why it bloomed, but I can only say that what happens when I pick up a Malaysian-based story is a peculiar feeling of trepidation. Not of the writing itself, no, but the content. The dialect, the street names, the locales, the characters, and their prejudices induce in me, simultaneously, an uncomfortable knowledge and an odd disengagement. As if I’m looking at an all-too-familar scene but from a different lens, and everyone within are strangers who I somehow, someway, somewhere, know. It can be a confusing kaleidoscope of emotions, where your knowing of what the author is telling clashes with some wonder that someone is indeed articulating what is normally just observed and silently understood, and along with these is the fear that there could be some unknowns of which you had been blissfully ignorant.

As all these don’t happen with non-fictions – where I can digest and absorb stinging critiques (and lavish praises) of the country without the emotional barometer swinging beyond the normal range – I suspect it has to do with fiction, to me, symbolising an alternative reality and a safe escape from the horrors of human nature.

So it is that, shamefully, Preeta’s is the first Malaysian novel that I have read and completed. I’m glad to also say that I thoroughly enjoyed it, as a fiction lover, and as a Malaysian. Praise have been heaped on Preeta’s prose, so mine will be an addition of the same. She writes sinuously, weaving words in and and out in a way that makes you look twice at an otherwise mundane scene, or ordinary fact, to find something new and – sometimes – different. I enjoyed especially her metaphorical descriptions, such as this, of India’s Independence:

….it had been nine years since King George VI had relinquished the cherished jewel of his crown. To be more precise: he’d dropped it as if it were a hot potato towards the outstretched hands of a little brown man in a loin-cloth and granny glasses; a taller, hook-nosed chap in a still-unnamed jacket; and three hundred and fifty million anonymous Natives who’d fiercely stayed up until, by midnight, they’d been wtery-eyed, delirious with exhaustion, and willing to see nearly anything as a precious gift from His Majesty. Down, down, down it had fallen, this crown jewel, this hot potato, this quivering, unhatched egg, none of them knowing what would emerge from it and yet most of them sure – oh blessed, blissful certainty! – that it was just what they wanted. Alas, the rest, too, is history: in their hand-clapping delight they’d dropped it, and it had broken in two, and out of the two halves had scurried not the propitious golden chick they’d imagined, but a thousand bloodthirsty monsters multiplying before their eyes, and scrabble as they might to unscramble the mess, it was too late, all too late even for them to make a last-minute omelet with their broken egg. (p.20)

Politics is a strong thread in the book. Preeta’s book deals with an upper middle class Indian family based in Ipoh in the state of Perak, and her narrative starts from pre-Independent Malaysia. She includes that fateful, unfortunate day in Malaysian history: 13th May 1969, when Chinese clashed with Malays, and the illusion of a young, harmonious nation was rudely torn apart. While I disagree with how the origins of the riot are presented (I believe Preeta only consulted one book on 13th May), I appreciated her inclusion of the incident, and how it must have been like from one particular race’s perspective (I hate to keep bringing race up but – as I had jotted down in a diary when I was in my teens – you can’t write about Malaysia, and Malaysians, without writing about race). Preeta’s family stays mostly within the race boundary, as is sadly the norm with a lot of Malaysian families, and, in reflection of how Malaysians relate to each other, characters become defined by race before any other tag.

It’s a masterpiece of a story when, at the end of it, you feel that you could relate not only to one character, but to three. Preeta’s characters are wonderfully (and exasperatingly at times) complex, from Appa, the Oxbridge educated lawyer who had to settle for a life that was on a much lower plane than his dreams had soared, Amma, his severely repressed, emotionally and intellectually handicapped wife, Uma, the beautiful, brilliant eldest daughter who prefers theatre to science, Asha, the neglected, ghost-sighting six year old who pines for better times, Paati, the demanding matriarch who still plays a role even after death, to Chellam, the unfortunate servant and unfortunate victim of the family’s myriad dramas. Their personal stories make up the collective jigsaw, and Preeta’s narrative made you look forward to the whole journey.

Technically, Preeta starts from the present and moves back, and it’s like an onion being peeled, layer by layer, until you come back to the present with a deep understanding (tinged with melancholy over what could have been) of the story. She switches from past tense to present tense, though the switch(es) were fluid enough that the seams were unnoticeable.

I wished her ending was more elaborate but it does end on a hopeful note. I wonder, though, whether the ending is based on her own experience of life in America, and what America could represent, for her. I met her at a Breakfast Lit event last month but – not having read the book yet – did not ask the question.

Congratulations to Preeta for the international accolades on her book. While I am not a lit expert, I can give a lay-reader’s enthusiastic Aye to the positive reviews.

Filed under: Personal Note

Ad Break: A Writing Marathon

Since I’m too caught up in Preeta Samarasan’s lyrical narrative to be inspired enough to write my own (much less lyrical) ones, an advertisement seems to be a good bet.

It’s November, and so National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is back, tantalising writers with the idea that they should, can, must complete a 50,000 word manuscript in 30 days. That roughly 175-pages in a month, or almost 6 pages a day. It doesn’t sound like much, but…if you are anything like me, where you cross out half of the passages that you write, before you even get a full page – six pages is an awfully long distance. To do it daily can be like climbing Mount Everest.

NaNoWriMo works on the principle that you need to write mountains of crap to produce a tiny mound of gold (“gold” being Natalie Goldberg’s expression for good writing). In other words, you’d perhaps get 20 usable pages out of the 175 – but you needed to write the 175 anyway to arrive at that 20. (I try to imagine Preeta writing “crap” but fail – however, she did mention in a recent author’s event that her orginal manuscript was three times the length of this one, so there you go – it’s easier to cut down on material rather than not have enough to work with in the first place).

I entered the NaNoWriMo marathon about five years back, and exhaustedly crossed the finish line at just a couple of hundred words over 50,000. See Ming’s Word Up! was administrating then, and I remember frantic emails before each milestone. The administration is a lot easier now – with just the finish line submission to be made, and to a centralised administrator which will then verify the word count.

At any rate, the exercise was a good stamina-building exercise for writers, particularly ones like me, who delete more than I write, regret the deletions, undo the erasures, get frustrated, and then wonder if I should delete everything and start over (perfectionism or procrastination, take your pick). With NaNoWriMo, and each installment logged, I couldn’t undo, nor backtrack, and had to find a way out of the story I had written my characters in, somehow.

The story’s gone – it was in an old laptop whose hard drive conked out before I could backup the contents. I remember bits and pieces of the narrative – it was excruciatingly bad (though with good grammar, of course) – but nonetheless, I have been slowly building on remnants of the tale since that time, adding layers and dimensions from – well, where else? – The Real World. If writers are scientists and story scenarios are hypothesis, then I”d say more than half have been proven correct, though quite unfortunately, in some cases.

That exhausting, painful, extraction of Story from Goodness Knows Where, at the expense of a Normal Life, has made me shy away from subsequent NaNoWriMos. But if you are ready, willing and able – go for it. Last year, 15% of the 100k participants worldwide completed the marathon. So, you can feel proud if you complete the 50k words, and console yourself if you don’t. Either way, you’ll end up with a lot more rubbishy narrative than when you started, which you can then mine and sieve, for the glinting threads of – yes, there’s actually no better word for it – gold.

Filed under: Personal Note, Writing , NaNoWriMo08, Writing