jeudi 26 avril 2018

Ponti!

I haven't written about literature on here for a while because I've just been putting stuff on Goodreads with a few sparse words as the review. I'll keep this short, but I've just finished Ponti by Sharlene Teo, who is a Singaporean author who did her BA in Law and then switched to creative writing. She won a £10'000 scholarship to finish her novel back in 2016, and this is the result.

It tells the story of Amisa Tan, a beautiful but emotionless woman who once starred in a B-movie that has now reached cult status but never became famous, her insecure daughter Szu whom she resents, and the daughter's friend Circe, who is equally lost. It spans forty years to tell the story of Amisa's departure from her Malaysian village to her crumbling marriage with a man she only loved because he loved her on one end, to Circe's meaningless life in 2020 on the other end and (spoiler alert) Circe and Szu's reunion. In the middle of it all is the year 2003, when both girls are 16 and enter into this sort of inescapable co-dependent friendship characteristic of two people who have nobody else.

I literally finished this book 10 minutes ago and had forgotten Szu's name, which is probably indicative of something. Maybe it just means that the book is really not memorable, but it could also mean that the reader is meant to project themselves (or, let's face it, herself) onto Szu. Szu is so full of self hatred, especially for her body, to which she feels completely alienated and which she mistreats (she doesn't realise until years later that she had an eating disorder in 2003). She's completely lost the will to go on – she just survives, trudging through every day and unable to stop hating her mother, allowing her mother's death to consume her entirely – haunted even from beyond the grave.

There were too many dream sequences, and the magical realism that I'd expected from a book where one of the main characters is called Circe comes at the very end. There are also hints of some science-fiction-wondrous-magical-stuff at the end but all of this could've come in much earlier and been weaved into the fabric of the story. But that might've made the plot too busy, I guess. I understand why Teo would put in the whole Amisa backstory but to be honest it didn't need to be 1/3 of the book. It makes the book seem like a lot of novels these days set in non-Western countries that tries to trace the history of the nation/culture through people's individual stories. Like Khaled Hosseini or the countless stories about China written by people of the diaspora, including Do Not Say We Have Nothing, which, again, is my favorite book, so I'm not saying it's bad. I just don't think Amisa's story contributed much to the book because all it really reveals is how much she's suffered and how bitter and resentful she is, which we can tell from Szu and Circe's points of view. It just seems forced to appeal to that market that loves to read about intergenerational stories set against a backdrop of nation-shifting changes like political upheaval or economic expansion. If it had to be included, it should've been much more revealing and rich; a couple episodes of Bojack Horseman showcase hereditary trauma much more effectively.

The back-and-forth of narratives and timeframes dances around this mystery of why Circe and Szu are no longer friends; we can tell how toxically symbiotic their friendship is, but we don't know what happened. Did Szu die? Did Circe have a hand in her death? Was there violence? The reveal is a bit disappointing, but I guess realistic. A lot of friendships, especially female friendships, kind of just fizzle out as both parties realise they never really liked the other person anyway. Szu's point of view portrays their relationship as something pathetic, Szu desperately hanging on to the cooler and more self-assured Circe who was often mean just for the sake of it. Circe, on the other hand, reminisces about the friendship in a more neutral way, admitting that she had genuinely liked Szu at first but had abandoned her when her illness worsened and she was ruined by grief. At the end of it all, Circe truly feels regret and feels haunted by Amisa and Szu, and Szu seems to have gotten over it and is living a happy life. Which is cool.

I wondered a couple of times whether this story would've been better as a film than a novel. Sometimes it feels like Teo has trouble describing something that would've come out much smoother on a screen, like when the radio plays Fleetwood Mac in the car and Amisa starts to cry – it's a bit awkward, whereas in a movie you wouldn't have to actively describe it but could just passively absorb it and it would be much more touching. But now that I think about it, there are other parts where the sensory details, especially about sweat and pungent smells, are so vivid that you would really not be able to feel the same thing in a film.

I've been thinking a bit about female coming-of-age stories. Although Ponti isn't really a coming-of-age story. Do any of the girls learn anything? We only see the result of their development 17 years later but we don't see them actually realise anything. In 2003, we're subjected to their cyclical angst. So it's not really a bildungsroman. More just a study in teenage self-loathing, which realistically does in fact feel like it'll never end. And you don't realise you're done until many years later, looking back. But anyway, stories about teenage girls. I went to see Ladybird with Gabriel back in March, and although I'm super sick of white people coming-of-age stories (like, nobody would watch a movie about me at 18 even though my life is pretty interesting because they'd want intergenerational flashbacks to how much my family suffered under Communism and/or during the Cultural Revolution) and it frustrates me that boring-ass movies about white people where nothing happens is, like, lauded by film circles –– and yet, and yet, Ladybird was so good. Even though I didn't really date anyone in high school I related to the sadness and the desperation and the pretending to be nonchalant and the awkwardness and, oh my, the scene with her mom in the kitchen... I cried so hard.

But Gabriel didn't like it at all: he said Ladybird was selfish and self-centred. While I agree that there were aspects of the plot, like her best friend Julie who immediately forgives her for treating her so badly, and also that horrible thing she said to Miguel, were pretty bad, I'm interested in the fact that both Gabriel and his brother (whom he spoke to about it afterwards) didn't feel a connection to the main character at all. The story is semi-autobiographic, based on Greta Gerwig's own girlhood. When we look back at who we were we often see the bad and the embarrassing, and it's natural to me that Gerwig would write herself as selfish and self-centred, with side characters not getting much development because that's what they are, side characters in the Story Of Her that she never really paid attention to because she was too busy thinking about herself. Even though it was a white girl who struggled with class differences between herself and the other people at her private Catholic school, I related because our issues were different but really the same.

Maybe it really is a female thing; maybe only women can understand that feeling in that acute kind of way because being a Young Girl isn't just an ontological thing, we get dragged into this common network of Young Girls where being isn't just being, but rather a concept, an unattainable concept because we can never be the Young Girls in the magazines or the TV shows. Young Girls belong to everyone but ourselves. I don't know, I haven't figured out the specifics of this yet. I'm still only halfway through Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl, which really is preliminary since it's mostly just fragments, and it doesn't really match up to what I want to be thinking about, more on that later, but it does have some very interesting truisms.

Anyway, I better brush my teeth and get to writing my two essays.

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