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extemporalli's review
5.0
This year… this year has been a really bad year in terms of books. I had lofty goals of reading 150 books a year, and was on track for the first couple months of the year with my long train commute until lockdown hit, and the trauma we all collectively went through in the U.S. left me with an inability to read until about August. It’s a small loss, in the big scheme of things, but one of the things that I’ve mourned. I did manage to read some brilliant books this year nevertheless and will be posting about them tomorrow, but I wanted to take some time to talk about earlier this month rediscovering an author that meant very much to me when I was a teen growing up in Singapore.
THE CLAIRE THAM COLLECTION brings together her three short story volumes: FASCIST ROCK (1990), SAVING THE RAINFOREST (1993), and THE GUNPOWDER TRAIL (2003), and they reflect Claire Tham’s evolving preoccupations over nearly a decade and a half - from the teen rebellion and ennui of FASCIST ROCK to the doomed-by-social-mores romances of SAVING THE RAINFOREST and the blowing-up-one’s-life fantasia of THE GUNPOWDER TRAIL. And it’s… all SO GOOD?? Fascist Rock is at its strongest when she talks about school and authority and how sentiment is frequently yoked to authoritarianism, gets a little bit affected when she goes too far into jaded-teens-talk-about-nothing-and-how-little-they-care territory, but overall… what she’s trying to say seems just as resonant thirty years later, just as resonant as it was when I was a teen growing up in 2000s Singapore. And for all her cynicism there are some really strong, even beautiful, moments in there that have unknowingly formed the backbone of my mental landscape for the past decade or so: Patsy throwing back her head and howling out the stupid uni hall song they tried to make her sing, Irvin twisting to look at his reflection in the mirror in an act of instinctive narcissism, Lee giving her father a black-and-white photo of a window, Christy touching Tom’s face, and of course… the whole entire titular story of SAVING THE RAINFOREST, a short story about a 39-year old lawyer, her kleptomania, her best friend, and her best friend’s teenage son. It has the best break-up scene in any fiction that I can remember. And also, there’s a whole thing about girls in convent schools being ‘excoriated for wearing pink socks’, which I’m convinced comes from a truly formative experience in her own life. Oh!!! And there’s a gem of a story I forgot about called Hell Hath No Fury in SAVING THE RAINFOREST, in which the grandma in a Chinese Catholic family joins a Protestant church, one of her grandsons becomes a militant Buddhist vegetarian, the mother becomes uncontrollably attracted to the Protestant pastor, and the dad has a headache and a minor existential crisis over the fallacies of religious dogma. (Me, with tears in my eyes and a helpless, formative love: “CLAIRE THAM HAS THE RANGE. She can do SARDONIC… she can do ANTI-AUTHORITARIANISM… she can do ROMANCE… TWENTY DOLLAR WORDS… she can do HIGH FARCE,,,”)
Anyway there’s a lot to say about Claire Tham: her range, her limitations (we are Not talking about her novel The Inlet here which I remember being distinctly… lacking), but also her originality, her ideas, and general evocation of a nineties Singapore. I forgot how much I love Claire Tham, and she deserves to be much better known that she is. I’m sad she hasn’t gone international in this day and age of Singaporean writers going international! But the fact that these three perfect short story collections will always exist is a matter of huge comfort to me.
THE CLAIRE THAM COLLECTION brings together her three short story volumes: FASCIST ROCK (1990), SAVING THE RAINFOREST (1993), and THE GUNPOWDER TRAIL (2003), and they reflect Claire Tham’s evolving preoccupations over nearly a decade and a half - from the teen rebellion and ennui of FASCIST ROCK to the doomed-by-social-mores romances of SAVING THE RAINFOREST and the blowing-up-one’s-life fantasia of THE GUNPOWDER TRAIL. And it’s… all SO GOOD?? Fascist Rock is at its strongest when she talks about school and authority and how sentiment is frequently yoked to authoritarianism, gets a little bit affected when she goes too far into jaded-teens-talk-about-nothing-and-how-little-they-care territory, but overall… what she’s trying to say seems just as resonant thirty years later, just as resonant as it was when I was a teen growing up in 2000s Singapore. And for all her cynicism there are some really strong, even beautiful, moments in there that have unknowingly formed the backbone of my mental landscape for the past decade or so: Patsy throwing back her head and howling out the stupid uni hall song they tried to make her sing, Irvin twisting to look at his reflection in the mirror in an act of instinctive narcissism, Lee giving her father a black-and-white photo of a window, Christy touching Tom’s face, and of course… the whole entire titular story of SAVING THE RAINFOREST, a short story about a 39-year old lawyer, her kleptomania, her best friend, and her best friend’s teenage son. It has the best break-up scene in any fiction that I can remember. And also, there’s a whole thing about girls in convent schools being ‘excoriated for wearing pink socks’, which I’m convinced comes from a truly formative experience in her own life. Oh!!! And there’s a gem of a story I forgot about called Hell Hath No Fury in SAVING THE RAINFOREST, in which the grandma in a Chinese Catholic family joins a Protestant church, one of her grandsons becomes a militant Buddhist vegetarian, the mother becomes uncontrollably attracted to the Protestant pastor, and the dad has a headache and a minor existential crisis over the fallacies of religious dogma. (Me, with tears in my eyes and a helpless, formative love: “CLAIRE THAM HAS THE RANGE. She can do SARDONIC… she can do ANTI-AUTHORITARIANISM… she can do ROMANCE… TWENTY DOLLAR WORDS… she can do HIGH FARCE,,,”)
Anyway there’s a lot to say about Claire Tham: her range, her limitations (we are Not talking about her novel The Inlet here which I remember being distinctly… lacking), but also her originality, her ideas, and general evocation of a nineties Singapore. I forgot how much I love Claire Tham, and she deserves to be much better known that she is. I’m sad she hasn’t gone international in this day and age of Singaporean writers going international! But the fact that these three perfect short story collections will always exist is a matter of huge comfort to me.
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