Tag: contemporary fiction

#BookReview Ponti by Sharlene Teo

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PontiAbout the Book

It is 2003, and in the sweltering heat of Singapore sixteen-year-olds Szu and Circe develop an intense friendship. For Szu it offers an escape from Amisa, her beautiful, cruel mother – once an actress and now the silent occupant of a rusty house. But for Circe, their friendship does the opposite, bringing her one step closer to the fascinating, unknowable Amisa.

Seventeen years later, Circe finds herself adrift and alone. And then a project comes up at work, a remake of the cult seventies horror film series ‘Ponti’, the same series that defined Amisa’s short-lived film career. Suddenly Circe is knocked off balance: by memories of the two women she once knew, by guilt, and by a lost friendship that threatens her conscience . . .

Format: Paperback (304 pages)    Publisher: Picador
Publication date: 23rd April 2019 Genre: Contemporary Fiction

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My Review

The book moves between three different timelines: Szu’s account of her teenage friendship with Circe in 2003, Circe’s reflections in the present day, and Amisa’s story beginning in 1968. I have to say I found Amisa’s story the most absorbing, describing as it does how, as a result of a series of disappointments, she becomes the cold, distant mother we encounter through Szu’s eyes.  The sadness of Amisa’s story is that the shattering of her dreams is something she never really gets over.

Szu’s and Circe’s teenage friendship emerges from a shared feeling of being outsiders,  ‘citizens of nowhere’ in Circe’s words. It’s this sense that they don’t belong that initially draws them together.  But, despite being intense, it’s not an untroubled relationship because of their different backgrounds and life experiences. Looking back, Circe marvels at how brief what she terms the ‘Age of Szu’ actually was. She describes the gradual fracturing of their relationship, how being friends with Szu became ‘like carrying around a heavy, sloshing bucket of water’.

I could completely empathise with what Szu goes through but also understand what a vast amount of patience on the part of a friend would be required to see her through the worst times.  Circe, who in the modern day story seems to rid herself of partners in the same merciless way she does her tapeworm, I found less easy to like.

All three women are, in different ways and with varying degrees of success, trying to find their way through life.  It’s a well-crafted novel and an impressive debut. There was a lot I liked about it without completely falling in love with it.

In three words: Insightful, intimate, assured

Try something similar: Best of Friends by Kamila Shamsie

Sharlene TeoAbout the Author

Sharlene Teo was born in Singapore in 1987. She has an LLB in Law from the University of Warwick and an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia, where she received the Booker Prize Foundation Scholarship and the David TK Wong Creative Writing award.  She was shortlisted for the Berlin Writing Prize and holds fellowships from the Elizabeth Kostova Flundation and the University of Iowa International Writing Program.

In 2016, she won the inaugural Deborah Rogers Writers’ Award for Ponti, her first novel.  (Photo: Goodreads author page)

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#BookReview The Echo Chamber by John Boyne

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The Echo ChamberAbout the Book

What a thing of wonder a mobile phone is. Six ounces of metal, glass and plastic, fashioned into a sleek, shiny, precious object. At once a gateway to other worlds – and a treacherous weapon in the hands of the unwary.

The Cleverley family live a gilded life, little realising how precarious their privilege is, just one tweet away from disaster. They are various degrees of catastrophe waiting to happen.

Together they will go on a journey of discovery through the jungle of the modern living, where carefully curated reputations can be destroyed in an instant. Along the way, they will learn how volatile, how outraged, how unforgiving the world can be when you step from the prescribed path.

Format: Paperback (528 pages)    Publisher: Penguin
Publication date: 12th May 2022 Genre: Contemporary Fiction

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My Review

John Boyne is one of the authors on my list for my Backlist Burrow reading challenge so it was serendipitous that The Echo Chamber was the book chosen for discussion at my book club this month. As is often the case, the book divided opinion with some club members finding it lacking in nuance or simply unable to put up with the unlikeable characters. However, quite a few of us – including myself – found it hilarious and very enjoyable.

I don’t believe The Echo Chamber is intended to be an in-depth exploration of the impact of social media. To me, it’s a satire in which the author pokes fun at various aspects of the modern age such as the rise of social media influencers, the scourge of online trolling and our growing dependence on electronic devices. It can also be seen as his response to the abuse he himself suffered on social media which saw him leave Twitter.  The book’s epigraph includes this quote by John Ronson from his book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed. ‘The snowflake never needs to feel responsible for the avalanche’.

To my mind, the members of the Cleverley family are clearly designed to be caricatures representing the worst of modern day society.  George, the head of the family, is a popular TV personality – or in his own words ‘a national treasure’. Although he believes himself to be liberal-minded he gets into a series of scrapes through his use of distinctly non-PC language on Twitter and in a broadcast interview.

George’s wife, Beverley is a celebrated – or so she would like to think – author of romantic fiction who employs a ghost to do the hard work of actually writing her books. She gets some of the funniest lines in the book. For example, she proudly recalls one of  her readers commenting on a recent book, ‘She said it reminded her of Wolf Hall. Just without all the boring historical bits’.

George and Beverley’s daughter, Elizabeth represents the nasty side of social media. She is addicted to her phone, suffers panic attacks when separated from it and is intent on increasing her followers on Twitter by any means possible.  At one point, whilst taking a break from trolling celebrities, she even engages in an argument with herself on Twitter.  What may be the greatest moment of her life comes when she gains that elusive blue tick on her Twitter account but disappointment soon follows.

My favourite character was the Cleverley’s eldest son, Nelson, who finds it easier to interact with other people when dressed in a uniform. His experiment with speed dating is one of the funniest scenes in the book. Other memorable characters are Pylyp, a Ukranian dancer, and his pet tortoise named after a Ukranian folk hero.

Each member of the family eventually finds themselves in hot water in a variety of bizarre ways and all of them are brought down to earth with a bump.

The Echo Chamber is certainly very different from the only other book I’ve read by John Boyne, All The Broken Places, although a glance at his backlist demonstrates the great variety in his writing. It’s rare a book makes me laugh out loud but The Echo Chamber did. In fact, I like to imagine John Boyne chuckling away to himself whilst writing certain scenes.  At over 500 pages, I did feel it ran out of steam a bit towards the end but it’s wickedly funny – with the emphasis on  ‘wicked’.

In three words: Funny, entertaining, satirical

John BoyneAbout the Author

John Boyne is the author of thirteen novels for adults, six for younger readers and a collection of short stories. His 2006 novel The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas has sold more than 11 million copies worldwide and has been adapted for cinema, theatre, ballet and opera. His many international bestsellers include The Heart’s Invisible Furies and A Ladder to the Sky. He has won three Irish Book Awards, along with a host of other international literary prizes. His novels are published in over fifty languages. (Photo: Goodreads author page)

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