Archives for July 2019

Alison Wong

Lonely Asian Woman by Sharon Lam (Lawrence and Gibson, 2019) 183 pp., $29

When you read a book published by Lawrence and Gibson, you know you’re going to get something a little different. After all, on their website under 9 Fun Facts About Us, they describe themselves as ‘a collective that publishes literary fiction skewered towards the morose, satirical, verbose and thoughtful’; and each of the other facts is amusingly off-kilter.

I read the blurb on the back cover of Sharon Lam’s debut novel. The protagonist, Paula, is a young Asian woman. But Paula bucks the stereotype of the industrious, responsible and super-achieving Asian young person. She’s lazy and ‘mired in a rut’, and this ‘is not the story of a young woman coming to her responsibilities in the world’.

Or is it? [Read more…]

Ben Brown

Novel by Vaughan Rapatahana (Rangitawa Publishing, 2018), 320pp., $38

‘In our contemporary world of increasing electronic surveillance from hegemonic national administrations, several diverse characters struggle to survive and to resist in a variety of ways. At the same time the so-called established methods of writing fiction undergo deconstruction.’

The italics are mine but the quote is lifted from the back cover blurb of this, Vaughan Rapatahana’s second novel, an earlier version of which was long-listed for the inaugural Michael Gifkins Prize for an unpublished manuscript.

The assertion of deconstruction is intriguing. I have to confess, it’s one of those terms I’d always associated more with architecture and a desire to reinterpret a structure as fragmented rather than unified or symmetrical. [Read more…]