Advertisement

Lake Like a Mirror by Ho Sok Fong review – beguiling

The winner of an English PEN award, Chinese Malaysian author Ho Sok Fong’s second short story collection is her first to be translated into English. There’s a surreal bent to many of the stories in Lake Like a Mirror: everyday logic seems to slip, as if in a dream. It can be just an uncanny shiver, as in March in a Small Town, in which a man checks in to a guesthouse every day, without acknowledging he’s visited before. But some stories go further, sneaking towards magical realism. A woman vomits white balloons; another has an amphibious, frog-like guardian angel. In The Wall, an old woman becomes so thin that Fong’s childish, yet also strangely omnipotent, narrator can “see the air passing magically along her throat, making her vocal cords quiver like violin strings”.

Fong is clearly fond of elusive narrators – in Wind Through the Pineapple Leaves, Through the Frangipani, she slides between characters, and first- and third-person narration, to disorienting effect. Here, and elsewhere, the meaning or metaphorical thrust of her work can be hard to grasp, but her writing is beguiling and seasoned with striking imagery. Rain falls in “silent needles from the sky, then shatters noisily against the ground”; an emerging diver opens his mouth wide, “as if trying to inhale the clouds”.

Fong allows different parts of her stories to hang together lightly, and they may chime more easily for readers with knowledge of Malaysian culture. For those without it, the collection provides a fascinating glimpse, not least into the repressive nature of a strictly Muslim society. A couple of notes – added, I presume, by translator Natascha Bruce – include a jolting reminder that all ethnic Malays are required to be Muslim, and applications to leave Islam are rarely granted.

Two of Fong’s stories draw attention to this, set in rehabilitation centres for women “judged guilty of licentiousness, deviant ideology, gender confusion, apostasy”. She’s highly critical, albeit in her own poetic, shifting fashion. Descriptions of wind blow through this collection, but are wistfully prominent in these stories about young women bored, damaged by confinement. The title story also focuses on political/religious censorship. An exhausted young Chinese Malaysian tutor, whose pupils remind her of a herd of docile elk – “no one ever broke the rules” – teaches at a university where staff are also terrified of breaking rules. After allowing a Malay student to read an EE Cummings poem aloud, the teacher is accused of promoting homosexuality and risks losing her job.

Aside from the unexpectedly buccaneering, action-packed tale October, which features hot-air balloons, pirates and brothel keepers, most of the stories are enveloped in ennui and exhaustion, focusing on women trapped by circumstances or lack of opportunity. An unemployed woman is bored listening to gossip in a hairdresser’s (“time slipped through hair and washed away down the sink”); a disillusioned stepmother at an amusement park is “plagued by a nagging sense that everything was turning to dust”. Despite the distilled strangeness of much of Fong’s prose, spending so much time with lethargic, disengaged protagonists can ultimately prove enervating.

• Lake Like a Mirror by Ho Sok Fong (translated by Natascha Bruce) is published by Granta (£12.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 020-3176 3837. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99