Amanda Lee Koe's DELAYED RAYS OF A STAR
This is one of the few novels by Singaporeans that I did not feel was a duty to read, but a real pleasure. I admire the ambition, not only in its range of characters, settings, times, and scenes, but also in its daring depiction of such well-known historical personages such as Hitler, Goebbels, and Walter Benjamin (in addition to the three female stars, Marlene Dietrich, Anna May Wong, and Leni Reifenstahl). It could have fallen on its face, but it did not; it throbs with life. The self-awareness invested in Benjamin, in particular, is Shakespearean. If the prologue about the Berlin Press Ball, which brings together the three female protagonists, feels stagey, the reader lives the last days of Benjamin with him as in a dramatic monologue.
The novel does own a few non-fatal weaknesses. The slight over-deliberateness in the construction and juxtaposition of scenes. The occasional flamboyance in the language, including distracting puns and wordplay. The chapter titles are coquettish, and in one case misleading (Marlon Brando is brandished but does not really enter the story), but perhaps that is the way of the coquette. Like its film stars, the novel wants so much to be loved, and everywhere is conscious of the perils and patrimony of that desire.
There is just a little too much of Marlene's piss and stools, for my taste, although the relationship between the aging star and her young Chinese maid is depicted with the keen sympathy that already illuminated her short story "Alice, You Must Be the Fulcrum of Your Own Universe," the best story of her first book Ministry of Moral Panic. The battle scene in the Leni Reifenstahl section is somewhat thin, but Reifenstahl herself is a complex creation, thrown into sharp relief by the sweetness of the soldier and best boy Hans Haas. Anna May Wong is a little too passive, too much of a screen for others' projections, in Lee Koe's novel, but the passivity sets the reader up for the wonderful final confrontation between her and the Chinese film critic, in which the old idea of art's supremacy over politics is burnished anew.
I do not believe that Bogie would kill himself the way he did, but Bebe's return to China is the experience of alienated longing that every immigrant feels upon returning home. "If you went around the world and ended up back in the same spot you started from, is that the same as never having left in the first place?" The novel is a resounding answer to its own question.
The novel does own a few non-fatal weaknesses. The slight over-deliberateness in the construction and juxtaposition of scenes. The occasional flamboyance in the language, including distracting puns and wordplay. The chapter titles are coquettish, and in one case misleading (Marlon Brando is brandished but does not really enter the story), but perhaps that is the way of the coquette. Like its film stars, the novel wants so much to be loved, and everywhere is conscious of the perils and patrimony of that desire.
There is just a little too much of Marlene's piss and stools, for my taste, although the relationship between the aging star and her young Chinese maid is depicted with the keen sympathy that already illuminated her short story "Alice, You Must Be the Fulcrum of Your Own Universe," the best story of her first book Ministry of Moral Panic. The battle scene in the Leni Reifenstahl section is somewhat thin, but Reifenstahl herself is a complex creation, thrown into sharp relief by the sweetness of the soldier and best boy Hans Haas. Anna May Wong is a little too passive, too much of a screen for others' projections, in Lee Koe's novel, but the passivity sets the reader up for the wonderful final confrontation between her and the Chinese film critic, in which the old idea of art's supremacy over politics is burnished anew.
I do not believe that Bogie would kill himself the way he did, but Bebe's return to China is the experience of alienated longing that every immigrant feels upon returning home. "If you went around the world and ended up back in the same spot you started from, is that the same as never having left in the first place?" The novel is a resounding answer to its own question.
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