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Book Reviewed by:From the author of The Harmony Silk Factory and Five Star Billionaire, a compelling depiction of a man's act of violence, set against the backdrop of Asia in flux.
Ah Hock is an ordinary man of simple means. Born and raised in a Malaysian fishing village, he favors stability above all, a preference at odds with his rapidly modernizing surroundings. So what brings him to kill a man?
This question leads a young, privileged journalist to Ah Hock's door. While the victim has been mourned and the killer has served time for the crime, Ah Hock's motive remains unclear, even to himself. His vivid confession unfurls over extensive interviews with the journalist, herself a local whose life has taken a very different course. The process forces both the speaker and his listener to reckon with systems of power, race, and class in a place where success is promised to all yet delivered only to its lucky heirs.
An uncompromising portrait of an outsider navigating a society in transition, Tash Aw's anti-nostalgic tale, We, the Survivors, holds its tension to the very end. In the wake of loss and destruction, hope is among the survivors.
I
OCTOBER
October 2nd
You want me to talk about life, but all I've talked about is failure, as if they're the same thing, or at least so closely entwined that I can't separate the two – like the trees you see growing in the half-ruined buildings in the Old Town. Roots clinging to the outside of the walls, holding the bricks and stone and whatever remains of the paint together, branches pushing through holes in the roof. Sometimes there's almost nothing left of the roof, if you can even call it that – just fragments of clay tiles or rusty tin propped up by the canopy of leaves. A few miles out of town, on the other side of Kapar headed towards the coast, you'll find a shophouse with the roots of a jungle fig creeping down the front pillars of the building, the entire structure swallowed up by the tree – the doorway is now just a shadowy space that leads into the heart of a huge tangle of foliage. Where does one end and the other begin? Which one is alive, which is dead?...
If this book has one failing, it's the overly languid pace; this isn't a book that necessarily gets its hooks in the reader from the onset. Without much of a narrative to propel the story forward, it's easy to set it down and not feel compelled to pick it right back up. However, with its sharp social commentary and eventual emotional payoff, it rewards perseverance...continued
Full Review
(527 words)
(Reviewed by Rachel Hullett).
Edmund White, author of The Unpunished Vice
The ironically-titled We, the Survivors is the story of billions of human beings today?but not one reader. This is the tale of poor people?refugees, day laborers?whose lives are ruled by cruel circumstance and extreme poverty, whose struggles end in defeat, who are not meant to survive. What would be abstract in a report is here given burning, lacerated flesh. In the twenty-first century it is our Everyman, alas. Édouard Louis, author of History of Violence
Tash Aw's new novel succeeds in achieving many feats: it is at once the great novel on today's racism that we have been waiting for; a masterly fresco of Southeast Asia, a region of the world that remains underrepresented in literature; and a magnificent story...We, The Survivors is one of the most beautiful and powerful books I've read in years. Tahmima Anam, author of A Golden Age
Utterly absorbing to the last word...With deep empathy combined with a sharp, unflinching gaze. As with his other books, we end up loving the characters we might otherwise hate, and arguing with those we might have a natural affinity for. [Aw] manages to turn our assumptions inside out, all while creating a world that would, without him, remain out of reach and invisible.
Tash Ah's We, the Survivors is centered around a Malaysian man who has recently been released from prison, where he served time for murdering a Bangladeshi migrant worker.
Malaysia and Bangladesh are two Southeast Asian countries that have enjoyed a long and mostly amicable history; records show that Bengalis (native to Bangladesh) settled in Malaysia as early as the 15th century, and according to Bangladeshi politician Salahuddin Ahmed in his book Bangladesh: Past and Present, Malaysia was one of the first countries to recognize the independence of Bangladesh in 1972. A trade report issued by the Bangladeshi government in 2012 declared that trade between the two countries was valued at $1.2 billion USD, and according to a report by ...
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