Ponti

by Sharlene Teo

Shortlisted for the Edward Stanford Fiction with a Sense of Place Award.
Longlisted for the Jhalak Prize.

'Remarkable . . . her characters glow with life and humour' Ian McEwan

2003. Singapore. Friendless and fatherless, sixteen-year-old Szu lives in the shadow of her mother Amisa, once a beautiful actress and now a hack medium performing séances with her sister in a rusty house. When Szu meets the privileged, acid-tongued Circe, they develop an intense friendship which offers Szu an escape from her mother’s alarming solitariness, and Circe a step closer to the fascinating, unknowable Amisa.

Seventeen years later, Circe is struggling through a divorce in fraught and ever-changing Singapore when a project comes up at work: a remake of the cult seventies horror film series ‘Ponti’, the very project 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 past that threatens her conscience . . .

Told from the perspectives of all three women, Ponti by Sharlene Teo is an exquisite story of friendship and memory spanning decades. Infused with mythology and modernity, with the rich sticky heat of Singapore, it is at once an astounding portrayal of the gaping loneliness of teenagehood, and a vivid exploration of how tragedy can make monsters of us.

Shortlisted for Hearsts' Big Book Award 2018.

• ISBN10: 1509855319
• ISBN13: 9781509855315
• Publish Date: 19 April 2018
• Publish Status: Active
• Out of Print: 23 December 2022
• Publish Country: GB
• Publisher: Pan Macmillan
• Imprint: Picador
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 304
• Language: English

Reviews

[Joséphine]

July 25, 2018

My full book review is up on Word Revel.

_________

February 9, 2018

Actual rating: 2.5 stars

Initial thoughts: Sharlene Teo writes well and chooses her words precisely. She's very talented and the years of hard work she spent on honing her craft are evident.

There are three time settings —1970s, 2003 and 2020. Each focuses on a different character. These three characters' lives intersect in 2003 but rather than building up towards something, each chapter offers a vignette into different points in time. They're like scenes randomly pulled out of a movie reel, making it rather disjointed.

I liked reading Ponti while I was immersed in it and was quite taken in by the nostalgia that tinged the historical portrayals of Singapore. Yet, when I think of the book as whole, I feel indifferent. I wanted answers to the questions that first few chapters raised but didn't find any. That's why I wasn't wholly satisfied after reading the last page. Then again, maybe it's the genre of literary fiction that Ponti squarely fits into rather than the novel itself that I'm not accustomed to.

_________

Note: I received an advanced reading copy from a local distributor in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.