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All articles by Adrian Chew
24 May 2011
I've previously read other titles by Haruki Murakami such as Kafka on the Shore and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles and I've commented each time that the storyline was surreal and filled with very rich imagery - allegories of human melancholy, the search for true love, and the regret over circumstances that can't be changed. South of the Border, West of the Sun is somewhat different. It's a short...
07 April 2010
The ancient Byzantine historian Procopius wrote a book called Anecdota, more commonly known as Arcana histora (The Secret History) chronicling the scandals and court intrigues of the rule of the Eastern Roman Emperor Justinian I, who reigned in the years 525 to 565 A.D. In it, Procopius described his hatred for the Emperor and his wife (and joint ruler) - the treacherous Empress Theodora, ...
11 May 2009
Meet Henry DeTamble and Clare Abshire, who first met when Henry was 36 and Claire, 6. First dated when Henry was 28 and Claire 20, and got married when Henry was 30 and Claire,22. The Time Traveler's Wife is an original love story that transcends life's barriers of time and death, and offers a fresh, realistic, and intimate insight into the complications that the space/time continuum theory, (if...
16 March 2009
Cormac McCarthy's tale of a post-apocalyptic America opens on a road where a father and his son trudge along pushing a shopping trolley filled with their earthly belongings in a world all but destroyed, where the dying land is burnt black, forests defoliated and ashened, the sky perpetually gray. It is always cold, dark, damp and gloomy. There is nothing beautiful about the rain falling in this...
06 March 2009
The Reader by German judge and law professor Bernhard Schlink was published in German in 1995 and translated into English in 1997. In 1999 it was selected for Oprah's Book Club, not to mention garnering various other literary awards. One can read this book as a story of a love affair set in post-war Germany between a 15 year old boy and a woman twice his age. Or one can read it and see the tale...
12 February 2009
Malaysian author Tan Twan Eng’s debut novel is a tale about the bonds of friendship and family, set amidst Penang Island in the turbulent years leading up to and after the Second World War. The story is told from the point of view of the protagonist, Philip Khoo-Hutton, a man in his twilight years who seeks to understand the events of his youth and his role in bringing them about. As he...