Athar Tahir’s new book is categorised as a novel, but it can be called other things besides. It can be called a memoir or an autobiographical novel, a travelogue, a confession (as in Rousseau and St. Augustine), a long personal essay, a book on art and culture, a religious meditation, and a philosophical and symbolic treatise. Certainly it contains all these elements and more. The book is intensely personal with the narrator presiding as the central character. The other main character, a not-so-young Thai woman named Su, may or may not be real, depending upon the reader’s perceptions. I will take up this point in more detail later.
The narrator is a successful 60-plus-year-old, happily married family man. He is well travelled, well read, and well connected. He is highly intellectual and philosophical, and has a poet’s sensibility. The novel is not heavy on plot. The story consists of the narrator traveling to Thailand as part of an official delegation, and being assigned a respectful and helpful female guide named Sukhon, referred to as Su through most of the text. The meeting is unremarkable, except for Su’s extreme helpfulness and amiability, and he returns home. She keeps in touch with him via email, and gradually he begins to look forward to their exchanges. Su moves to Paris for a PhD and keeps him informed about her exploits. By this time he is addicted to her emails and eventually falls in love with her by dint of thinking of her all the time. He finally visits her in Thailand at her invitation, hoping to deepen his somewhat spiritual connection with her, only to be rebuffed. He returns home baffled, with a deep sense of loss.
This is not much of a plot, but the plot is not the point of the book. The story, and indeed Su herself, are devices in the service of the author’s telling of his own story and the revelation of his own spiritual angst. There, indeed, the book is rich with material and meaning, and has multiple layers of complexity. Moreover, one cannot read the book and remain insensitive to the way the author has told his story. The language of the text is remarkably precise and poetic. Form here is as important as content; rather, the form and content reinforce each other throughout the book. To take just one example that occurs early in the book, in Chapter 2 the narrator describes the differences between Thai and Chinese culture when it comes to work. Instead of being long and leisurely, the sentences are crisp and curt to show no-nonsense Chinese efficiency. This is in marked contrast to the description, for instance, of the sunset in Chapter 3, whose serenity envelopes the reader as well. Many instances in the book show that the reader is in the presence of a poet and a visual artist. The descriptions are delightful enough, but added to them are surprising contrasts and unexpected turns of phrase. We also see the art critic in action in many parts of the book, as in chapter 5 where he visits the Emerald Buddha. The language is highly sensory throughout and draws the reader in. We also get to see the narrator’s philosophical side at every step.
Reading the book reminded me of a book called De L’Amour, translated as On Love or Of Love, by the 19th-century French writer Stendhal. It is a nonfiction book where the author coolly dissects his unhappy passion for Metilde Dembowski, a married Italian woman whose salon he frequented in Milan. In the book, Stendhal talks about what he calls the process of crystallisation in romantic love: if you leave a dry wintry bough in the salt mines of Salzburg for two or three months, you will see that it gets deposited with hundreds of shiny crystals. This is what happens to a lover when he is left for a while with thoughts of his beloved. The same thing happens to the narrator in Tahir’s book—he builds up an idea of the woman Su in his head and deposits all his longings—even metaphysical ones—on her. It’s not that he falls in love with this woman due to such a flimsy reason as her occasional, casual emails; it’s that she is the occasion for him to recall his regrets at not having had what he calls “a spent youth.” He describes how, even as a youth, he was studios and serious, and never went around sowing his wild oats. His somewhat comic description of the visit to the Red Light Area with friends again reminded me of Stendhal’s visit to the girls that he recounts in his Memoirs, where he could not bring himself to use the services offered because he was so in love with Metilde, and consequently became the butt of his friends’ jokes.
A lot is said in the book about how Su is not beautiful but plain. The narrator wonders why she must affect him so. He also talks about how in a way he is still in love with his childhood crush Azizah. This really is the clue to his strange obsession with Su. Here I’m reminded of another book. In the rather garishly titled Labyrinth of Desire: Women, Passion and Romantic Obsession, Canadian writer Rosemary Sullivan explores the subject, concluding that romantic obsession is not really a function of the beloved but of the one who loves. In other words, it is the lover’s capacity to love, rather than the charms of the beloved, that creates and sustains the passion. It is the narrator’s own temperament which prompts him to associate Su with all his unfulfilled desires, even religious and spiritual ones. As he confesses, he had tried to love God, and been occupied with Sufism for a time: “The love of God that I read about in Christianity and Islam, that I craved to overpower, overwhelm and consume me and lead me to irfaan and the ultimate peace of mind and the heart, never came.” This desire to lose oneself in God’s love is similar to what anthropologist Marianna Torgovnick calls “the oceanic impulse,” which is “a dissolution of subject-object divisions so radical that one experiences the sensation of merging with the universe.” This feeling of Nirvana is of course part of eastern spiritual traditions, as is the tendency to conflate the beloved and God in poetry. One feels that it really is the frustration and dejection of not being able to reach this state of spiritual bliss that propels the narrator to obsess over Su’s casually typed “baisers.”
The last two sections of the book are in the present tense. Chapter 7 is where the narrator travels to Thailand to see Su, after five years of crystallizing his thoughts. From here on, the narrative is a mix of travel, philosophy, introspection and confession. There are a lot of sensory details, and the depiction of a mind pondering a problem while experiencing various events is masterfully done. As I said before, it is immaterial whether Su is real or not. She is merely the occasion for the narrator to talk about himself and reflect on himself. Along the way he also shows a disarming candor and vulnerability, and the all too familiar self-deception that everyone practices. When he is finally disabused of his illusion, he is left with the terror and desperation of the approaching nothingness—the terror of a man without any consolations: “What have I?...A few more years?...Time is too squeezed for another reaching out…I have missed out so much in life. This was my last, belated, blighted attempt at love.”
In the end, the mystery of Su’s rather irrational behavior is neither important nor interesting. One is left pondering over the narrator’s existential dilemmas which are universal in nature, and as such are also one’s own.
The narrator is a successful 60-plus-year-old, happily married family man. He is well travelled, well read, and well connected. He is highly intellectual and philosophical, and has a poet’s sensibility. The novel is not heavy on plot. The story consists of the narrator traveling to Thailand as part of an official delegation, and being assigned a respectful and helpful female guide named Sukhon, referred to as Su through most of the text. The meeting is unremarkable, except for Su’s extreme helpfulness and amiability, and he returns home. She keeps in touch with him via email, and gradually he begins to look forward to their exchanges. Su moves to Paris for a PhD and keeps him informed about her exploits. By this time he is addicted to her emails and eventually falls in love with her by dint of thinking of her all the time. He finally visits her in Thailand at her invitation, hoping to deepen his somewhat spiritual connection with her, only to be rebuffed. He returns home baffled, with a deep sense of loss.
This is not much of a plot, but the plot is not the point of the book. The story, and indeed Su herself, are devices in the service of the author’s telling of his own story and the revelation of his own spiritual angst. There, indeed, the book is rich with material and meaning, and has multiple layers of complexity. Moreover, one cannot read the book and remain insensitive to the way the author has told his story. The language of the text is remarkably precise and poetic. Form here is as important as content; rather, the form and content reinforce each other throughout the book. To take just one example that occurs early in the book, in Chapter 2 the narrator describes the differences between Thai and Chinese culture when it comes to work. Instead of being long and leisurely, the sentences are crisp and curt to show no-nonsense Chinese efficiency. This is in marked contrast to the description, for instance, of the sunset in Chapter 3, whose serenity envelopes the reader as well. Many instances in the book show that the reader is in the presence of a poet and a visual artist. The descriptions are delightful enough, but added to them are surprising contrasts and unexpected turns of phrase. We also see the art critic in action in many parts of the book, as in chapter 5 where he visits the Emerald Buddha. The language is highly sensory throughout and draws the reader in. We also get to see the narrator’s philosophical side at every step.
Reading the book reminded me of a book called De L’Amour, translated as On Love or Of Love, by the 19th-century French writer Stendhal. It is a nonfiction book where the author coolly dissects his unhappy passion for Metilde Dembowski, a married Italian woman whose salon he frequented in Milan. In the book, Stendhal talks about what he calls the process of crystallisation in romantic love: if you leave a dry wintry bough in the salt mines of Salzburg for two or three months, you will see that it gets deposited with hundreds of shiny crystals. This is what happens to a lover when he is left for a while with thoughts of his beloved. The same thing happens to the narrator in Tahir’s book—he builds up an idea of the woman Su in his head and deposits all his longings—even metaphysical ones—on her. It’s not that he falls in love with this woman due to such a flimsy reason as her occasional, casual emails; it’s that she is the occasion for him to recall his regrets at not having had what he calls “a spent youth.” He describes how, even as a youth, he was studios and serious, and never went around sowing his wild oats. His somewhat comic description of the visit to the Red Light Area with friends again reminded me of Stendhal’s visit to the girls that he recounts in his Memoirs, where he could not bring himself to use the services offered because he was so in love with Metilde, and consequently became the butt of his friends’ jokes.
A lot is said in the book about how Su is not beautiful but plain. The narrator wonders why she must affect him so. He also talks about how in a way he is still in love with his childhood crush Azizah. This really is the clue to his strange obsession with Su. Here I’m reminded of another book. In the rather garishly titled Labyrinth of Desire: Women, Passion and Romantic Obsession, Canadian writer Rosemary Sullivan explores the subject, concluding that romantic obsession is not really a function of the beloved but of the one who loves. In other words, it is the lover’s capacity to love, rather than the charms of the beloved, that creates and sustains the passion. It is the narrator’s own temperament which prompts him to associate Su with all his unfulfilled desires, even religious and spiritual ones. As he confesses, he had tried to love God, and been occupied with Sufism for a time: “The love of God that I read about in Christianity and Islam, that I craved to overpower, overwhelm and consume me and lead me to irfaan and the ultimate peace of mind and the heart, never came.” This desire to lose oneself in God’s love is similar to what anthropologist Marianna Torgovnick calls “the oceanic impulse,” which is “a dissolution of subject-object divisions so radical that one experiences the sensation of merging with the universe.” This feeling of Nirvana is of course part of eastern spiritual traditions, as is the tendency to conflate the beloved and God in poetry. One feels that it really is the frustration and dejection of not being able to reach this state of spiritual bliss that propels the narrator to obsess over Su’s casually typed “baisers.”
The last two sections of the book are in the present tense. Chapter 7 is where the narrator travels to Thailand to see Su, after five years of crystallizing his thoughts. From here on, the narrative is a mix of travel, philosophy, introspection and confession. There are a lot of sensory details, and the depiction of a mind pondering a problem while experiencing various events is masterfully done. As I said before, it is immaterial whether Su is real or not. She is merely the occasion for the narrator to talk about himself and reflect on himself. Along the way he also shows a disarming candor and vulnerability, and the all too familiar self-deception that everyone practices. When he is finally disabused of his illusion, he is left with the terror and desperation of the approaching nothingness—the terror of a man without any consolations: “What have I?...A few more years?...Time is too squeezed for another reaching out…I have missed out so much in life. This was my last, belated, blighted attempt at love.”
In the end, the mystery of Su’s rather irrational behavior is neither important nor interesting. One is left pondering over the narrator’s existential dilemmas which are universal in nature, and as such are also one’s own.