Ponti

Ponti is a very MFA-ish book, full of lovely description, visual detail, and memorable phrases, but chapters and chapters go on without anything much happening in them.  The novel is narrated in turns by Amisa, a horror-movie hasbeen, her teenage daughter, Szu, and Szu’s school friend, Circe. The three women narrate different overlapping experiences, over many years, and the jumping narrators and timelines help make this a book of images, without much plot connecting them.

Mostly, this was fine. I’ve enjoyed reading about Singapore and Malaysia in The Night Tiger, Crazy Rich Asians, Sarong Party Girls, Last Tang Standing, The Harmony Silk Factory, and more, and the setting in Ponti comes through strongly. As an ex-expat English teacher, I usually love reading about foreign food, foreign weather, and foreign school systems, and Ponti didn’t disappoint me there, with detailed observations about daily life and personal relationships.

But I read this on my Kindle, so I didn’t have any reminder of my progress through the book. The beautiful prose, extremely slow character development, and the vaguely similar emotions between narrators, had me at the final chapter thinking At last! The wandering exposition is over and the plot is starting! Although really. I was just pages from the unsatisfying end.  I enjoyed the scenes that make up this book, but, ultimately, nothing happened. Our three characters went about their days feeling frustrated and disappointed, and overall, the book left me feeling a bit frustrated and disappointed, too.