Novel
Lonely Face
孤寂的脸
Yeng Pway Ngon · 1989
Synopsis
In Singapore, at the end of the eighties, a man approaching forty, educated in Chinese-medium schools, sees his marriage come apart. For a weekend, he flees: a night bus takes him to Genting Highlands, where he tries his luck at the slot machines. This journey mingles with memories of his childhood, his youth and his marriage, and the narrative shifts in turn from the first to the second and the third person.
Context
Published in 1989, two years after a prize-winning first novel, the book belongs to the years when the author moved from poetry and the essay to the novel; Ang Jin Yong counts him among the pioneers of modernism in Singaporean literature in Chinese. Natascha Bruce translated it into English under the title Lonely Face, for Balestier Press in 2019, and her translation was shortlisted for the TA First Translation Prize.
Who it is for
For discovering the Chinese-language novel of Singapore through a book of inventive construction, readable in English.
Prizes and reception
The reviewers of the University of Leeds praise the construction of the narrative, made of flashbacks and shifting voices.
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