The Harmony Silk Factory
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- 6,49 €
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- 6,49 €
Publisher Description
A landmark work of fiction from one of Britain’s most exciting new writers: The Harmony Silk Factory is a devastating love story set against the turmoil of mid-twentieth century Malaysia.
Set in Malaysia in the 1930s and 40s, with the rumbling of the Second World War in the background and the Japanese about to invade, The Harmony Silk Factory is the story of four people: Johnny, an infamous Chinaman – a salesman, a fraudster, possibly a murderer – whose shop house, The Harmony Silk Factory, he uses as a front for his illegal businesses; Snow Soong, the beautiful daughter of one of the Kinta Valley’s most prominent families, who dies giving birth to one of the novel’s narrators; Kunichika, a Japanese officer who loves Snow too; and an Englishman, Peter Wormwood, who went to Malaysia like many English but never came back, who also loved Snow to the end of his life. A journey the four of them take into the jungle has a devastating effect on all of them, and brilliantly exposes the cultural tensions of the era.
Haunting, highly original, The Harmony Silk Factory is suspenseful to the last page.
Reviews
'A fine, strong, confident novel – and what a storyteller Tash Aw is. Unputdownable’
Doris Lessing
'The Harmony Silk Factory is an utterly remarkable debut. It's a dream of a novel, lovely and exquisite and intense, and reveals Tash Aw's already prodigious gift for storytelling; this young writer has come to us fully formed, and with the promise of a long and significant career.' Chang-rae Lee
'Bewitchingly written and gracefully assured … The story Aw tells is mercilessly gripping and his prose is lucid, uncluttered, beautiful … Aw orchestrates a graceful ballet of dissonances and congruences, of echoes and discords.' Neel Mukherjee, The Times
'Tash Aw's striking debut is as elusive as it is exotic. Aw is a skilled and sensitive writer' Daily Mail
'Absorbing … a rich, intense novel … The strength of Tash Aw's writing can be seen in the three narratives. Each voice is distinct and each offers a subtly different viewpoint, remaking the material afresh … The beauty and danger of nature are everywhere in this delicately drawn novel' TLS
About the author
Tash Aw is a recent graduate of UEA. He is Malaysian by birth but now lives in London. This is his first novel.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Aw slices his first novel into three segments, wherein three characters dissect the nature of Johnny Lim, a controversial figure in 1940s Malaysia. Depending on the teller, Johnny was a Communist leader, an informer for the Japanese, a dangerous black-market trader, a working-class Chinese man too in awe of his aristocratic wife to have sex with her, or a loyal friend. Long after Johnny's death, we hear these conflicting accounts from his grown son, Jasper; his wife, Snow (through the lens of her 1941 diary); and his English expatriate friend, Peter Wormwood. The chief benefit of this structural trick is to make palpable the limitations of each character's perspective, and that's no mean feat. But Aw's prose, though often witty and taut, is not equally convincing in all its guises. Jasper is the typical alienated son who burns to discover all the crimes his father committed; this also makes him the typical unreliable narrator (when his father kills a mosquito that had bitten him, Jasper cites this as proof of an innate "streak of malice"). When Snow takes over, Johnny suddenly resembles a more ordinary man, while she adored by her son, whose birth caused her death reveals herself to be a fallible character and an unfaithful wife. The most boisterous and enjoyable thread of this story belongs to Peter, with whose chipper English patter Aw, oddly enough, seems most at home.
