In the foreground of the collection of nine stories by Ho Sok Fong – a Malaysian author writing in Chinese – there are women. In the background – contemporary Malaysia with its ethnic and religious divisions, as well as growing intolerance and progressive radicalization.
However, you don’t need to know much about Malaysia to immerse yourself in the slightly surreal world of Ho Sok Fong’s protagonists. Their struggles with reality, with patriarchy, strict religious dictates, progressive urbanization or with broadly understood politics that intrude their lives and claim the right to make decisions that increasingly interfere with their privacy, are just as topical and understandable to readers in Malaysia as well as in Poland or any other country of the world.
On the one hand, Lake Like a Mirror (trans. Natascha Bruce) can be perceived as a polyphony criticizing the mechanisms of power, social and economic inequalities or the exclusion and marginalization of certain groups and minorities (religious, sexual, ethnic). On the other – Ho Sok Fong’s stories are incredibly poetic, often focusing their attention on details, building a slightly curved, alternative reality. The logic of everyday life seems to disappear as if we were in a dream. A dream? Or a nightmare?
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