Booker 101 Quick & Dirty Monday!
THE SOUTH: Tash Aw
Farrar, Straus and Giroux : 27 May 2025 (US) (unless otherwise noted, I’m reading the US edition)
4th Estate (Harper Imprint): 13 February 2025 (UK)
Page Count: 280
First line: Two boys walk through the scant shade of an orchard, far from the house where they are staying.
Blurbed by:
Michael Cunningham – (Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1999, no Booker nominations)
Yiyun Li – (Numerous awards (including finalist for the Pulitzer), previous Man International Booker Prize Judge, 2024 Booker Prize judge)
Edouard Louis – ( Numerous awards, no Booker nominations)
Oisin McKenna – (Award-winning spoken word artist and playwright. His debut novel was published in 2024. No Booker nominations.)
Tash Aw is the author of five novels, three of which have been longlisted for the Booker Prize. (THE SOUTH, THE HARMONY SILK FACTORY (2005),and FIVE STAR BILLIONAIRE (2013).) THE SOUTHis the first of a planned quartet.
Don’t Judge a Book… Wednesday
I’m not sure what it is about the Booker dozen this year, but I’m finding myself liking the US covers over the UK ones, and The South follows that trend. The US version features a stunning aerial view of southern Malaysia – lush, green, and hazy with memory (and longing). This suits the summer-long romance between Jay and Chuan. The novel, set on a farm in the south during a prolonged dry season, is about so much more than this young love between the two boys and Jay’s coming of age, and this picture somehow captures all of that with the tone of the novel. The font is perfect. I typically don’t like the author’s name as large as the title, but it works here.
The UK version looks like a sister to FLASHLIGHT. 4th Estate opted for a bright green (dare I say garish green?) with a small photo of a man in a river. The man is standing in the water, looking away from the camera. To me, it looks more like a man than a boy. This doesn’t bother me so much because the novel is framed with an adult Jay looking back on that summer, and the river is important to the land but also memories of the water are tied to the relationship with Chuan; I just don’t like this block single color plus photo style.
What about you? Which one is your favorite?
“In no time. I can’t remember how long all this takes to unfold; it doesn’t matter.” (116)
“That was how memory worked; it was the opposite of recollection, never as strong as we thought it was, always relinquishing the instances that mattered most to us.” (200)
Set in Malaysia, Tash Aw’s The South, the first of a planned quartet, is a bildungsroman that does so much more; Jay’s first love story also tackles infidelity, gender norms, geopolitics, Malay v. Chinese Malaysian, urban v. rural, and the socioeconomic struggles during the financial collapse of the 1990s. (And like a few other Booker books, it involves a professor who can’t keep it in his pants.)
The novel is told in four alternating POVs: adult Jay (his is the only one in first person), young Jay, Sui (his mother), and Fong (his father’s half-brother and farm manager, also Chuan’s father). The connection between Sui and Fong is delicate and often unspoken; one of my favorite sections of the novel is when Fong cuts down tamarind trees following Sui making a decision that will forever change everything. This act of anger and defiance is in quiet contrast to the depictions of Jay’s father’s violent outburst.
The relationship between Jay and Chuan is at the heart of the novel, but the pieces you get about his sisters, his parents, Fong… these slices of life, quiet moments that pass quickly, are the juicy fruits in a failing harvest.
Chuan’s friend, Jessie, is also an interesting part of the novel. She’s vibrant and alive, much like the sunflower print in her apartment, but Aw just drops clues without revealing too much. But it’s the whispers in the novel, the flashes of light that Jay might not notice, that a memory might not recollect, that the reader catches. We can infer what happened, but we’re not told. And that seems to be a bit of the theme with the novel – we’re getting whispers, but it seems unfinished.
As it should. This is one of four.
Will the whispers get louder?
I am surprised they listed the first of a quartet, though it does stand seemingly well enough on its own. Aw’s writing is beautiful and he’s been listed twice before – maybe the third time is the charm for him.
A Girl Named Tommi 