Noon at Five O'Clock: The Collected Short Stories of Arthur Yap

by Arthur Yap, Angus Whitehead (Editor)

A schoolboy time travels in a strange old shop house. A child with Down's Syndrome is run over chasing a balloon seller. An older sister tightly slaps her theatrical younger sister. A soul fatally forgets its wayang performer owner.

With his signature minimalistic style, Arthur Yap simultaneously perplexes readers with stories of seemingly plotless ambiguity, yet draws them in with familiar characters playing out situations that still resonate in twenty-first century Singapore.

The volume marks the recovery and first combined publication of the stories of Arthur Yap, one of Singapore's most accomplished and important writers. A hitherto neglected facet of Yap's opus, his eight stories are deceptive in their simplicity, housing within their sparse prose a complex engagement with Singapore society.

Angus Whitehead's introduction highlights literary nuances in the stories and frames them within the wider backdrop of social change of Singapore at the time of Yap's writing. The meticulous critical apparatus make this book of interest to not only the general reader but also students of Singapore and Southeast Asian literature in English.

"Arthur Yap's manner slides surreptitiously between detachment and an undermining sense of ironic understatement, as he exposes the half-truths, even the utter void, existing at the heart of human interactions..."

~ Cyril Wong, author of "Tilting Our Plates to Catch the Light

112 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2014

About the author

Arthur Yap Chioh Hiong (Chinese: 叶纬雄; pinyin: Yè WěiXióng; 1943–2006) was a Singaporean poet, writer and painter.

Arthur Yap was born in Singapore, the sixth child of a carpenter and a housewife. Yap attended St Andrew's School and the University of Singapore, after which he won a British Council scholarship to study at the University of Leeds in England. At Leeds Arthur earned a Master's degree in Linguistics and English Language Teaching, later obtaining his PhD from the National University of Singapore in the years after he returned from Leeds. He stayed on in the University's Department of English Language and Literature as a lecturer between the years 1979 and 1998. Between 1992 and 1996, Yap served as a mentor with the Creative Arts Programme run by the Ministry of Education to help inspire students and nurture young writers at local secondary schools and junior colleges. Yap was then diagnosed with lung cancer, and received radiotherapy treatment. Yap was known to be an intensely private man.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Yap

Reviews

[Jee Koh · Rating 3 out of 5]

This slim volume of 8 stories is significant mainly because it collects the prose fiction of a major Singaporean poet. Too much can be made of the resemblance of these spare, almost plotless stories to his minimalist poetry. The best story here is the first, "Noon at Five O'Clock," written when Yap was nineteen years old, an undergraduate at NUS. The style is spare too, but here the spareness is entirely fitted to the situation of a young boy's accidental discovery of a secret courtyard. A small moment is inscribed in plain yet highly conscious prose. The style is less convincing in the other stories in the collection. It feels rather more like a writer's handicap than like a precisely chosen instrument. When the later stories become longer, they turn to satire, dream, and formal pastiche. Nowhere do they give the hidden depths of a lightning-quick characterization. In a very interesting critical essay included in the volume, Shirley Geok-Lin Lim posits that Yap's preference for extreme privacy and reticence hinders the expression of the public privacies required in a short story. She may very well be right. A great poet may not make a great storyteller. Still, I'm grateful to Angus Whitehead for editing this collection. It adds to one's understanding of Arthur Yap's artistic powers and their limitations.

[Claire Ion · Rating 5 out of 5]

approaching this book having already read yap’s poetry, these stories made me feel like I was inching closer to finding out more about yap himself. I love the short phrasing, the subtle humour, the references to a developing singapore, those moments of ennui in our everyday relationships. he is simply a wonderful writer who i marvel at all the time!

[YJun · Rating 3 out of 5]

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[Lorraine · Rating 5 out of 5]

interesting narration......... O.o