Love, Or Something Like Love

by O. Thiam Chin

A woman reminded of her past through the acts of her grandson. A band of swordsmen on a failed mission. The forbidden love of Zheng He, the great Chinese Admiral. A young daughter forming a strange bond with her deceased father’s cat.

Presenting ten stories in his fifth collection, O Thiam Chin plumbs the joy and despair, hopes and fears of men and women caught up by their past and confounded by lost loves. Taut, dark and visceral, these stories reveal, once again, the mysteries that lie in the heart of man.

Genres: Fiction, Short Stories

Paperback

First published October 1, 2013

About the author

O Thiam Chin is the winner of the inaugural Epigram Books Fiction Prize in 2015 for his first novel, Now That It's Over, and his second novel, Fox Fire Girl, was shortlisted for the 2016 EBFP; both novels are published by Epigram Books.

He is also the author of five collections of short fiction: Free-Falling Man (2006), Never Been Better (2009), Under The Sun (2010), The Rest Of Your Life and Everything That Comes With It (2011) and Love, Or Something Like Love (2013). Love, Or Something Like Love was shortlisted for the 2014 Singapore Literature Prize for English Fiction, and Never Been Better and Under The Sun were included in the top ten fiction books in the POPULAR Readers’ Choice Awards in Malaysia.

His short stories have appeared in Mānoa, World Literature Today, The International Literary Quarterly, Asia Literary Review, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Kyoto Journal, The Jakarta Post, The New Straits Times, Asiatic and Esquire (Singapore). His short fiction was also selected for the first two volumes of The Epigram Books Collection of Best New Singaporean Short Stories anthology series.

O was an honorary fellow of the Iowa International Writing Program in 2010, a recipient of the NAC Young Artist Award in 2012, and has been thrice longlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. He has appeared frequently at writers festivals in Australia, Indonesia and Singapore.

Reviews

[Whitaker · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a very uneven collection of ten short stories. In the best of them, O Thiam Chin’s straightforward style complements the story being told. His natural voice seems, based on this collection, to be relatively unadorned. This is not to damn with faint praise: It worked well with stories of ordinary people struggling with difficult situations, where a more ornate style would have been out of place. On the other hand, where he tried to reach for a more obvious stylistic effect or where the circumstances were more unusual requiring a stronger descriptive element, the stories fell flat.

I’ll start with the stories that worked for me:

> “Third Eye”: A man loses his wife in an accident. He struggles to bring up his young son while grieving heavily.
> “Boys at Play”: A man recalls the drowning of his best friend in his childhood. The two boys were playing in a canal during a rainstorm and his best friend was swept away.
> “At the Suvarnabhumi Airport”: An estranged couple visit Bangkok to try to patch up their marriage. While there the husband befriends a young woman.
> “The Years”: In his late middle age, a married man recalls a clandestine gay one-night stand and is seized with regret.

A common theme in each of these is guilt and regret, and the prosaic voice gave ballast to what might have otherwise been overwrought. In these works, O has a knack for the telling detail that gives the story life:

> From “Third Eye”:

Looking at [my son, James], I saw traces of resemblance with Susan [(the late wife)]: mocha-coloured eyes kindled with gentleness, thin lips, a lonely dimple on his right cheek. When James was a baby, Susan and I used to compare the features we thought matched ours. While James possessed Susan’s eyes, lips and dimples, he had my curly mop of hair, thick eyebrows and angular jawline.

These past few days I had found more and more traces of Susan in James, and it hurt to look at him for long.

>From “Boys at Play”:

Lying miserable in bed, awash in random thoughts, I could see us back in the canal, fighting against the pulling current, our bodies feeling every piece of debris that came with the water: the broken arms of branches, the jellyfish-like texture of plastic bags, the mushiness of softened milk cartons.

>From “The Years”:

Liang bent in to kiss the man. And his body went down, in a blind, final surrender, a man caught in the waves that swept him asunder, finally giving up. The man pulled Liang’s shirt off and placed his hand on the chest. Your body feels so warm, he said, turning to adjust the air-con knob. Is this better?

Liang moved to take off the man’s shirt, tracing his tongue on his nipples, teasing the hardness, nibbling lightly. The man sighed, throwing his head back.

Stories that did not work for me were:

> “The Cat that Disappeared”: A woman tries to rehome her late father’s cats. He had been found dead in his home after several days, and the cats had partially eaten his face. The story is badly hampered by clunky metaphors: “Sunlight reflected off the windscreens of parked cars in sharp, pulsating glints.”; “A feathery skin of white dust lay over the surfaces.”
> “The Swordsmen”: A wuxia (i.e., stories of Chinese martial art fighters set in the past) story of a rebel clan led into a trap by a traitor in their midst. O struggles to fully flesh out his tale with atmosphere and detail.
> “The Last Voyage”: The last and greatest Chinese admiral, Zheng He, imagined as having a gay lover on his last voyage before returning to China. Weighed down with a language that is at once stiltedly formal and flat: “To go forth and command a fleet of three hundred vessels is a fearful, daunting task, one that might paralyse a lesser man, but I knew enough of myself, of my strength and courage and experience, to overcome these fears. To know and master yourself fully, that’s the first victory you should win; the rest will follow naturally.”

The remaining stories were about average, the last two being more vignettes or impressionistic pieces rather than full stories:

> “A Lost Boy”: A woman recalls her first sexual partner as she tries to deal with her teenage grandson’s burgeoning sexuality.
> “The Verdict”: About 750 words of imagined musings of man who had sex with an underage prostitute.
> “You Are Always Here, All the Time”: A wife recalls her husband’s fading years as he succumbs to Lou Gehrig’s disease.

Averaged out to three stars.

[Diana · Rating 4 out of 5]

I devoured the book slowly in one sitting. In some way I can't really explain, I loved it. The prose is uncomplicated and unpretentious and somehow in a simple way, spellbinding. His characters are also endearingly, seemingly simple, with an almost banal sheen to their lives. Their desires and griefs seem uncomplicated, and perhaps all the more relatable in a way we might not have paid attention to.
As if the stories spoke to our very nature; stories as real, as humble, as important to us as the very air.

I didn't really expect to enjoy the book but found that I really did. The first story "The Cat That Disappeared" was a strong opening which I thought was quite representative of O Thiam Chin's style -- a very compressed but telling silence. He jumps back and forth the timeline for a few of the stories, but I think he does it quite elegantly. He does turn the gaze of the reader to the details, and he does explain things with some length, but the power of his telling lies very much in suggestion. He writes around the obvious fact; the unsaid; the elephant in the room of the heart.

I enjoyed "The Years" and "Third Eye" the most, along with "At the Suvarnabhumi Airport" which I felt had such a brilliant ending -- So little is said about the wife in that story, but she knows everything, or at least enough, of what is going on in the protagonist's head which readers are privy to. "The Last Voyage" & "Swordsmen" stuck out too sorely in the collection, being set in a completely different timeframe, the latter having all of the explanatory detail but really none of the subtlety and silent, mournful gaze that his strong short stories have. I've read his novel "Now That It's Over" and prefer his short stories a lot more. Perhaps his writing is best employed in the form of the short story.

My honest rating would actually hover between a 3 and a 4, but since it would be closer to the 4 (like 3.7 if I want to be exact) I'll give it 4 stars.

[Natalie · Rating 3 out of 5]

i ended up giving this a 3, though in my mind this book wavers a little above it—four stars for the measured, muted tone & straightforward/concrete style of writing, but three for how much i enjoyed reading these stories. his writing was most effective when focused on the personal, ordinary lives of people in singapore, instead of reaching for elaborate 'tales' set in the 13th century/long ago past ("the last voyage" & "swordsmen"). of the twelve stories, i only liked three—but those three were very strong: "the years", a married man in his fifties reflects about the one gay sexual encounter he had when he was in his thirties, with a stranger he met at a chinese new year party for gay men which he was invited to over internet chat; "at the suvarnabhumi airport", about a couple in their forties on a week-long holiday in bangkok 'to rebuild their marriage' after multiple affairs, and the young woman they meet, traveling alone, who ends up joining their table; and "third eye", about a man taking care of his young son in the wake of his wife's death. they are similar in their quiet, unassuming descriptions of things thought but left unsaid, where subtle glances carry more weight than what is said aloud. in these three stories, the emotions pierce through. i would want to check out his other books.

[Aisya · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quick read. Author has decent writing style, but wow the amount of male gaze

[Justin Chia · Rating 2 out of 5]

An average collection of short stories. There's a recurring theme (death! violence!) running through the stories but they are often executed poorly, reading almost like what you'd expect from a sensationalist tabloid article.

I think the short story form is very tricky to get right because you have so little room for error. Any slight tonal abnormality is immediately perceptible to the reader such as in the second story where a first-person narrative grandma is spying on her grandson masturbating and it has a weird flashback to her childhood torturing a duckling and then helping her boyfriend rape another villager. Like wow, it really took me for a ride which I wasn't really sure I wanted to be on in the first place and I'm left pretty confused by the end of it.

The worst story is definitely "Swordsmen" not because of the many questionable stylistic choices (like huh? can the human body really bend like that?) but because they ate stewed rabbits. Like c'mon, leave the bunnies alone man. "The Years" is pretty okay but again, the attention to detail seems a little off because who, in good conscious, will bring a curry dish to a gay gathering/pre-sex party (Thiam Chin wasn't very specific here)?

I really wanted to like this collection (the title is really good, 'love, or something like love', lust? infatuation? romantic longing? projections? always seems to get me into trouble) and I don't want to be an unkind reviewer but I think ultimately, the stories here are mostly forgettable and the ones I remember are for the wrong reasons.

[Jac · Rating 3 out of 5]

A quick and lukewarm read, each story from the POV of someone in a relationship, ranging from familial to romantic or affairs between strangers.

[lin · Rating 3 out of 5]

this book reminds me of my tiny island country, and it hit home for me. The stories, though short, were impactful in their ways. It left me wondering what happened to the characters after the story ended.
Like little windows peering into their lives, we read about what they feel, their becomings and unbecomings. The author really made the characters come to life and this is a really great piece of literature.
I was only sad that the stories came to an end.

[Rage · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5. Pretty uneven - I liked a lot of the contemporary stories (and I feel his writing fits that kind of setting more) but I didn't see the need to include historical fiction which wasn't particularly well pulled off.

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of short stories mostly tinged with loss and regret.

[mila · Rating 4 out of 5]

read it in one sitting.
the writing is so easy to follow and without you knowing, you are half way through the books. some of the stories got me thinking

[Beatrice · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't read a lot of short story collections but I'm glad I picked this one up. I was torn between reading all the stories in one go or savoring the stories by reading slower. The author's words immediately draws the reader in; 10 stories is not enough! This was written well, and while a small number is so-so for me, I have my favorites and overall an enjoyable and quick read.

[K Yuan · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favourite books - often return to it for solace.

[DeanJean · Rating 4 out of 5]

Chin's writing, although sparse at times, vibrates with an emotional current invoked easily in a few words. I am in awe.

[ember x · Rating 5 out of 5]

Achingly familiar stories, in ways only local writers evoke.

[Joel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well written and clever but neither beautiful nor thought provoking.