Ponti

by Sharlene Teo

Autora estreante elogiada por Ian McEwan narra história ambientada na Cingapura contemporânea

Cingapura, 2003. Sem amigos e abandonada pelo pai, a adolescente Szu vive à sombra da mãe, Amisa, uma ex-atriz que ganha a vida ao lado da irmã como médium, em uma casa caindo aos pedaços. Quando Szu conhece Circe, uma menina privilegiada e sarcástica, as duas constroem uma amizade intensa, um alívio para o ambiente tóxico controlado por Amisa e a inadequação que Szu sente no colégio. Mas não demora muito para que Circe fique fascinada pela intocável ex-atriz e as três estabeleçam uma dinâmica que as marcará para sempre.

Dezessete anos depois, Circe está lidando com os desdobramentos de um divórcio complicado, quando um projeto novo surge no trabalho: a refilmagem do filme cult de terror dos anos 1970 Ponti!, a obra que definiu a curta carreira de Amisa. De uma hora para outra, Circe perde o chão e mergulha nas memórias das mulheres que ela conheceu, na culpa e em um passado que ameaça sua consciência tranquila.

Contado pela perspectiva das três mulheres em momentos distintos de suas vidas, Ponti, livro considerado “Incrível” por Ian McEwan, é uma história original sobre amizade e memória no breve espaço de algumas décadas. Um retrato generoso da avassaladora solidão da adolescência e um vislumbre de como pequenas e grandes tragédias podem nos tornar monstros.

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary, Literary Fiction, Asia, Novels, Adult, Asian Literature

244 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 19, 2018

About the author

Sharlene Teo (b. 1987) is a Singaporean writer based in the UK. She is the winner of the inaugural Deborah Rogers Writers’ Award for Ponti, her first novel, released by Picador and Simon & Schuster in 2018. Her writing has appeared in publications such as Esquire (Singapore), Magma Poetry, The Penny Dreadful, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, New Writing Net and Best New Singaporean Short Stories: Volume Two. In 2012, she was awarded the Booker Prize Foundation Scholarship to undertake an MA in Prose Fiction at the University of East Anglia, where she is currently in her second year of a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing. She is the recipient of the 2013 David TK Wong Creative Writing Fellowship and the 2014 Sozopol Fiction Fellowship.

Reviews

[Xueting · Rating 2 out of 5]

What am I missing here? So many critics and goodreads readers have given this book glowing reviews, but I can’t seem to get into it.

I was drawn to this book because it’s written by a Singaporean Chinese (like me) and it’s set in Singapore, where I have grown up and continue to live in. I enjoyed the many references to the MRT train system, the dialects, the secondary school routine and more, that are so familiar to me and so refreshing to read against the books set in the West I usually read. Sharlene Teo managed to capture the hot and dreary atmosphere in Singapore, for each of the three generations she explores here. The atmosphere also complemented the premise of horror B-movies and the mysterious mother, which I found original and promising.

However, setting the scene is probably as far as it goes for what I liked about this book. For me, the story was all over the place. It’s a multi-voice novel with three main characters: Szu, Szu’s mother Amisa, and Szu’s new friend Circe. I can tell that the mother-daughter relationship is supposed to be central to the story, but i honestly could not connect to it. It was not convincing to me that Szu and Amisa had some “difficult” relationship; it just felt like they were distant. There were few conversations between them and few interactions too. I couldn’t connect to any of the three main characters, and Amisa was definitely the most unknown one to me. Sure, she’s kinda supposed to be “mysterious” but well, then, I couldn’t understand the allure of her mystery to everyone who meets her, including Szu and Circe. I was also lost in what to make of Szu and Circe’s friendship, what they meant to each other, how special or fraught their relationship was, why they liked each other... so it was also not clear to me why they suddenly grew apart, for it to really matter to me. It’s especially the lack of introspection on the part of each character (even for the first-person narrative sections by Szu and Circe!) that I struggled with.

This is also not a plot-driven book. I’m fine with that; i’ve loved many books that aren’t really plot-driven but more character-driven. But the pacing in this book confused me. When it felt like something was building up and i finally got into the story, the chapter ends and Teo inserts another narrator and time. So many times I felt like a twist, a revelation or some character growth was coming, and then the momentum passed. Events that seem to overwhelm the characters emotionally feel underwhelming and quickly passed over, under-explored in the narrative, to me. Chances for introspection gave way to more descriptive language and imagery.

Most reviewers have praised Teo’s writing and prose. She’s definitely skilled with creating expressive imagery and she chooses her metaphors well. But there were one too many adjectives, similes and metaphors planted in almost every sentence. It got a bit too abstract at times, and the flowery writing came at the expense of characterisation and often distracted me from fully connecting to the characters. There were a lot of quirks added (like Circe’s “funny sayings”) that did not do much for developing neither character nor story. I love that Teo was building the atmosphere of Singapore with these images, but I personally felt that the character and storyline developments were left unbalanced as a result.

I realise I’m making a lot of criticism here, but that might be due to my high expectations. I truly wanted to like this book a lot because of the praises i’ve heard, and I want to support Singaporean writers. There really aren’t many books by Singaporeans and set in Singapore this well received outside of Singapore. So you should definitely still check out this book if you’re interested in learning more about Singapore, and if the story in general just appeals to you. Loads of readers love it! The writing’s probably just not my type of thing.

[luce (cry bebè's back from hiatus) · Rating 2 out of 5]

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Ponti, Ponti, Ponti...what a vexing read. This is one of those books that was ceaselessly frustrating and, dare I say, ultimately pointless. What was this book even about? There is no story, not really. We don’t even get satisfying character studies to make up for the plotlessness of Ponti. The characters are thinly-rendered and unfunny caricatures that for 99.99% of the novel remain unchanged in their behaviours & attitudes. Given the comparison to authors such as Elena Ferrante and Emma Cline, I went into this hoping for a story about fraught and complex female friendships and found myself bitterly disappointed as the one friendship we get is not really a friendship, not at all.
I will try to give an impression of what this novel is about but you will have to bear with me as, as I stated above, this novel doesn’t really have a plot. The narrative is set in Singapore and the chapters alternate between Szu, Circe, and Amisa. Szu’s chapters take place in 2003 when she’s sixteen, Circe’s in 2020, and Amisa’s take us from the late 60s to the 80s. Amisa once starred in an indie horror trilogy called Ponti. After that, her acting career never took off and she goes on to live a rather miserable life. Her daughter, Szu, both reveres and is discomfited by her. Because of her ‘horror’ past, Szu becomes obsessed with the genre and the Ponti trilogy in particular. Szu is alienated from other girls and spends most of her school days creeping her classmates out. She eventually falls in with Circe, who is from a wealthy and fairly stable family. The two allegedly become friends but in adulthood, they no longer are in touch. I guess the reason for their falling out is what is meant to propel the storyline but my god did it drag. I felt no interest in seeing how their falling out would unfold as I never bought into their friendship. The two are horrible people. Szu’s personality revolves around her supposedly ‘macabre’ love for horror and gory stuff. That’s it. If you were to strip off that, she would have no discernible traits. Circe is an acerbic bitch who spends most of the time being a selfish little brat. As an adult, she manages to be even more grating. Amisa’s chapters, which are told in the 3rd person, do not give us much insight into her or her past. What we learn about her life there, well, we’d already learnt about it in Szu’s chapters. The ‘humor’ involves a lot of girls being catty about other girls, more often than not Szu thinking mean things about Circe & Circe saying bitchy things to Szu. The way they describe other women/girls is fairly vile.
This kind of toxic dynamic does work when say done by authors such as Ottessa...but here, it just fell flat. The characters were so one-note and often sounded very much like the same person. The dark humor promised by the summary doesn’t really come through. The narrative tries to be edgy and gritty by having passages dedicated to Circe talking about her tapeworm or our various characters taking shits. Wow, how s u b v e r s i v e. I’m shook. Most of the chapters came across as repetitive as they give us time and again the same glimpses into these women’s lives. Their inner-monologues added no depth to them, if anything, they made all the more unbelievable and indistinguishable from each other. Everything is abject: one’s body, other people and their bodies, Singapore, womanhood. Every character has greasy hair and oily skin, which is fair enough, but these are often regarded with repulsion by our mcs. Again, if the author had managed to pull off’s Ottessa’s biting humor, maybe this could have worked but as things stand it just felt forced.
I kept on reading hoping that at some point the story would take off but it never does. Nothing major happens nor do we gain more insight into the characters and their various dynamics. This was a waste of my time. The only thing this book succeed in was in establishing the setting of Singapore. That's about it.

The characters are 1 dimensional & vile, the non-existent story goes nowhere, and the prose tries & fails to be edgy/gritty.
If you are interested in this novel and not put off by its overall low rating here on gr I recommend you check out more positive reviews.

[Alexis · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book so, so, much. Sharlene Teo is my new favourite author and I urge everyone in the world ever to read this, her debut novel. Her writing is amazing, she is so clever and funny. She is just extremely sharp-witted and all her characters are like wonderful caricatures with such colourful personalities. There are so many quotes I want to share from this book, so I'm going to! And I don't even care if it's too many because I just couldn't decide which one I liked the best!

There must be a word - some German or Inuit term - that describes the stuck, dreadful feeling of disliking a beautiful view just because it is overfamiliar, and synonymous with work and daily boredom.

This book is based around three characters: Szu, her mother and her best friend. All the characters tell their stories from different times; their timelines do not overlap but they are all relevant to one another and come together into one big picture. Szu is in the present; her mother Amisa is in the past when she was a young girl and growing into a woman and mother, and her best friend Circe is in the future when she has grown older and is looking back to the past. Szu's mother was once an actress in a B movie: "Ponti!" Although it was a complete flop and nobody has ever even seen it, Amisa is forever a bitter and proud superstar.

Magazines, with their phoney advocacy of self-love, say that you learn to enjoy being yourself the older you get. In spite of your decrepitude, your decreasing worth. Be a peacefully deteriorating woman; covet, but also accept your lot. Believe in cosmetic products and their promises of preservation. You are supposed to celebrate, not to complain; to ripen like a bottle of wine, not a banana; to thrive, not to rot.

All three of these characters are funny and sad. They each have their own unique problems and ultimately they are similar in many ways, but the author does a really good job of differentiating their voices and personalities so it is never confusing or dull. They all have interesting and unusual relationships with each other. The characters have love for one another in strange ways, and I love the way they interact incredibly awkwardly and think weird, crazy things - ultimately just like real people.

I don't know how to fix the awkwardness that wafts over the table like a fart.

My favourite character is Szu. She is so awkward and I can relate to her so much, I guess because she feels like she has nobody to talk to and her mother is such a huge presence that she feels completely overshadowed by the ever present memory of her mother's stardom. And, of course, she is not beautiful and graceful like her mother is, and that is such a disappointment to everyone, especially Szu.

Even the gruesome, echoey plop of a turd hitting the toilet would be demystifying. It's reassuring to be reminded that we are all full of shit. It makes me feel united with my fellow humans

Ultimately, this book is about awkwardness and ageing, family and friendship, success and failure. If you have ever been human, there is something you can appreciate in this book. The writing is amazing (have I said that already?) and just makes it so special and enjoyable to read. This is my new favourite book of all time and I would give it 6 stars if I could.

So it's a hot, horrible earth we are stuck on and it's only getting worse. But still. I want to care for you always. May you be safe, may you feel ease. May you have a long, messy life full of love.

Sidenote: I received this book from the publisher via Netgalley as an ARC in exchange for an honest review. Quotations may not appear exactly as in the final published version.

[Faith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ponti is the title of a series of cult horror movies from the late 1970s about a ghost, portrayed by the preternaturally beautiful Amisa. In 2003, Amisa is 45, ill and living with her 16 year old daughter Szu and the medium Yunxi. Amisa aged out of the movie business in her late 20s, but she is still beautiful, regal and intimidating, especially to her daughter, with whom she has a fraught relationship. Szu and her only friend Circe attend a convent school. Circe is fascinated by Amisa. "[Amisa] had a brand of bruised yet appealing insouciance that I wanted to grow into one day myself." She "broke her daughter's heart every day as much as she continued to fascinate us both."

This book is set in Singapore and stretches from the 1970s to 2020. It's told from the alternating points of view of Szu, Amisa and Circe. It is a character driven book and not terribly eventful. There is no melodrama or big twist. People just live their lives. Relationships fray or blossom, people age, some die or recover, careers evolve. But I liked the quality of the writing, the dialogue (even though Szu and Circe often sound like annoying valley girls), the incisive descriptions and the interaction of the characters. Sometimes Chinese terms were used in the book without clarification, which was unfortunate. Overall, however, I enjoyed this book and I would like to read more by this author.

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher.

[Trudie · Rating 3 out of 5]

* 3.5 *

I fell in love with the writing in this book immediately. It is whip smart, beautifully observational and funny. Sharlene Tao does a marvellous job of steeping you in a sultry Singapore circa 2003, full of the sights, sounds and smells of this metropolis. It is at first a headlong plunge into teenage angst, and while Ponti is not a YA novel it is arguably at it's best when told from the perspective of it's adolescent main characters.

The narrative cycles through three points-of-view; Szu, the lonely teenage daughter of a faded horror actress, Amisa, and Szu's sometime friend, Circe. It covers a period of time from the late 60s to 2020 and although this kind of thing can be hard to get right, I thought this technique was handled very well. There are moments within each of these three stories that are just perfectly written vignettes and I marvelled at Tao's skills. She had me by turns laughing, sad, hungry and then also desperately keen to go to Singapore.

Where things did fall apart for me was in the department labelled plot. By the half way point it was becoming rapidly clear to me that Ponti even though fetchingly written was really going nowhere in particular, that rather than the three voices somehow building to some kind of event or resolution, things were going to meander in an ultimately unsatisfactory way. Obviously, things did happen, horror movies were made, but the excitement I felt at the start slowly leaked away the more I progressed.
In as much as these individuals had potentially interesting stories the weak point was the relationships between characters. Nominally daughter, mother and best friend their was no real feeling between any of them and this coldness eventually seeped through and coloured my experience of the book. All the ingredients for a great novel were here but on balance I thought the whole was less than the sum of its parts.

However, Sharlene Tao is a wonderful wordsmith and she writes with such energy particular in the opening chapters that I am pleased I picked this up.

[ns510 · Rating 5 out of 5]

I adored Ponti, and will happily read anything Sharlene Teo ever writes in the future. Loved her narrative style, her sentences and choice of descriptors. If you stick glorious food descriptions in there, I’m in, so maybe I was an easy sell! I also adored slipping into the familiar sultry atmosphere of Singapore, the nostalgia of being a teenager where everything felt larger than it was, where school seemed like your whole life.

Ponti takes its name from a scary vampire-like monster which scared the crap out of me growing up. Many wouldn’t dare to say its full name ‘pontianak’ for fear of turning to look out into the trees and seeing it there staring back at you. In this multi-voiced book, Amisa plays the role of this creepy monster on a low budget horror movie titled Ponti!, that no one ends up hearing much about at all. Her daughter Szu, and Szu’s high school friend Circe, make up the other two female voices in the story. Each perspective is set in different time periods; past, present, and future. Each woman is at a different juncture in her life, from being a teenager to being in her thirties. Amisa’s perspective is the only one told in third person, which makes sense in terms of preserving some of the mystery and glamour that surrounded her persona, and how she kept herself at a distance from her daughter. I found each of the individual perspectives stood out and each intrigued me in their own ways. The book opened with Szu’s snarky teenage voice and I was immediately delighted.

In the time period set in the future (2020), the horror movie Ponti! is being remade, riffing on how (mostly) low-grade horror movies about classic scary ghosts are remade over and over again, like there’s lingering nostalgia over the past, even as the city of Singapore modernises and becomes more advanced. The book deals with grief and loss, with disappointments and the loneliness that comes from feeling apart from it all. It left me feeling melancholic, quietly contemplating these women’s lives. It’s often when I feel emotions deeply enough after finishing a book, that I find myself sitting on the couch still ruminating on the characters afterwards, that I know it has made a lasting impression.

If you love character-driven, multi-voiced stories that are written well, this is for you. If you love reading fantastic debuts that makes it hard to believe the author hasn’t written other novels before that, this is for you.

[Eric Anderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s so bizarre when reading one novel after another to discover coincidental and surprising connections between them. Right after I finished reading Madeline Miller’s “Circe” I started reading Sharlene Teo’s debut novel “Ponti” since it’s one I’ve been anticipating and I wanted to finish it before going to the latest Lush Book Club hosted by Anna James. I soon realized one of the main characters is called Circe as well. While it’s a really evocative name from Greek mythology, it’s certainly not a common one so it was a fun surprise. But this is just an incidental comment about my process of reading what turned out to be a novel that’s so distinct and engrossing.

Since its publication earlier this year, “Ponti” made a splash on social media after receiving a briskly cutting review in the Guardian from Julie Myserson who criticised the “writing workshop” feel of certain scenes and the “limitations of creative writing courses.” In particular she objects to the turns of phrase in sections narrated by Circe whose somewhat self-consciously crude language is actually a crucial part of her character. The review sparked a flurry of responses defending both the value of writing courses and the creativity Teo demonstrates in this complex novel. It was good to hear that Teo herself felt unperturbed about the criticism when Anna asked her about it at the book club discussion. She sensibly sees the value in the debate for how it encouraged people to discuss her novel more and how it also raised interesting issues surrounding creativity/writing courses. I simply note all this because, despite Myserson’s dismissive tone about the book, I found “Ponti” to be refreshingly original and emotionally arresting.

Read my full review of Ponti by Sharlene Teo on LonesomeReader

[Caleb Liu · Rating 3 out of 5]

The hype for this book was truly enormous (winner of the Deborah Rogers Prize for most promising book in progress, triggering a bidding war based on the manuscript alone), I can only imagine the kind of pressure the author was under when finishing the book. So I am tempering my response on finishing it, though tempering it merely diminishes the fact that I was somewhat disappointed.

Putting my finger on precisely why is hard. It's certainly a very readable novel, and Sharlene Teo is someone who has clearly honed her craft. The writing is lively, often spot on, and the author has a knack for finding the apt description (especially of food, but then she is Singaporean after all!) and often an arresting metaphor that keeps the writing engaging. Even when covering familiar tropes (high school, office politics) the writing isn't tired.

She's also good when it comes to teenage relationships: the shallowness, angst, the viciousness that is used to hide vulnerability. The more critical readers might suggest that all those scenes lack depth, but that's the point: these are young women who lack the maturity to know just how deep their actions can cut. The author is also good at depicting the shallow materialism at play in modern (and future) Singapore - it's much harder to do that it might seem without descending into cliche.

Perhaps my biggest disappointment is with Amisa and the whole metaphor of the Pontianak. Amisa is the centre of the whole story for me, and I really enjoyed the scenes set in her youth in the kampong in Malaysia. She grows into an embittered, soul destroying, angry woman, an actual personification of the Pontianak she played on screen and this transformation is the least convincing part of the book. Yes, any young lady might be turned by thoughts of fame but this was still a beautiful young woman willing to cut fish, clean toilets and marry a plain but caring man. Can I really believe that evenings spent with a rich wannabe director being told how wonderful she is could bring about this transformation, this for a girl that had been turning heads since she underwent puberty?

In the mythology, Pontianaks are women who die while pregnant or during childbirth. They prey on men because they have been denied what they most desire - to be a mother - in the cruellest way. What turned Amisa - the fame she feels she was denied? Was there any real significance in the movie being re-made and Circe's involvement other than as a deus ex machina to bring the two girls back together?

Maybe I am ultimately disappointed, because I (along with many others) believed we finally had our great Singapore novel, or at least novelist - our Singaporean version of Malaysians Tan Twan Eng or Tash Aw. A book that would immediately find itself Booker shortlisted. Maybe that was too much to ask. It also doesn't diminish Sharlene's talent, and the fact that hers is a voice I will certainly be following in the future.

[Michael Livingston · Rating 3 out of 5]

I loved the writing in this: sharp and sometimes funny. I especially enjoyed the voice of Szu Min - after the first chapter I was sure this was going to be a favourite. Things meandered a bit though - the chapters set in Szu Min's mother's youth weren't quite as engaging and the broader arc of the story didn't really connect. Still - this was a fun read - I'm definitely going to keep an eye out for Teo's next book.

[Figgy]

The writing really is gorgeous here, and it totally pulled me in at the start. Over time that did begin to wane, as the story itself didn't really go anywhere. This is very much a character driven story of not fitting in, disappointment, and living a life that fails to be spectacular. There are a few hints at coincidence and maybe something "other" going on.

Basically this feels like a very realistic depiction of life as it is, and for that reason it might appeal to fans of people watching, or those who feel/felt like they're not "in" on the societal conversation.

But in the end, I feel like this was the downfall of this book for me. It started with some very tangible lines I could totally relate to in my life, but as it continued, some of the power was lost. Though this was set in Singapore, and events transpired that did not happen in my own life or childhood, I was left with a feeling of "been there, done that". Though it was, of course, interesting to see this depiction of unspectacular life in Singapore, with customs and settings that I'm not familiar with, the story itself had a very familiar feeling.

Oh, it's also a little strange that the chapters that focus on Amisa call her Amisa from the start, even though she didn't rename herself that until she was 20.

Proper review to come. But for now I can post quotes because it passed embargo yesterday!






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- Early on -
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The writing here is so gorgeous that I want to quote it all... but it’s embargoed, so for now I’ll have to sticky-tab them and come back after the 24th of April.

So far I think there’s a quote on almost every single page, but also the entirety of pages 4, 14, 16, and 20.

When I force myself not to tab every page, I can get as far as maybe five pages... but yeah, totally engaged in this book so far.

I love it when an unsolicited book steps up and says, "Hey, you should be reading me right now."

[Jaclyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Damn, this was a good multi-voice. It’s very much about the things we do in youth that haunt us into adulthood. Told from the perspectives of Szu, her mother Amisa and Szu’s friend Circe, PONTI is interested in how we damage and hurt one another and how our environment shapes us. I loved Teo’s writing and think this book very much announces her as a voice to watch.

[Alice Slater · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ponti is a book about disappointment: the unfairness of life as it unspools in terrible and unexpected directions. Ponti examines memory and perspective, with a backdrop of horror movies, high school, mythology and the psychic industry. I simply adored it.

[Corinna · Rating 5 out of 5]

I waited 1 year for this after reading about this in The Guardian. Then, wanting to read it was just along the lines of, oh yeah, Singaporean author wins some award based on an unfinished manuscript, hey I’m Singaporean too, let’s support local!

Reading Ponti is a journey of navigating a strange adversarial mother-daughter relationship (“please be healthy so that I can hate you without guilt.”), surface placid waters of girlhood and friendship belying undercurrents of desperate acceptance and misplaced disappointment and memories.

Aside from needing just a wee bit tighter editing, I loved just about everything about it. I thought I’d come into the book reading about stuffy HDB flats, and how Singaporean speech gets locked down in typecast characters i.e. the noisy, next-door-neighbour auntie, the bitchy female colleague, the tepid Singaporean male etc, and was prepared to be disappointed. Thankfully, this one keeps it to a bare minimum.

I read some reviews about how the characters aren’t developed enough because of the way it is told in 3 voices and even then, it wasn��t distinct/strong enough to draw the reader in. I disagree. Amisa is as cold and distant as how she is to her daughter - it is no surprise you’d feel as much warmth from a marble surface as you’d get from her. Szu is engulfed in grief & anger she doesn’t understand. Her hesitant grabs at forming a clearer outline of her identity is evident in how she speaks to Circe and interacts with her mother. And Circe is just doing what all of us do at the cusp of adulthood/“adulting right”.

Overall the book worked for me on a personal level also because I remember what it was like to be a teenager in 2003 & also see Circe’s adult life in an eerily similar echo of my own, minus the divorce.

[Jason Lundberg · Rating 2 out of 5]

I need to preface this by saying that I’m a fan of Sharlene’s writing. I’ve even published her in LONTAR and Best New Singaporean Short Stories. And I went into this novel really wanting to like it. Which is why reading it was frustrating.

I felt throughout held at arm’s length by the author. Even though I am told about our three protagonists, I never got invited into their experiences, which left me cold as a reader. Even the first-person chapters are surprisingly light on interiority.

In fact, the third-person chapters following the life of Amisa, from leaving her kampung to filming the Ponti movies to her disappointment as a failed starlet and mother, were the only ones to catch my interest, yet they only occupy a third of the narrative. Szu’s and Circe’s stories just can’t compare.

It is entirely possible that I am not the audience for this novel, but for someone rooting for Sharlene to succeed, and who understands much of the cultural context that the book explores, I’m sad that it just didn’t connect.

[Hally · Rating 4 out of 5]

Surprisingly, despite ticking a lot of my boxes, it took me a long time to connect to this novel, but when I finally did I REALLY did.

Upon hearing about Ponti I was HYPED. It sounds silly but everything about the book; the title, the cover, the blurb, just excited me so much that I was blind with adrenaline for a couple of chapters. High schools, Singapore, intense friendships, horror movies, psychic mediums, mythology...it was all so potentially delicious. Soon though the adrenaline died down and I was a little disappointed. I gradually found that things just weren't really clicking for me.

Having written my master's dissertation on the depiction of female friendships in contemporary literature looking at Toni Morrison's Sula, Brit Bennett's The Mothers and Zadie Smith's Swing Time, I thought Sharlene Teo's Ponti fit my interests perfectly and was bound to become a new all-time favourite. For most of the book however, I found that despite being thematically similar to those mentioned, it didn't really bring anything new to the discussion. Plus, for some reason I associate multi-voice narrations with plot heavy books, so found myself waiting for things to really 'happen', and I didn't particularly warm to the writing style either. In fact some of the metaphors made me think 'I bet that's a good/relatable image and is making readers all over the world go YES right now but why is it not happening for me??' For a while I didn't completely understand why we were being told these three women's stories, couldn't see the link between them, didn't get what was really being said, but was still enjoying the backdrop and expected that I was going to be giving Ponti a 3* rating.

I don't necessarily expect everyone to have a huge turnaround at the end of this book, but on a personal level it was just...wow. Having had anorexia/a history of eating disorders, Teo finally reached into my soul in the last quarter of Ponti and did real stuff with my feelings. I'm still not done processing, but I do know that Teo's portrayal of eating disorders is ultimately so tender, in a way I haven't quite seen before in literature (mind you I do tend to avoid such books). Whilst I was scrutinising the novel for its minutiae on female friendship, I missed the bigger picture, the real significance of everything else, and it all walloped me in the face at the end. Now I get what this book, for me, is really about; isolation, and how sickness and isolation are so embroiled. It's a book about the fine line between wanting to belong, to connect, to be seen, and wanting to escape, to disappear, to implode or float away. I now have the urge to re-read it immediately and savour it from the start. I believe this one is going to stay with and haunt me for a long time.

[Kyra Leseberg (Roots & Reads) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Szu is a pretty typical teen who feels she has never fit in, living in the shadow of her former actress mom and grieving the sudden loss of her dad who walked out when she was only eight.  
She finds a kindred spirit in her wealthy and sometimes cruel school mate Circe and they develop a friendship in 2003 when Szu's mom becomes ill and passes away.

In 2020, Circe is a social media consultant recovering from a divorce.  She's shocked to see that her consulting team will be handling the promotion of a Ponti movie re-make.  Her thoughts turn to Szu, who she hasn't seen in years, and her mysterious mother Amisa.

In the 1970's, Amisa is a poor teen in a large family.  She leaves them and their village behind for Singapore, where she works at a movie theater.  She eventually marries and is "discovered" at the theater by a director who immediately offers her the starring role in his film Ponti and its two sequels.  By the 2000's, she is divorced and living in an old house with Szu, performing seances with a sister who claims to be a medium.  She drinks and smokes too much and soon finds herself in the hospital with a gray spot in her lungs.

The story is told in alternating chapters from the perspectives of Szu in 2003, during the year she meets Circe and loses her mother; Circe in 2020, looking back on her childhood and the year spent with Szu and Amisa; and Amisa from the 1970's - 2003, explaining her relationship with her family, her movie role, and life after filming.

While Ponti is beautifully written and covers topics like loneliness and adolescence in smart and honest ways, I felt lost by the end.  I feel we barely graze the surface of the stories of Szu, Circe, and Amisa.  I appreciated this book for its story of friendship and loss but I wanted more:  more of their stories, more of a resolution for each character.

Thanks to Simon & Schuster and NetGalley for providing an ARC in exchange for my honest review.  Ponti is scheduled for release on September 4, 2018.

For more full reviews, visit www.rootsandreads.wordpress.com

[Natalie · Rating 3 out of 5]

‘ponti’ starts off promisingly enough, with its central focus on three singaporean women with intertwining lives: amisa’s story is set in 1977, as she moves to singapore from malaysia & becomes the ninteen year old star of horror flick ‘ponti!’. in 2013, szu is amisa’s 16 year old lonely teenage daughter grappling with secondary school life, O levels & the way her mother’s anger & bitterness infects her, when the privileged circe befriends her out of the blue. in 2020, 33 year old circe reflects on her friendship with szu & her interactions with amisa when she is asked to lead the marketing strategy for the re-make of the cult film ‘ponti!’

teo excels in describing what it’s like to be a singaporean teenage girl in the early 2000s: going through the motions of secondary school, studying for O levels, self-conscious abt popularity and the lack of friendships, visiting town/orchard road after school ends, taking buses home in the heat. the loneliness of szu is piercing & relatable. there are some paragraphs written from circe’s perspective of what it’s like to be an office worker in the late 2010s that are similarly vivid & convincing.

however, ‘ponti’ begins to falter mid-way through. i had the distinct sense that teo’s inspiration/energy was fizzling out; the narrative began to drag & lacked the incisiveness that the book opened with. it’s like the big reveal was that szu became a stereotypical teenage Sad Girl after her mother passed away & after losing circe’s friendship; her developing an eating disorder, getting hospitalised felt like empty plot points that seemed like teo revealing she had an empty hand after all.

to entice potential readers, the synopsis on the back cover says “suddenly, circe is knocked off balance: by memories of the two women she once knew, by guilt, and by a past that threatens her conscience...” & “it is at once an astounding portrayal of the gaping loneliness of teenagehood, and a vivid exploration of how tragedy can make monsters out of us’. this gave me the impression that the plot would hurtle towards something far more explosive than whatever seemed to be going on, that would explain why szu and circe stopped being friends, but what actually happens is underwhelming. the ending with szu & circe agreeing to meet up felt like the author had run out of steam re: how to wrap up the plot.

also i was never completely convinced that the book was set in singapore, or rather i could hardly recognise its setting as the singapore i knew and myself had grew up in. part of that was because of the language used; words that felt foreign in the mouths of characters that were meant to have spent their whole lives in singapore. for example, teo uses words like ‘cul-de-sac’ to describe the location of szu’s childhood home, but it’s distinctly american/‘western’, and not a word any singaporean is familiar with or would use. small things like that in accumulation betrayed the authenticity of the narrative.

overall, perhaps worth the read to see what the hype is abt, and to support emerging singaporean writers. but if you have a long list of other books to get through, you could skip this one.

[Vartika · Rating 2 out of 5]

I feel the need to preface my review of Ponti by pointing to the fact of it being very, very poorly published. I have something of a bone to pick with the kind of cover design Picador chose for this paperback edition (needlessly florid, entirely divorced from the tone of the blurb, and ultimately forgettable) and would normally never have picked it up given that alone. However, my partner was drawn to its unusual title, and it did have a promising premise with a (fictional) Singaporean cult classic from the seventies at its center, praise from Ian McEwan, and the inaugural Deborah Rogers Writers' Award to its name. We decided to give it a shot.

The first third had me prepared to eat my hat: the writing was atmospheric and witty, dissecting the adolescent experience of angst and loneliness skillfully, and the chapters established a slow rhythm where characters would reveal themselves bit by fetchingly-written bit.

My adoration soon turned into frustration, however: 200 pages in, the plot refused to move and the characters failed to materialise, presented in a manner that could have worked as mystery but ended up underwhelmingly unidimensional. The relationships between characters, too, remained blurry. This worked in the context of the friendship between Szu and Circe—marked, as many teenage friendships are, by a certain shallowness, imitativeness, and immaturity—but tanked when it came to the mother-daughter relationship at the story's supposed center.

I was also disappointed by the author's lukewarm deployment of the metaphor of the Pontianak as embodied on screen and in life by the mother, Amisa, which disappeared just as soon as it seemed to be coming to a swell. I kept reading to the end because of how good Sharlene Teo is with words, but this alone could only take a book so far. A journey to nowhere.

For the most part, the story seemed like one that the author intended for the readers to unpack and unfold outside of the text, but the gaps provided were less than generative for this purpose. On another level, it made me wonder if Teo wanted this to be a longer, different novel altogether, but was hurried into what Ponti became because of the bidding wars. In either case, I stand by my judgement of the book by its cover. My partner, meanwhile, is not moved to finish reading it at all.

[Jee Koh · Rating 1 out of 5]

My expectations might have been set too high because of all the hype (Simon and Schuster! Glowing blurb from Ian McEwan!) but I was seriously disappointed by this debut novel by Singaporean writer Sharlene Teo. What is real and deeply felt (synonyms in my aesthetics) is the difficult relationship between mothers and daughters, and between close (girl)friends, but the novel does not succeed in translating what is deeply felt into a persuasive plot or convincing characters. The plot feels secondhand: cinema ticket girl is picked out by an auteur wannabe to become a film star; girl student bullied by schoolmates because she is different; young girl brings food to fugitive Malayan Communists in the manner of Pip to Magwitch. The character arcs are mundanely depressing. Where are the monsters? Where is the bloodsucking Pontianak? A mother who does not like her own daughter? So many mothers are like that. A friend who abandons her friend in need? If that's monstrous, we have too many of them and so they are no longer monstrous. There is a lack of focus in the novel's key image. Ghosts are not quite the same thing as monsters. And the style. For all its self-conscious wryness regarding cliches, filmic and literary, the writing does not escape whoppers of its own. Near the beginning of the novel, we have this description of the medium "sister" of the Ponti:

"Depending on the time of day and the angle, Aunt Yunxi looks anything between fifty and a hundred years old. She is as fit as a fiddle. In all the time that I have known her I have never heard her sneeze even once. She appeared on our doorstep nine years ago: 1995, the year my father walked out. My mother is the last person to ask for help or admit that she is struggling. She is too proud. But Yunxi simply knew. Call it sibling intuition. She swept into our lives after having traveled half the world...."

I counted nine cliches. No, you can't justify them by saying that this passage is in the voice of a teenager and teenagers speak in cliches. If I want teenage cliches, I go and hang out with teenagers, not stay at home on a bright and sunny June day to read a book.

[Vanessa · Rating 3 out of 5]

I went into this book thinking it would be in some way horror-related, but unfortunately that wasn't the case. It was simply a story of three women - two friends, Szu and Circe, and Szu's mother Amisa who starred in a trilogy of horror movies called Ponti! in the late 70s/80s. That's where the horror part stops. However, I did still enjoy this book for what it was, despite my initial disappointment.

The novel isn't heavy on plot, but I wouldn't say it's massively heavy on characterisation either, and I think this is to do with the fact that it's a multiple-perspective, multiple-timeline book. We jump around in time, mainly in the past with Amisa seeing her childhood and burgeoning 'career', but also in 2003 when Circe and Szu are at school, and later in 2020 where Circe is an adult looking back at their friendship. Because there was no intense focus on any one character, I didn't feel like I was pulled into their minds enough, and although each character was interesting in their own way, I still felt like someone on the outside looking in.

Saying all this, Sharlene Teo is obviously a massively talented writer. Within the first few pages I was reading out wonderful turns of phrase and clever use of imagery to my husband, and marvelling at how painterly her prose was. The scene setting of Singapore was one I'd never experienced in a book, and it was often both offensive and magical at the same time which isn't a common mix. She brought the image of Szu and Circe's school days, as well as the Ponti horror movies of Amisa's past, into my head almost immediately, and this was the main thing that kept me reading.

So overall, I enjoyed this book. It wasn't what I was expecting, and I would have loved a bit more of a deep-dive into the characters' heads, but I will definitely be keeping my eye out for Teo's future novels.

[Kenny · Rating 4 out of 5]

A triangle revolving round a cult actress, her daughter and her daughter’s best friend.A tour de force of a debut. A voice I will definitely follow.

[Out of the Bex · Rating 2 out of 5]

PONTI is a loose narrative alternating between three timelines and characters, two a mother and daughter, the third a childhood friend. This book is primed as a mother-daughter story and as the story of a life-changing friendship. I have to disagree with both of those descriptions.

What we’re really dealing with here is an exploratory character study that seems to come from a writer with little experience in writing full length pieces and might be more advanced in shorter styles. The author’s prose is entirely unique and at times darkly fascinating, like a goth girl in a world of pastel. Yet the story itself meanders, weaving aimlessly without much purpose.
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That being said, inexperience shows in the author’s failure to separate voice for each of the three characters. They all read the same. There’s nothing to separate their personalities except circumstance and a time stamp at the start of each chapter.
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I was ready to be done reading this book about halfway through. I enjoyed the set up at the beginning but after a hundred and fifty pages I had to ask, where are we going with this? As it seems by the time I finished this book, the answer is: nowhere. PONTI lacks a strong theme or core message.

THE BOTTOM LINE
While Sharlene Teo’s unique prose shows great promise, she failed to deliver in her debut novel. I would try her work again for the sake of her writing style, but I would be hesitant to recommend this novel for as a whole it simply isn’t worthy of the time.

Verdict: Skip It (but keep an eye on this author. She shows promise)
Rating: 2.5

[Lizzie Huxley-Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book perfectly captures the heartaches and disappointments of being a young woman. Told through three different points of view, Ponti tells the tale of Szu Min, her beautiful cruel cult film star mother Amisa and catty best friend Circe throughout different points in their lives. It is a delicately, yet expertly, woven novel of grief, friendship and identity. I absolutely loved it and look forward greedily to Teo’s next offering. This Singaporean coming of age novel is a must read, and will be on many Best Books of 2018 lists.

[Alena · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’m stumped by how to review this debut. Sharlene Teo is a master author and I have no doubt that she has a brilliant literary career ahead. Her complex debut is honest, beautiful, prescient, and deep. It’s filled with longing and startling observations about what it is to grow up in a modern world. I stopped often to capture her words and never lost my way despite frequent shifts in perspective, decades and, in some cases, mood.

It’s coming-of-age kicked up a notch and I loved the Singapore setting, the horror movie subplots, the deeply needy characters of Amisa, Circe and Szu.

But, ultimately, I was dissatisfied. Despite all the promise, and all the beauty, I finished without having my heart or my head turned. So I’m stumped because I cannot point to a single fault in this novel and would not be surprised to find 5-star ratings. It just didn’t resonate with me the way wanted it to.

And yet, I will be forever grateful to read such remarkable passages as:

“Szu felt cheated of explanations, and I felt sorry for her. But life just happened and it wasn't fair, wasn't my fault. Memory tussled us backwards with idiot hands, just the past insisting on its pastness because it didn't know what else to do."

"I’m a bad person because I can’t let go of how she crumpled me up like a ball of paper my whole life, and now that she’s gone I don’t know how to get the creases out."

“During teenhood all you know is all you know, which shouldn't be discounted. You have this one narrow window on the world, the stakes smaller but no less deeply felt.”

"The truth is that my Aunt Yunxi is half woman, half violin. She screeches, she is narrow and stiff. ... she is shrewd and shrill. Yet from time to time she is capable of emitting clear, startling notes of sweetness."

[Sam · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars.

Quite riveting story of friendship between girls, I absorbed it within 3 days. There is also the waxing and waning of a mother and daughter’s relationship that unfurls throughout Ponti, and I enjoyed the story as filtered through the perspectives of three women at different stages of their life. There is not the saccharine feel-good affection but a lot of traumatic rot in the relationships across any of the pair in the three leads. What really struck me during my reading experience was Sharleen Teo’s inventive use of metaphors - some very visceral and well-placed in evoking the scenery and mood of balmy Singapore and her precision in illuminating the growing pains of girlhood. Ponti also had some engagement with the monstrous feminine which Amisa is clearly modeled after. I felt more emphasis and thought needs to be extended to the figure/mythology of the Pontianak even though there are some obvious parallels in large parts of Amisa’s characterization. Given that this figure is such a key engine that animates the telling of the novel, the Pontianak and her history could have afforded more centrality and complexity.

[Samantha · Rating 3 out of 5]

Poderia facilmente começar a falar desse livro com uma frase da icônica dona Silvana (se não pegou a referência, é porque não está no twitter acompanhando a melhor série do ano): “falou, falou, falou e não falou nada”.

Ponti tem uma sinopse de um bom drama familiar, mas fiquei com dificuldade de encontrar o gênero dele até o fim, e inclusive escrevi “talvez seja um drama”. Tem uma boa premissa, mas não desenvolve. Tem boas personagens, que não desenvolvem.

É um livro muito bem escrito e ambientado em um país novo, que nunca tinha lido histórias a respeito: Cingapura.
Mas a história em si deixa a desejar.

Ponti acompanha a vida de 3 mulheres em épocas diferentes (década de 70, anos 2000 e 2020) e a relação entre elas. Ou que deveria ter sido uma relação. Uma mulher, sua filha e a amiga desta.

Não sei, difícil falar sobre o livro que não disse nada, mas bem escrito.

[Stina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hänförd! Sårigt, ömt, fult och alldeles, alldeles underbart om tonårstiden, hur komplicerad en mor-dotterrelation kan vara livet igenom och hur vi kan leva så nära varandra men ändå så avlägset.

[Tammie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Finally got round to finishing this after a few months of hiatus (school I blame you). Honestly felt this wasn't as provocative or alluring as it was made up to be. I wasn't entirely convinced by Amisa's plot, which felt a bit cliché. One thing I liked was how Teo understood female relationships/friendships and how she turned a simple concept into something ~complex~ and nebulous.

[Lingying Chong · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read it in one sitting. It’s very exciting reading a novel written by a person who grew up in roughly the same world. The book is energetic and endearing like its teenaged protagonists, overflowing with details that really draw the reader into the mysterious, sweaty moods of Singapore. It’s an enchanting portrayal of youthful emotion that stirs deep inside every one of our souls.

It may well be the great Singaporean novel that we’ve been missing all these years. It is little raw, and could benefit from tighter editing, but it’s definitely the best one I’ve read so far.

Congratulations to Sharlene on her wonderful work. I’m sure the next one will be even better.

[Lolly K Dandeneau · Rating 4 out of 5]

via my blog: https://bookstalkerblog.wordpress.com/
'The distance between where she was and the glossy point where she wanted to be stretched and stretched.'

In Ponti, Szu lives in the shadow of her mother Amisa's otherworldly beauty and small diminished fame. ” I marvel for a split second at the unfairness of genetics, mysterious spirlas of DNA coiling and cohering into life sentences: You will be plain. You will be beautiful. You will repulse mosquitoes. You will have an iron gut. You will be sickened by crabmeat.” Amisa’s career never took off with the promise her beauty once held. Having left her small village for bigger things, she works hard and falls in love with Wei Loong, they marry and she works full-time at the Paradise Theater until she is discovered by filmaker “visionary” Iskander Wiryanto. She has the perfect beauty, like a mask, exactly who he desires to play the Pontianak (folklore, a ghost of a woman who dies in childbirth and preys on men, in the form of pale beauty, long dark hair) in his films. We follow Amisa through the making of the film, witness to the ‘bloom of her ego’ even in the face of grief for her losses back home. Playing the Ponti takes it’s toll on her, the filmaker difficult, pushing her harder than she can stomach, not as enraptured by her sexually as all men are. Three films in, and her shining star dims, the movie becomes a cult classic, but of the times no one is interested in superstitions nor films about ghosts. The parts dry up, Wiryanto no longer needs his beautiful ghost and life with Wei Loong leads to just another part, of poor housewife. It isn’t long before she is pregnant with Szu, and feeling dreadfully close to her own mother and the life she trudged through. Amisa is more like a ponti now than a starlet. Wei Loong leaves before Szu turns 8, and then it is three, Szu, Amisa and Auntie Yunxi.

Aunt Yunxi and Amisa earn their living as fakes, mediums who ‘trade in hope’, milking the desperation of their clients. It’s necessary to con people for their survival, what with her tragic mother more a ghost of a woman, sleeping away her life. Szu is a misfit and completely friendless, until she befriends Circe. The two of them ‘citizens of nowhere’, feel unique, bonding over their discontent with the world. For Circe, the allure is Szu’s mother and mysterious aunt, even in their ugly home, there is a pull. Jump ahead to 2020, Circe’s team is going to be working on promotions for the new re-make of Ponti, hence “it feels like a can of Amisa-shaped worms has been opened.” The reader is dragged through time, guest to each character’s perspective. Szu, once seeming so bitter, strong, solid begins to fade, retreat into herself. Something many female relationships wrestle with is the discomfort of familiarity, seeing too much of yourself in another. Sharlene Teo exposes this uncomfortable bond perfectly, there is a pull and push between Circe and Szu, a sort of marriage. They feel warm and cold toward each other, until Circe can’t stomach Szu, when Szu needs to be anchored most to the here and now! “She started wearing her hair in a bubble ponytail just like mine and mooched about my house all day drinking gallons of diet coke and draping her sadness over my things.” It’s too much heavy sadness, Szu is dwindling, and she isn’t going down with her! Circe wants to be young, fun, free and this friendship is suffocating, she needs to shake her off, shake off this stale depressive air. Circe of the present day isn’t sure she wants that Szu back in her life, and is surprised to hear of a Szu who turned out differently then she imagined.

Szu doesn’t really hate her mom, she hates that she wants her love and never gets it. That her mother was more a phantom through her entire childhood, never happy to play her part in her real life role. What is more melodramatic than a fallen star? Despising all the ordinary living that remains. How did Amisa, so beautiful, so alluring allow her promise to fizzle out? How could this woman, who as a young girl showed so much grit and courage by venturing into the city, the unknown to become something more, simply surrender? Auntie Yunxi is the bones of the household, maintaining the only structure in Szu’s life. But she is a mysteriously strange woman herself, and where is Szu’s father? Is she right in blaming her mother, for chasing him away being like a Ponti, a threat to his happiness? When he makes an appearance again, after life turns tragic, he has some truths to unveil.

This novel is disquieting, because the real ghost here is grief, blindness, and starry eyes. It’s about the whims of fate, beauty isn’t always a promise of anything solid either, you can’t bank solely on dreams nor a face. It’s giving up and closing your eyes to what you have, haunting your own future and destroying those nearest you in the process. It’s a child trapped by her mother’s shadow, who sees nothing but disappointment reflected back at her, a girl who hungers for the love she will be denied even from the grave. It’s clinging to another person for dear life, because they are a sort of stand in for the mother/daughter bond. Circe and Szu represent that awkward hunger girls have for connection, and how easily it can turn monstrous and all you want is your freedom. The Ponti in this story isn’t so much about the folkloric ghost, the more terrifying creature is Amisa, and what she allows her disappointments to do to her future. She was so sure her beauty signled her out for more, made her special and she simply retreated from life when it knocked her back to earth. Szu follows in her footsteps for a breath of time, devoured by her own form of grief, like a disease. I found this to be terribly sad, heavy to carry.

I admit I was disappointed by the ending. I felt the story was a gathering storm, waiting for a climactic moment (big things do happen throughout, in their own unassuming way, with death) but I was waiting to be a part of Circe and Szu’s reunion, which was more hinted at. It never culminates. The writing is gorgeous, it’s an emotional upheaval which is strange considering there is a great distance between all the characters. There is an air of detached coldness, but it seems more a defense, Szu isn’t as strong as she seems. Her anger is a wall. Maybe it’s true that grief ‘makes ghosts of us’ and that is part of why Amisa is more a suggestion of a mother, having lost someone dear to her early on. I am mixed on the novel, this is a talented writer but again I kept waiting for the big ending. Despite the aforementioned issues, the novel itself is beautifully written. Circe is haunted by the past friendship, and years later carries the burden of her reaction to Szu as she began falling apart. It’s a complicated look at friendship, unwanted motherhood, dead dreams and the terrible ways we allow certain moments to define our lives, for better or worse.

Sharlene Teo is one to watch. I am wildly curious what her next novel will be about.

Released Today! September 4, 2018

Simon & Schuster