ရေသေအိုင်

by လင်းခါး

228 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 2019

Reviews

[Sébastien · Rating 3 out of 5]

The protagonist narrated or reminisced the life he had with his three closest friends. Each had their own struggles they were dealing and the problems they were trying to solve. The story started with the funeral of one of the protagonist’s friends. Right from that opening scene, the writer told the bitter truth of the struggles of the lower class youths and their families. A mixture of realistic and minimal style of writing yet it was emotionally provocative in its merely over two hundred pages. Adding a bit of laughter in their gruelling life felt like an occasional cool breeze gusting into the hot summer night to please your sweltering.

[May Sun Aung · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars

I really liked the writing style. But instead of setting the novel in early 2000s, I wish it would be set in modern days, like 2017,18 or 19. Because most of these kinds of novels are set in the past. I want to read about the struggles of young people in the modern days. That would be cool.

And although the characters are well-developed, I can’t say I like them. The characters...they don’t have any will and motivations. I feel like they are just a bunch of lazy people! But I guess that’s what the author wants to show us because of the title. (Just my thought. Probably wrong)

All in all, it was good. The writing style is my favorite part though.

[Erin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book in one sitting and little did I know I was for a ride of an emotional rollercoaster. It was well written and I found the protagonist relatable rather than being bitter and misogynistic like many other male protagonists in Burmese novels. Although I cried throughout the book, it cannot be identified as a “tearjerker” because it is a huge reflection of the lost Burmese working class and many people should be aware of all the situations they have faced.
5/5

[Wai Yan Tun · Rating 4 out of 5]

An inside peak into the life of a youth born into a lower-class family. The story primarily focuses on the main character and his four friends as they navigate through adolescence and adulthood in the 2000s, in Yangon. Unemployment was a given in such a time, especially to the protagonist's friends due to their lack of education. Each of them had a reason why they had to drop out of school, and each of them while they have fighting a losing war against society, they never gave up.

In my humble opinion, the novel is critiquing our society at the time. While young people were passionate and eager for education and occupation, society was satisfactory to say the least. The preface of the story was very reminiscence of The Great Gatsby as well. If The Great Gatsby was describing the Jazz age of America, ရေသေအိုင် was describing the period of depression in Myanmar.The protagonist reminds me of Nick Carraway, the narrator from The Great Gatsby, as he was but a spectator who were thrusted into this group of friends, who experienced their story together with us, the readers. This story is a tragedy, I won't recommend to anyone who wants to enjoy a lighthearted read.

[Htet Aung · Rating 5 out of 5]

ရေသေအိုင်ကို ဖတ်မိချိန်မှာ ကိုယ့်ကို ရေသေအိုင်ထဲ နစ်မသွားအောင် အားကုန်စိုက်ပီး တွန်းပေးရုန်းပေးတဲ့ မိဘနှစ်ပါး
• ဆရာသမားကောင်းများ
•မိတ်ကောင်းဆွေကောင်းကို အရမ်းကျေးဇူးတင်မိတယ် 🙏

[May Htar · Rating 4 out of 5]

အခြေခံလူတန်းစားနဲ့ ဘဝနေထိုင်အသက်ရှင်ညရုန်းကန်ရမှုကို ပီပြင်စွာ ပုံဖော်ထားသေား ဝတ္တုကောင်းတပုဒ်ဖြစ်သည်။ ရင်နဲနစ်ကျန်ရစ်ခဲ့ရသည်။

[T · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very good