The impression is that Tash Aw (Taipei, Taiwan, 1971), an English writer born to Chinese parents who grew up in Malaysia, has conceived and written his latest novel, The South, as a compendium of many of the frictions, contradictions, and clashes that define the vast, heterogeneous, and highly complex world of Southeast Asia.In the just under two hundred and fifty pages that the novel has, generational disputes and discrepancies, class conflict, instability and the changes brought about by the rapid transition from a society with an eminently rural economy to a society with a mostly urban economy, a sexual awakening that does not fit into the prevailing rigid social codes, the gaps between tradition and modernity, the ravages of an incipient but already severe climate emergency all play a central role... Although, as I have already said, the novel does not reach two hundred and fifty pages, it has a panoramic ambition and a totalizing breath that are quite considerable. Perhaps because, as the author has announced, it is only the first volume of what is to end up being a tetralogy.Epic of detailism

The plot premise of the novel is literarily and humanly flammable. An old Malaysian farmer has just died and has bequeathed the family farm to his daughter-in-law, Sui. The farmer has willed it this way partly because Sui is a clever and resolute woman, but also because he had two sons, one with his wife, the other with his mistress. As if all this were not complication enough, the farmer's legitimate son, Jack, Sui's husband, abandoned the farm years ago and has worked as a teacher for decades in the city, while the illegitimate son, Fong, is the one who, with great effort and toil, breaking his back from sunup to sundown, has kept the farm from becoming an unproductive desert. Melodramatic? That is nothing. It turns out that Jack's son, Jay, and Fong's son, Chuan, who could not be more different – Jay is a sensitive and educated seventeen-year-old from the city, while Chuan, two years older, has been raised wild – are attracted to each other, and they desire each other and get involved.Melodrama materials, all things considered. But it is well known that, in literature, it is not the materials that matter but the way in which they are approached, worked on, directed, and made expressive. From the plot of The south, one could just as easily make a daytime TV movie out of it as a Faulkner novel. Tash Aw is closer to Faulkner, although it would be a Faulkner of sensitivity and self-awareness queer, less violent and more intimate.Set between the past of the 90s (the farm plot) and an indeterminate present, and narrated by one of the protagonists, Jay, who shifts from the first person to the third, The South grows and unfolds based on a kind of epic of detail. It is a detail that explores precisely and intensely both the awakening to life of a pair of adolescents and the frustrations and failures of a group of adults forced to live in a world shaken by economic and climatic crises, but who nevertheless strive to try to find meaning in life, even if it means clinging to a dry and inhospitable piece of land.

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