Aw allows much to remain unknown, uncertain, or unsaid in The South, and he does so beautifully, allowing readers to find the nuance within the very specific scenes ... A strong opening for Aw’s projected quartet, a quiet yet expansive novel, and it’s with great anticipation that I discovered that he is already hard at work on the second installment. If the first book is anything to go by, there is a lot to look forward to.
Gorgeous ... The sensuality of the prose is just one of the pleasures of Aw’s writing. With The South, he has crafted a story of yearning for autonomy, escape, financial independence and excitement that is suffused with sexual longing and the ache of nostalgia ... While I’m not convinced that The South needs a sequel, I’ll stay tuned. But for now, this shimmering, psychologically rich tale of first love and a family at a crossroads stands taller than those ill-fated tamarind trees.
Uneventful ... The characters are, however, living through a time of seismic change ... Aw is pitch perfect on the embarrassment, and sticky bitterness, of having provincial roots ... Aw’s writing features lush and arresting imagery ... Aw has spoken in interviews about conceiving of The South as the first novel in a quartet, and indeed, the book sometimes reads like a lengthy prologue.
Although the novel is an exquisite portrait of young love, its main theme is a different kind of highly relatable yearning: to live your life as you wish. In this first instalment, all the characters are imprisoned by custom, expectation, poverty or sometimes bonds of their own making. Whether they can break free will be revealed in the subsequent novels.
Sensitively drawn ... Rather than piling on twists like a Netflix miniseries, Aw develops a story that is more universal: about land ownership, the shadings of class and ethnic difference, legacy, globalism, youth and love.
With all that Aw adds to the coming out story trope, it’s interesting to note what he also withholds ... At times, Aw’s writing leans too heavily on minimalism and comes off merely plain and direct, lacking in suggestion or irony ... Reading The South is a pleasant diversion, much like recalling a summer vacation from one’s teenage years, with memories of youthful romance and sun-kissed pleasures.
Carefully sculpted ... The novel’s innovation in narrative perspective takes place at the level of point of view, with subtle shifts modulating closeness and distance in self-storytelling to expert effect ... The power of The South is in its enactment of this truism, its narrator always keenly aware that the people we might have once been in the past are already long dead.
Readers familiar with Tash Aw know that the power of Aw’s writing lies in the intricate layering of complex themes, brought to life through nuanced characters. His latest novel, The South, the first of a four-part saga, is no exception. It is an ambitious portrayal of a family navigating profound transformation and the complexities of identity and belonging within Malaysia’s rich and challenging political context of the late 1990 ... The novel, both broad in its scope and delicate in its intimacy, explores the repercussions when personal lives intersect with wider societal currents. It unfolds with a quiet yet remarkable sense of pacing, each moment carefully weighted, drawing the reader deeper into the rich inner lives of its characters ... Aw’s treatment of Jay’s burgeoning desires and struggles with familial expectations are rendered with a delicate intimacy that resists easy categorization ... Through their stories, Aw illuminates how sweeping historical events and subtle social pressures shape individual lives and collective self-perception ... Aw leverages Jay’s emotional distance to foster intimacy while simultaneously providing a broader view of the unfolding drama through Jay’s contrasting voices of his first-person and third-person perspectives ... Beneath the surface of their individual stories, Aw’s novel pulses with an awareness of historical and social fault lines shining a powerful light on what’s broken, what needs healing and how his characters shape the narratives to do so. Cultural displacement, the ambiguity of belonging, and unspoken wounds passed down through generations are central themes that echo throughout the narrative, compelling readers to contemplate difficult realities about our world ... Even as Aw addresses significant societal issues, the novel primarily focuses on the intricacies of human connection. He renders a delicate architecture of family bonds, the yearning and vulnerability of desire, and ways in which the larger public sphere inevitably shapes and sometimes shatters private lives. His ability to braid together individual experiences with the broader currents of contemporary Malaysian life ultimately invites readers to reflect on the forces that shape our identities, the burdens of history, and the enduring power of human connection ... Whether tracing the fault lines within a family struggling with the decline of tradition and the fading past or exploring the unexpected intimacies that blossom in new and challenging environments, Aw’s delicate and honest treatment of fragile human relationships lends The South an enduring emotional resonance.
It takes a while to orient yourself ... The novel never settles into a predictable shape, switching tantalisingly between family members, first and third-person narration, past and present tense. It’s a bit disorientating, but that’s the beauty of this spellbinding story about a group of people navigating a period of upheaval ... It’s a book that reveals Aw’s greatest strength as a novelist — an ability to subtly shift and unsettle your perceptions of characters and situations. The South deliberately resists easy resolutions. We must wait — and enjoy waiting.
Intense ... Shows Aw breaking into newly empathetic and impactful territory with his already considerable novelistic panache and artfulness ... I worry that after the vitality of this portrait of a moment, it might be tedious to read book after book about Jay and Chuan and their descendants as they age. But Aw has moved beyond his previous novels to discover a different kind of writing here, emerging as a Proustian chronicler of momentary bodily and mental experience writing on a compressed, exquisite scale.
Aw treats his characters with a fierce tenderness that suggests more than a touch of familiarity with the kinds of lives portrayed. The South is announced as the first in a quartet promising to explore one family’s story across turbulent times. It succeeds magnificently in its own right, however, as a moving portrait of how we all experience as extraordinary what we later learn was merely a first time.
