The Last Lesson of Mrs de Souza by Cyril Wong

Tiang – who is also a translator from Chinese and this year was the inaugural Literary Translator of the Fair at the London Book Fair – writes excellently and this novel covers some important moments in Singaporean history, dealing with leftist rebellions and Singapore’s relationship with Malaysia and Britain, pre and post-independence. It is another debut novel and it won the 2018 Singapore Prize for Literature in the Fiction in English category. Probably the best of the three and one of the best books I have read this year. This short novel is a quick read but will stay with you for a long time. The themes of responsibility, growth and forgiveness are key, as are the nuances of doing what it is right and trying to make a difference. The way she tells Amir’s tale to the class is not the way she tells it to the reader and she is not always certain of exactly what happened or how she related it, offering a lesson in the reliability and function of stories and memory. She is presented as complex, conflicted and ultimately very human and in the reader she generates a mixture of sympathy, respect, admiration, frustration and criticism. With crisp, clear, meditative prose, Wong has excellently crafted the voice of his narrator and one can hear the soothing yet weary tones of Mrs de Souza with all her experience, wisdom, certainties and doubts. Along the way there are reflections on society, education, her childhood, her marriage and more besides.

The eponymous Mrs de Souza narrates her final day as a teacher before retirement, where she tells her class, and us the readers, the story of a former student of hers that continues to haunt her. Deprecated function: Return type of DateObject::setTimezone($tz, $force = false) should either be compatible with DateTime::setTimezone(DateTimeZone $timezone): DateTime, or the # attribute should be used to temporarily suppress the notice in include_once() (line 143 of /var/History of BodiesĮven as I sealed us in with words of forever.This debut novel from one of only two persons to have won the Singaporean Literature Prize twice offers plenty to think about in its less than 150 pages.Deprecated function: Return type of DateObject::format($format, $force = false) should either be compatible with DateTime::format(string $format): string, or the # attribute should be used to temporarily suppress the notice in include_once() (line 143 of /var/.Deprecated function: Return type of DateObject::_wakeup() should either be compatible with DateTime::_wakeup(): void, or the # attribute should be used to temporarily suppress the notice in include_once() (line 143 of /var/.

The Last Lesson of Mrs de Souza by Cyril Wong