The Brain-Child That Looks Like Its Father

So I read this madly speculative, mostly light historical fantasy novel that leads through a chapter of pure tragedy and then speeds back into its predominant hopeful whimsical tone: The Impermanence of Lilies by Daniel Yeo. (When I get a new laptop the Amazon link will go here.)

What can I say? Yeo has a wild imagination. He's done a lot of reading; he's scrambled the facts that ought to underlie an historical novel. It's so easy to look up those facts on Wikipedia that I suspect he scrambled them deliberately to establish that his central character is an Unreliable Narrator. At what point will you stop wondering "Is this supposed to be a novel about a real person in history?" and start wondering "Is this Unreliable Narrator going to unmask as a lunatic, or just end this preposterous tale as the frantically romantic young man he seems to be?" If you like speculative fiction, read it and find out...it's a new book, and Yeo deserves encouragement.

When Jee Leong Koh sent it to me for review, I sent back a review based on my notes on (1) the first incredulous reading and (2) a second, fascinated reading. It's bizarre, it's surreal, it's the pick-up line to end all pick-up lines. It leaves me wondering what Yeo will do next.

A bright, modest young man from Singapore (whose name is not Daniel Yeo) read The Impermanence of Lilies too, made some observations that have more of a "literary" (and Singaporean) tone, and proposed a mash-up of his notes and mine. I thought his name ought to appear in the by-line too. He demurred. A higher percentage of the words in the mash-up came from my longer review.

The resulting review is now live at https://singaporeunbound.org/blog/2020/4/15/titanic-singaporean-imagination .

It's mine, mostly, but it doesn't read like my voice. It doesn't read like an American voice. It has picked up a Singaporean accent. Well, why not, when the review is of a Singaporean book?

I can only compare the feeling of reading it to looking at a child, knowing it to be your own child, but seeing it, at times, as a miniature of its other parent.

Producing this little mental "baby" together with a man I've never met, while I've been mostly isolated in Virginia and he's been isolated in New York City, was fun; I'd do it again.