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WORK TITLE: Ponti
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BIRTHDATE: 1987
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CITY: London
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COUNTRY: United Kingdom
NATIONALITY: Singapore
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https://www.tumblr.com/login_required/strangelikeness
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PERSONAL
Born in 1987, in Singapore.
EDUCATION:University of Warwick, England, LLB; University of East Anglia, England, M.A., Ph.D. candidate.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Novelist and poet.
AWARDS:Recipient of scholarships and fellowships from Booker Prize Foundation, 2012, David TK Wong Foundation, 2013, Elizabeth Kostova Foundation, Sozopol Fiction Seminars, 2014, and University of Iowa International Writing Program, 2017. Golden Point Prize for Poetry; Deborah Rogers Writer’s Award, 2016, for Ponti.
WRITINGS
Contributor of short stories and poetry to literary journals, including Esquire, Magma Poetry, and Eunoia Review.
SIDELIGHTS
Born in Singapore in 1987, Sharlene Teo is a novelist and poet now based in London. Her debut novel, Ponti, about the friendships of family and friends in Singapore, received the inaugural Deborah Rogers Writer’s Award in 2016. She has also published short stories and poetry in such literary journals as Magma Poetry and Eunoia Review. With a master’s degree and pursuing a Ph.D. in creative writing from the University of East Anglia, Teo has been awarded numerous scholarships and fellowships, including the Booker Prize Foundation Scholarship and David TK Wong Creative Writing Fellowship.
Beginning in 2003 Singapore, Ponti celebrates the value of friendship. Sixteen-year-old Ng Szu Min lives in a dingy apartment. Her single mother, Amisa, was once a beautiful actress known for portraying a ghost named Ponti in a series of cult films. Today, Amisa gets by financially by holding séances. Overweight and poor, Szu is an outcast in the strict social hierarchy of her all-girls high school. At school, she meets and becomes good friends with the wealthy Circe Low but even that friendship falters. Fast forward to 2020 when Circe is a social media consultant assigned to promote a remake of the Ponti movie, and she tries to rekindle her friendship with Szu. “Teo deftly captures the insidious female rivalry often rife in teenage girlhood, but also the passion of that age, in which a short friendship can feel dramatically momentous,” said Marta Bausells on the London Guardian website.
Teo deals with the suffocating lives of misfits who want freedom but know that they can’t live without each other. A Publishers Weekly reviewer noted: “Teo’s relatable yet unsettling novel smartly captures earnest teenage myopathy through a tumultuous high school relationship.” To counter the stereotypes about Asian women, Teo told Rosie Milne in an interview online at Asian Review of Books, “I wanted to explore the ageing Asian female body. I wanted to think about the way we look at women, the difference between having your face on a screen, and truly being seen. Amisa wants to be truly seen.”
Violet Hudson online at London Telegraph remarked: “It’s a pity, though, that not one of the central trio is more sympathetic. … In this strange, claustrophobic novel, our attention drifts between them, ‘like the skin on soup’, never quite alighting on anything worth lingering on.” According to a Kirkus Reviews critic, “The novel never quite amounts to more than the sum of its parts, the quieter intricacies of the relationships overwhelmed by the volume of the premise.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, July 15, 2018, review of Ponti.
Publishers Weekly, July 16, 2018, review of Ponti, p. 37.
ONLINE
Asian Review of Books, http://asianreviewofbooks.com/ (May 18, 2018), Rosie Milne, author interview.
London Telegraph, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/ (May 28, 2018), Violet Hudson, review of Ponti.
London Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/ (April 19, 2018), Marta Bausells, review of Ponti.
Sharlene Teo was born in Singapore in 1987. She has an LLB in Law from the University of Warwick and an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia, where she received the Booker Prize Foundation Scholarship and the David TK Wong Creative Writing award. She holds fellowships from the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation and the University of Iowa International Writing Program. In 2016, she won the inaugural Deborah Rogers Writer’s Award for Ponti, her first novel.
Sharlene Teo
Sharlene Teo (b. 1987) is a Singaporean writer based in the UK. She is the winner of the inaugural Deborah Rogers Writers’ Award for Ponti, her first novel. Her writing has appeared in publications such as Esquire, Magma Poetry and Eunoia Review. In 2012, she was awarded the Booker Prize Foundation Scholarship to undertake an MA in Prose Fiction at the University of East Anglia, where she is currently in her third year of a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing. She is the recipient of the 2013 David T.K Wong Creative Writing Fellowship, the 2014 Sozopol Fiction Fellowship, and was a University of Iowa International Writing Program Honorary Fellow in 2017. Ponti is published by Picador (UK), with editions forthcoming from Simon & Schuster (USA/Canada), Buchet Castel (France), De Bezige Bij (Holland), Aufbau (Germany), Intrinseca (Brazil), Edizioni E/O (Italy), Hep Kitap (Turkey), Keter (Israel) and Sweden (Ramus).
Agent Name: Emma Paterson
Sharlene Teo’s debut novel, ‘Ponti’, was inspired by pontianak mythology
July 8, 2018 Book News, Books, Culture, People
By TERENCE TOH
Photos By Barney Poole
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Sharlene Teo's 'Ponti' will haunt you long after you've put it down
Why do we love the pontianak so much?
We may have gone from tiny kampungs to towering skyscrapers, but this bloodthirsty creature of folklore still plays a powerful role in our imagination. Sightings of them are reported to this day.
Sharlene Teo grew up in Singapore but a lot of Malaysian mythology finds its way into the stories people tell each other, she says.
“And I’ve always been interested in the myth of the pontianak. This woman who dies in childbirth, and comes back to haunt neighbourhoods,” says Teo, 31, in a recent telephone interview from Singapore.
“I was very interested in how this ghost enters the domestic space. Young girls are scared of her, men are scared of her. But she’s basically a young woman who’s a predator. I thought that was an interesting subversion.”
Countless films have been made about this creature, who really should become some sort of mascot for Malaysian horror. And a film about the pontianak plays a major role in Ponti, Teo’s debut novel (see review here).
Ponti is the tale of three Singaporean women, told in three timelines. In 1977, Amisa is a determined if somewhat self-centred small-town beauty cast as the lead in Ponti, a B-movie about the pontianak.
While the movie never takes off, it becomes a cult sensation, and Amisa resigns herself to an ordinary life, with occasional fan letters to remind her of the glory days.
In 2003, Amisa’s daughter Szu is a troubled teenager, having to deal with the horrors of secondary school as well as putting up with her mother, who now conducts fake seances with her sister at home.
The only spot of light in her life is Szu’s best friend Circe.
Finally, in 2023, Circe is a burnt out social media consultant. She and Szu have cut ties. However, in an odd twist of fate Circe is assigned to promote a remake of Ponti, thus bringing her old friend and her mother back into her life.
Yes, the novel is a little hard to describe. But it’s certainly been making waves. In 2016, the unpublished manuscript for Ponti was selected as the first winner of the Deborah Roger’s Award, which celebrates authors as they finish their first book.
Selected out of 885 entries, Ponti earned Teo £10,000 (RM53,000) and glowing accolades – including from noted British author Ian McEwan, who said in awarding the prize that the manuscript was “a remarkable first novel in the making” and that “I read this extract longing for more”.
image: http://www1.star2.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/ttponti-2.jpg
Teo drew inspiration from the haze which enveloped Singapore in 2003 as it ‘cloaked the country in this surreal, claustrophobic atmosphere’. Photo: Filepic
A remarkable feat, especially since according to Teo, Ponti started very, very differently. Believe it or not, its original premise was “A pontianak discovering the Internet”!
“I started writing the novel from the point of view of the pontianak. How the creature would feel in this contemporary society. How can you be afraid of things when you can find information about them at a push of a button?
“I was interested in the contrast between the old and new. Fifty years ago, you’re afraid of the pontianak. Today, you’re afraid of someone hacking into your accounts, or embezzling your cryptocurrency,” Teo laughs.
The author, however, soon realised she couldn’t go anywhere with the idea. Teo then changed her narrative, adding another thing she is fascinated with: scary movies.
“I love scary movies – although I’m a chicken when I watch them! I think horror is the genre that is most reflective of ‘contemporary now’, because we live in a strange horror show now. All kinds of radical things are happening, and I think we’re slowly killing the world with pollution,” Teo says.
Environmental issues also played a role in shaping the novel: It seems that Teo drew inspiration from the haze which enveloped Singapore in 2003 as it “cloaked the country in this surreal, claustrophobic atmosphere”, she said in a 2016 interview about Ponti in The Straits Times.
She began weaving a story set in 1970s Singapore, when local cinemas were starting to lose ground to television. Her idea: a filmmaker trying to make a film about a pontianak, something not considered “cool” any more.
“Whenever I read books that are set in Singapore, they’re often about WWII, or times like that. I’d never read one in this time period. So I did that,” says Teo, whose writing influences include Shirley Jackson, Yiyun Li, Tan Mei Ching and Cyril Wong.
Pontianaks may lurk in the corners of its pages, but Ponti is not a horror novel. Instead, it touches on loneliness, friendships and memory, while exploring how lives can be shaped by tragedy or failure.
The book also examines the intricacies of the female experience in an Asian setting.
“People behave in very specific ways according to the context. If we have women picking fights in a corporate context, for example, they would do it very differently here than in America. But we’re used to getting very Western-centric perspectives of female rivalry and stuff.
So I wanted to make a realistic depiction of how South-East Asian women are, and the expectations placed on them,” Teo says.
“It’s quite a ‘female’ novel. That may be quite limiting, some men may read the blurb and go ‘eeee’! But that’s a risk I’m willing to take because it’s the story that’s truest to me and what I want to write.”
Teo is now working on another novel. She’s tight-lipped on what it’s about, only revealing it will be “radically different” and “not for everyone”.
Her advice to aspiring writers? Pick up a book or two dozen.
“Read as widely as you can. You can’t be a good writer unless you are a good and voracious reader
“ Your voice is a lot more interesting than it is, and I think bad writing only happens when you try too hard to sound like someone else, when you bury your originality,” Teo says.
Brief Bio
Teo studied at Singapore’s Methodist Girls’ School and Anglo-Chinese Junior College before heading to Britain in 2006 to read law at the University of Warwick.
In 2012, she received the Booker Prize Foundation Scholarship to do her master’s in creative writing at the University of East Anglia. The following year, she was chosen for the David T.K. Wong Fellowship, which disburses £26,000 (RM140,000) to a fiction writer in Britain to write in English about the Far East.
She went on to do her PhD in creative and critical writing at the University of East Anglia and received the Deborah Roger’s Award in 2016 for the unfinished manuscript of Ponti.
The award was set up in 2014 to honour renowned British literary agent Deborah Rogers, who once represented literary giants such as Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro. Rogers died from a suspected heart attack in April 2014, aged 76. Teo was the award’s inaugural winner.
Follow Teo on Twitter at twitter.com/treebirds. – The Straits Times/Asia News Network
Read more at https://www.star2.com/culture/2018/07/08/sharlene-teo-pontianak-ponti/#UystBsBtPwjGCjmJ.99
Rosie Milne 18 May 2018 Interviews, News
“Dainty, subservient; Singaporean women aren’t like that”: Rosie Milne talks to Sharlene Teo
Sharlene Teo (photo: Barney Poole)
L
ondon-based Singaporean Sharlene Teo is currently finishing a PhD at one of the UK’s premier centres for the teaching of creative writing, the University of East Anglia (UEA). Part of her studies focuses on criticism and theory, and her work in this area concerns the representation of Singaporean and Malaysian women in fiction. But her course also requires participants to write a novel, and presumably she has already passed this unit with flying colors, as the novel she wrote to satisfy it, Ponti has already been read way beyond the confines of the UEA faculty office.
Deborah Rogers was a literary agent who often supported new writers. She died in 2014, when a £10,000 prize was founded in her name, to lend financial assistance to first-time writers to help them to finish their books.
In 2016, Teo won the inaugural Deborah Rogers Writers’ Award for the first 25,000 words of Ponti. Ian McEwan, who played a significant part in the development of the creative writing courses at UEA, was one of Rogers’s clients, and he presented Teo with her prize. He commented at the time:
Ponti is a remarkable first novel in the making. With brilliant descriptive power and human warmth, Sharlene Teo summons the darker currents of modernity—environmental degradation, the suffocating allure of the sparkling modern city and its cataracts of commodities and corrupted language. Against this, her characters glow with life and humour and minutely observed desperation.
Ponti, Sharlene Teo (Picador, April 2018; Simon & Schuster, September 2018)
Ponti has now been published by Picador in the UK, and it will be published in the USA in September, by Simon & Schuster. The novel is set in Singapore, and it concerns the effects down the years of the short-lived but intense friendship between two sixteen-year-old girls, Szu and Circe, and of the death of Szu’s mother, Amisa. In her youth Amisa starred as the Pontianak in a trio of hammy local horror films, but by the time of her death, from quickly-devouring cancer, she is working as a hack medium and living in a decaying house.
I caught up with Teo as she paid a flying visit to Singapore, on her way back to the UK from the Sydney Writers Festival, where she’d been discussing Ponti, and women’s bodies and horror. Ponti is notable for the power of its evocative descriptions of Singapore. When I congratulated Teo on her achievement here she stressed that she was most interested in the emotional topography of her characters, not the touristic representation of Singapore.
***
When I read Ponti, I found the name of one the protagonists, Circe, distracting: I kept wondering why Circe was called Circe.
Both Circe and Szu are hard to say. I chose them both because of that difficulty. I thought Szu would fox non-Singaporean readers, and, for everybody, I thought wondering about how to pronounce their names would help both Szu and Circe live on the page. If readers find the characters’ names hard to say, then it prods each reader to form his or her own idea of the character.
So, there are perhaps not too many links between Ponti’s Circe, and witchcraft. But a Pontianak is a kind of Asian witch; what had so drawn you to write about an uncanny female?
The myth of the Pontianak is a radical, subversive one. It expresses social and cultural anxieties about femininity. The Pontianak was originally conceived as a woman who died in childbirth, now transformed into a ghastly femme fatale. Her monstrous, predatory femininity is used as a warning off strategy, to dissuade men from straying. I wanted to explore all the anxieties rolled up in that. Also, a woman who died in childbirth was once regarded as a woman who’d failed. I wanted to explore that idea, and ideas about thwarted maternity.
Since the critical component of your PhD concerns the representation of Singaporean and Malaysian women in fiction, it sounds as if there was considerable overlap between the critical and creative components of her degree in the person of the Pontianak.
Dainty, subservient. Singaporean women aren’t like that. None of my characters are like that.
Yes. Women’s bodies in horror movies are always sexual objects and women are always the victims. Women are expected to be desirable at all times but are punished for desiring. The Pontianak challenges all that.
It’s not just horror movies which stereotype women, particularly Asian women. In novels, Asian women are often presented as little more than projections of Western males’ fantasies.
I wanted to challenge standard stereotypes and tropes of Asian women in fiction—pretty little delicate things with no opinions. Dainty, subservient. Singaporean women aren’t like that. None of my characters are like that. They are messy, temperamental, unbroody. My characters are opposites of fictional stereotypes.
What of the stereotype of the Asian woman as a beauty? Neither Szu nor Circe are particularly beautiful, but Amisa is. How are you challenging stereotypes with Amisa?
I wanted to explore the ageing Asian female body. I wanted to think about the way we look at women, the difference between having your face on a screen, and truly being seen. Amisa wants to be truly seen. For Amisa, Iskander, who casts her as the Pontianak in the Ponti movies, holds out the promise of perceiving her innate qualities. He sees more than her face and body. In so much fiction, Asian women are nothing more than faces and bodies.
Amisa dies when Szu is 16, when the relationship between them is suffering all the stresses and strains usual between a daughter just coming into herself and her sexuality, and a mother whose power is fading. Her death is rapid, and it offers no redemption; there is no final chance for Szu to reconcile with her mother. It must have been draining to write a death leaving so many loose ends in characters’ lives.
I wanted to explore grieving when everything is unresolved. We take so many relationships for granted, we assume we’ll be given time to sort things out, but what if we’re not? What if when someone dies we have ambivalent feelings about them? What if we don’t understand. I wanted to have Szu confronting life and woman-to-woman relationships when everything was unresolved.
Ponti is not grim. There is plenty of humor, not just in the descriptions of the Ponti movies, but also when Circe, who is herself living with problematic, unresolved feelings to do with how she acted at the time of Amisa’s death, realises she’s playing host to a tapeworm. Why a tapeworm, and not some other affliction?
A tapeworm is a horror-movie kind of creature. It summons ideas of guilt, shame, and festering. I wanted to suggest Circe was being eaten up from the inside, by guilt for her actions in the past. I also thought it was funny.
SHARLENE TEO is a Singaporean novelist based in London. She won the Deborah Rogers Writer’s Award for Ponti, her debut novel due to be published in April 2018 by Picador (UK) and Simon & Schuster (US). Ponti will also be translated into six other languages, including German, by Aufbau-Verlag. She was
shortlisted for the Berlin Writing Prize and is a recipient of the Golden Point Prize for Poetry and the Booker Prize Foundation scholarship. She holds fellowships from the David TK Wong Foundation, Sozopol Fiction Seminars and the University of Iowa International Writing Program.
Sharlene Teo is the winner of the inaugural Deborah Rogers Writer’s Award for Ponti, her first novel. She is currently completing a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing at the University of East Anglia, where she received the Booker Prize Foundation Scholarship and David TK Wong Creative Writing award. She holds fellowships from the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation and the University of Iowa International Writing Program and was shortlisted for the 2017 Berlin Writing Prize.
2017 Resident
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South-Eastern Asia
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English
Sharlene TEO (fiction writer; Singapore) won the Deborah Rogers Writer’s Award for her debut novel Ponti, to be released in 2018 and translated into six languages. She is a PhD student in Creative and Critical Writing at the University of East Anglia, where she received the Booker Prize Foundation Scholarship and the David TK Wong Fellowship. She participates courtesy of the Singapore National Arts Council.
Interview
Sharlene Teo on her first book Ponti, writing 'losers' and dealing with hype
Marta Bausells
Already praised by Ian McEwan, Teo’s debut about three Singaporean women – a cult horror movie actor, her anxious daughter and her more worldly friend – deftly captures the rivalry and jealousy of girlhood
@martabausells
Thu 19 Apr 2018 16.45 BST
Last modified on Thu 3 May 2018 09.43 BST
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‘Everybody has their own process’ ... Sharlene Teo. Photograph: Barney Poole
M
ost narratives about teenage girls, especially those coming from America, follow a pattern. Girls often come in pairs. One will be popular, overtly sexual and self-possessed, and the other is a loser, who pines for popularity – and is always secretly attractive, often subjected to a makeover that will unveil their beauty to the world.
“And then they’ll get deflowered and take lots of drugs and do all these wild things,” laughs Sharlene Teo. There are no such stereotypes in her first novel, Ponti, in which teenagers Szu and Circe get no makeovers, solace, or much attention from anyone. “I’ve never read a book depicting two teenage girls who are equally losers, unknowing and unattractive,” Teo says – and in Ponti, you can.
The novel follows the lives of three Singaporean women: Szu, initially seen in 2003 as a bored and anxious 16-year-old who lives in a decaying house with her aunt and mother Amisa, a one-time actor who starred in a cult-horror film called Ponti!, and who now spends her days at home, conducting fake seances with her sister; and Circe, a more privileged and worldly teenager who befriends Szu at school.
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Leaping forward to 2020, Circe is now a demotivated and aimless thirtysomething, working as a social media consultant (the empty jargon of the industry is hilariously captured by Teo). Having lost contact with Szu after a mysterious falling out, Circe is asked to prepare a campaign for a remake of Ponti! – bringing back old ghosts of her time with her onetime friend and her actor mother.
Teo deftly captures the insidious female rivalry often rife in teenage girlhood, but also the passion of that age, in which a short friendship can feel dramatically momentous. With the benefit of hindsight, Circe reflects: “Szu felt like my first test of patience: a tenuous, milk-toothed kind of love that evolved into the toil and torpor of a difficult marriage. You could say it was prophetic. I’m not exaggerating when I say that we were only 16, but I felt like we had been through decades.”
If you’re a writer and you stop reading things that don’t relate directly to your work, for pleasure, then you’re fucked
Sharlene Teo
The story of Szu’s mother, Amisa, is traced over several chapters. An arresting beauty, she is discovered by a film producer while working in a cinema box office in 1977. She is cast in a movie as the Pontianak: a mythological, cannibalistic beauty, created when a deformed girl makes a deal with a shaman to become beautiful. This is a real Malay myth, as explained in the novel, “told by worried wives to make their husbands wary of young, beautiful girls walking alone at night”.
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The shoddy B-movie never takes off, and Amisa’s dreams of reinvention morph into bitter resignation, having spent too long dreaming of a rags-to-riches narrative, only to be pushed back into rags. Exacerbating her sense of failure is the attention of loyal fans, who still send her letters 30 years later. Even her own daughter idealises her mother’s glory days, dwelling on how she can’t live up to her beauty, vowing: “One day I will learn to be as expertly cruel as she is.”
When Teo won a fellowship to work on her manuscript as part of her MFA programme, her first idea was “an epic Pontianak novel”, narrated by the monster. She ended up discarding it halfway through writing it (“I cannot read it now!”) when she watched the film Berberian Sound Studio. Teo became fixated by “the idea of predestined failure’” and by the female face in film: “If you stake your whole identity on being this visual spectacle, where does that leave you?”
'Sultry, sweaty' portrayal of Singapore wins writer £10,000 prize to help finish debut novel
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Singapore closes in on the characters as much as the past does, Teo calling it “a character in and of itself – it excludes people and none of them feel quite at home in it.” Her vivid descriptions of its weather – skyrocketing pollution, repressive humidity – leave the reader almost sweating with the characters. Born and raised in Singapore, Teo has lived in the UK for a decade, which helped her write about her hometown. “It’s very much written in my psyche. When I try to write about London it’s not that interesting,” she says. “I guess my imagination works more when there’s gaps to fill in, so there’s that psychic and geographic distance between your imagination of the place and how it actually is.” She wanted to depict a Singapore that is not “this exoticised version, of this one-dimensional new liberal metropolis. It’s not at all like a travel guide.”
Before Ponti was even finished, Teo was already receiving praise; Ian McEwan presented her with the inaugural Deborah Rogers award for first-time writers in 2016 and called the then unfinished manuscript “a remarkable first novel in the making”. After the award, the writing process became “like someone who was running away from a fire. You got this prize, this money, this validation – and if you can’t write the damn thing [Ponti], you’re like a total loser.” (Thankfully, she could).
But when I ask her about her writing routines, she laments the “shaming culture” that dictates “all these didactic rules” one must follow to be considered a writer – like having to write every day.
“Everybody has their own process ... You’re not a machine,” she says. “I feel like as long as you’re reading, you’re fine. If you’re a writer and you stop reading things that don’t relate directly to your work, for pleasure, then you’re fucked. What are you even doing? How can you expect people to read your stuff for pleasure if you’re not?”
Ponti by Sharlene Teo is published by Picador.
Ponti
Publishers Weekly. 265.29 (July 16, 2018): p37.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Ponti
SharleneTeo. Simon & Schuster, $26 (288p) ISBN 978-1-5011-7311-0
In Teo's stirring debut, an adolescent friendship ripens and festers in the oppressive heat of Singapore. It's 2003, and 16-year-old social outcast Ng Szu Min grapples with her weight, social awkwardness, and her mother, Amisa, who has a fan following due to her role as a ghost named Ponti in a cult film. Decades earlier, young Amisa leveraged her beauty to remake herself in the globalizing city as a B-film actress. It is the voice of Szu's friend, Circe Low--reminiscing as an adult--that gives context to the surreal wanderings of the Ng women. Outside of the toxic social hierarchy of their all-girls school, Szu and Circe consider themselves "citizens of nowhere." Although they come from different worlds, the two become best friends after meeting. Wealthy Circe is enchanted by Szu's bizarre home life, which features hack seances run by Amisa, who believes she is a medium. Szu appreciates Circe's honesty and humor whenever she comes over, making her feel more comfortable amid the specters of her cold mother's beauty and the void of her absent father. But the fiery fascination between the two burns quickly, leaving a blistering resentment. Teo's relatable yet unsettling novel smartly captures earnest teenage myopathy through a tumultuous high school relationship. (Sept.)
Caption: Sharlene Teo's novel Ponti follows a high school girl in Singapore growing up in a house used for stances (reviewed on this page).
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Ponti." Publishers Weekly, 16 July 2018, p. 37. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A547266792/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=06fa9ad6. Accessed 12 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A547266792
Teo, Sharlene: PONTI
Kirkus Reviews. (July 15, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Teo, Sharlene PONTI Simon & Schuster (Adult Fiction) $26.00 9, 4 ISBN: 978-1-5011-7311-0
United by shared awkwardness, two high school girls in Singapore forge an intense if short-lived friendship that shapes the course of their lives in Teo's buzzy debut.
At 16, Szu pales in comparison to her beautiful, dying mother, Amisa, who once starred in a trio of cult horror movies, playing a beautiful, cannibalistic monster in the only role of her career. Her husband, Szu's father, is long gone; instead, Amisa works as a kind of medium with her so-called sister, another job that plays to her strengths. "She promises these people everything," Szu observes, "and she is so wonderful to look at, so dazzling and persuasive, that a few of them have even agreed to bring over their life savings." Szu is not what she wanted, motherhood not what she'd hoped for. But Szu has Circe, a recent transfer student and fellow misfit, and they quickly form an all-consuming sort of friendship, obsessive if not entirely pleasant. In the future--the novel weaves among three timelines: Amisa's past, Szu's adolescence, and Circe's adulthood--Circe will be a "social media consultant," assigned to a campaign to promote the kitschy remake of Amisa's films. By then, she will not have spoken to Szu in years. Shortly after Amisa's death, they'd fallen out. It's a poetic sort of premise: Amisa, the horror would-be starlet, haunting Circe through the remake. (In a particularly novelistic flourish, Circe, when we meet her, is taking medication to kill off an "uninvited" tapeworm that's taken up residence in her guts.) All three women have objectively compelling stories: Amisa, escaping her small village only to wind up with new thwarted dreams; Szu, navigating adolescence through a haze of grief; and Circe, now divorced, still unable to shake the grip of her former friendship. But the novel never quite amounts to more than the sum of its parts, the quieter intricacies of the relationships overwhelmed by the volume of the premise.
All the pieces are there, but the end result is frustratingly hollow.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Teo, Sharlene: PONTI." Kirkus Reviews, 15 July 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A546323432/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=af8e4726. Accessed 12 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A546323432
Ponti by Sharlene Teo review: a strange, claustrophobic tale of three women in Singapore
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Sharlene Teo's first novel Ponti is published by Pan Macmillan
Violet Hudson
28 May 2018 • 2:00pm
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P
onti, Sharlene Teo’s debut novel, tells the story of three women: Amisa, a faded beauty whose short-lived career as an actress gave birth to three cult horror films, and who now works from home as a hack medium; Szu, her teenage daughter, unlovely and unloved; and Circe, a schoolmate of Szu’s whose hardheartedness is not as complete as it seems. It also spans many years, from 1968 and Amisa’s scrappy youth, to 2020 and Circe’s divorce.
The action takes place in Singapore, which “feels like the bullseye where the sun is aiming a shot at the earth with the intention of killing it”. The whole narrative is overlaid with oppressive heat and stifling smogs. Characters cough up dark phlegm on polluted days and “perspiration makes our starched button blouses turn translucent as onion peel”. Exotic plants rot in unkempt gardens, and damp fish markets reek off the page. Even the teenagers are jaded. “We thought our alienation was unique,” says Circe.
More stifling than the heat is Amisa’s cruelty, her casual disregard for her daughter. Through the sections told from her point of view, we learn of her restless, thieving youth, her arrival in Singapore, her discovery by an oleaginous, mercurial talent-spotter whose business card reads: “VISIONARY. FILM-MAKER. AUTEUR.” We see her listless marriage to a man with “genuine suckerfish kisses”, and her adultery. Amisa’s arrogance – born of her beauty, heightened by her brief film career – leads only to dissatisfaction. As a medium, she trades “in hope… Some would call it desperation.”
Not content with wrecking her own life, she turns on Szu, undermining and neglecting her. Szu finds a replacement for her mother’s affection, striking up an unlikely friendship with the vinegary Circe. When Amisa falls ill with cancer, Szu prays, “Please just get better and look normal again. Just get better and let me hate you in peace.”
After Amisa dies, Szu wanders around in a daze. She stops eating. “Grief makes ghosts of people,” she thinks. “I don’t just mean the ones lost, but the leftover people.” Amisa’s presence, for all its nastiness, had been a tether; now her friendship with Circe cannot survive.
Circe, meanwhile, carries on with life. She is getting divorced, but directs most of her negative feelings towards a tapeworm that “wants to sap up the very best of me”. When her PR company is employed to promote a remake of the Ponti films that made Amisa (nearly) famous, Circe finds her thoughts drifting back to her friend and her mother and their strange, dingy, silent house.
If Ponti were a film, it would pass the Bechdel test – whether two women ever talk to each other about something other than a man – with flying colours. The three main characters, complex and fully realised, are concerned with far more than men, who make occasional and vague appearances.
It’s a pity, though, that not one of the central trio is more sympathetic. Teo is merciless in her appraisals: Amisa is nasty, Szu clingy, Circe neurotic. In this strange, claustrophobic novel, our attention drifts between them, “like the skin on soup”, never quite alighting on anything worth lingering on.
Ponti by Sharlene Teo is published by Pan Macmillan at £14.99. To order your copy for £12.99, call 0844 871 1514 or visit the online Telegraph Bookshop
Ponti by Sharlene Teo – review
A much-lauded debut novel featuring a faded movie star is a lesson in the limitations of a creative writing course
Julie Myerson
Mon 16 Apr 2018 08.00 BST
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Sharlene Teo: in need of a tougher editor. Photograph: Amaal Said
Ponti, Sharlene Teo’s first novel, won the inaugural Deborah Rogers writers’ award (in honour of the late, great agent) and comes ablaze with praise from Ian McEwan. There’s not a debut writer on the planet who wouldn’t kill for such names on their dust jacket and certainly I came to this book very ready to like it.
Szu and Circe meet as teenagers in Singapore and form an intense, if uneasy, friendship. Szu’s mother, Amisa, now dying, once had a short-lived career as the star of a series of obscure 70s horror movies. Ignored at the time, these films now enjoy a cult following.
Flash forward to the present day and thirtysomething Circe is working as a “social media consultant” in a firm whose new project, somewhat coincidentally, is a remake of those very cult movies. As the novel snakes back and forth between these two strands, it adds a third: back in the day, young and icily beautiful Amisa left her “zinc-roofed” village only to find herself an unlikely film star.
To be fair to Teo, it’s always hard to create an imaginary work of art within a novel without having to also convince your reader that it’s a cult film and then persuade them to feel excited about a possible remake. Not only does she fall at this crucial hurdle, but it adds precious little depth to have Circe’s boss barking limp cliches such as: “This is a major project. All hands on deck”, or: “We have to work even harder to think outside the box.”
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It’s equally hard to feel engaged by Circe herself, who, having confided to the reader that working with young interns “keeps me feeling trendy” – really? – then proceeds to give a lengthy and oh so tediously writing workshop description of the “uninvited” tapeworm for which she’s taking medication.
And why exactly are we being told all of this? It’s the first big question that any working novelist must ask of him or herself. Good fiction should feel seamlessly necessary – as if someone has grabbed your wrist and begun to whisper a story so urgently that you have no choice but to listen. So would such a narrator really stop to let you know that their morning alarm wakes them with “polyphonic pleas” or distract the narrative with an unwieldy image such as “diarrhoea-conquered toilet”? Would they really want to break the suspense with a line such as: “The past rises up like the heat pimples that itch along the scalloped neckline of my top”?
There comes a painful moment in every writer’s life when they must concede that the thrillingly descriptive phrase they’ve been fashioning for hours or days (or even, sometimes, in my case months) must go if it interrupts the story. If you let mere words muscle in between the tale and the telling – or, worse, allow them to push your reader away (or, as in this case, give her a severe case of brain-ache) – then daylight rushes in on the magic. Your fiction doesn’t live.
It wasn’t until the novel’s final pages when, reading Circe’s eerily arresting description of an episode from childhood, that I found myself putting down my pencil and, for quite a few pages actually, holding my breath. If a more vivid, elastic and relaxed Sharlene Teo is hiding somewhere beneath all this knotty verbiage and MA creative writing-speak, then I wish her lots of luck – and a much tougher editor – for her next novel.
Julie Myerson’s latest novel is The Stopped Heart (Vintage)
• Ponti by Sharlene Teo is published by Picador (£14.99). To order a copy for £12.74 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
Rosie Milne 4 April 2018 Fiction, Reviews
“Ponti” by Sharlene Teo
Sharlene Teo (photo: Barney Poole)
D
eborah Rogers was an influential literary agent in London. After her death in 2014, the Deborah Rogers Writers Award was established in her honor. Since literary agents thrive on finding talented new authors, the prize was set up to support authors as they finished their first novel. In 2016, UK-based Sharlene Teo won the inaugural prize with an extract from her work-in-progress, Ponti, set in her native Singapore. The finished novel is now published by Picador.
Ponti (short for Pontianak, the man-hunting female ghoul of Malay legend) is part coming-of-age, and part coming-of-death novel. In 2003, as Singapore chokes under the haze produced by forest fires in Indonesia, Szu, and the distractingly named Circe, are two sixteen-year-olds who struggle to fit in with their peers, but who find solace in their new, and developing friendship. Szu’s impossibly beautiful mum, Amisa, is dying.
In her youth in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Amisa starred as the Pontianak in three hammy movies: Ponti 1, Ponti 2 and Ponti 3. These vanity-projects funded by the director’s wife flopped, so at twenty-four Amisa “had three films to her name, but her name didn’t matter.” Teo can’t have intended it, and what’s more she points out this is not the cliche of the fame-hungry actress and the sex-hungry powerful man, but the passages concerning Amisa’s relationship with the director, Iskandar Wiryanto are sure to prod readers to think of Harvey Weinstein and the #MeToo movement.
Ponti, Sharlene Teo (Picador, April 2018; Simon & Schuster, September 2018)
Ponti is told from the perspectives of each of the three women, Szu, Circe, and Amisa.
Szu and Circe are both first person narrators. Since Amisa dies during the novel, Teo uses the third-person to tell her story, which runs from 1968 to 1987. Apart from the final one, the chapters from Szu are all set in 2003. Circe’s chapters are set in 2020.
Szu is compelling and believable, she is filled with authentic teenage confusion, distress and sense of specialness. Chapter 1 is written from her perspective, and through her Teo grabs the reader from the opening lines:
Today marks my sixteenth year on this hot, horrible earth. I am stuck in school, standing with my palms pressed against a green wall. I am pressing so hard that my fingers ache. I am tethered to the wall by my own shame.
Szu is also given the final chapter, set in 2020, and almost at the very end of the book, Teo echoes her opening sentence: “So it’s a hot, horrible earth we are stuck on and it’s only getting worse.” But in the final chapter, this is not an observation of unmixed teenage gloom, but one mingled with hope.
In 2020, Circe is a thirty-three-year-old divorcee doing a trendy contemporary job managing the social media accounts of B-list celebs and arts projects. The Ponti films are going to be remade, and Circe is asked to drum up interest in the remakes. She has had no contact with Szu since soon after Amisa’s death, back in 2003. But working on the Ponti account forces her to confront her memories of Szu and Amisa, and also to examine her own self-centred behaviour back when she was sixteen.
Circe seemed a little overburdened by her portentous name: what did it portend? None of the possible explanations that came to mind seemed satisfactory. Circe’s brother is the more prosaically name Leslie, and her only comment on her own name is to acknowledge it sounds pretentious.
However, even leaving aside all the references to the Pontianak, the supernatural seeps through Ponti. Szu grows up surrounded by threatening magic, or faux magic, since Amisa’s post-actress career is as a rackety medium. She works in cahoots with Aunt Yunxi, a woman described as: “half woman, half violin. She screeches, she is narrow and stiff.” Back In 2003, Aunt Yunxi lived with Amisa and Szu. Szu believed Aunt Yunxi to be her mother’s sister, although, in fact, the two women were not related.
Teo’s writing is wonderful; Ponti, filled with spot-on vivid descriptions, metaphors, and observations, is a novel to enjoy line-by-line. Among my bleakly favorite passages was one in which Circe, as an adult, remembers her own youthful and regrettable behavior towards Szu, a newly bereaved girl in the early stages of an eating disorder. Circe remembers being unable to block her out: “She was like sarin gas, leaked poison.” A few lines later Circe compares Szu’s limbs to chopsticks, and comments that such was the fear she engendered, even the school bullies left her alone.
Teo is particularly brilliant on evoking place. In 2003 Szu, Amisa and Aunt Yunxi live in a grimly dilapidated bungalow originally paid for when Szu’s father, now absent, won the lottery. This bungalow is a brooding presence that seems to oppress the people living in it. Szu comments. “I wouldn’t be surprised if the Japanese used to torture people here during the war.”
The other setting Teo conjures brilliantly is Singapore itself. She captures the city’s restlessness and modernity, alongside its adherence to tradition, and its questionable celebration of its past. In 2020, Circe goes out to a new bar modelled on an old-time coffee shop. It
looked and felt like a dingy old kopitiam, down to the unstable plastic chairs and stray cats, except it served S$25 chendol espresso martinis and the staff wore a uniform of printed black wife-beaters and too tight jeans.
This nostalgia amidst skyscrapers and careers in social media is typical of Singapore.
Above all, Teo conjures the sweaty heat of Singapore, with Szu and Circe both commenting regularly on its effects on skin: opening pores; making faces oily and damp.
Teo’s portrait of Singapore is so good it would not be a surprise if Ponti were a contender for the next Ondaatje Prize, awarded to a work that best evokes “spirit of a place”. People talk about “the great American novel”, or, in Britain, “the state of the nation novel”. Ponti is a great Singaporean novel, and a marvelous investigation of the state of the tiny island nation.