Lake Like a Mirror (translated by Natascha Bruce)
Ho Sok Fong
Granta: 2019
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The protagonists of the nine short stories that come together in Lake Like a Mirror are chronically enervated and disorientated. They grope their way through darkness or are blinded by light. The play of light and shadows throughout the book creates a sense of being lost in a house of mirrors:

Streaks of shadow danced across the window, some dark, some lighter, creating a kind of optical illusion, making me feel like I was standing outside, looking in on someone’s life.

The second short story collection by Malaysian writer Ho Sok Fong and the first to be translated into English, Lake Like a Mirror peers into the lives of women whose relationship with social reality vacillates between quiet anguish and wild delirium. At first glance, some of the women of Ho’s stories seem to border on madness — the old aunty who grows so thin that she virtually disappears and is devoured by her pitcher plant, the hairdresser hiding from the police, the naked sleepwalker Aminah. Yet these women are not unhinged neurotics or tragicomic figures in a surreal fantasy. Ho’s stories are powerfully unsettling not because they are strange, but because, especially for Malaysian readers, they are so familiar and real.

• Tags: Ho Sok Fong, Issue 18, Malaysia, Pauline Fan