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A review by beebottoms
Delayed Rays of a Star by Amanda Lee Koe
4.0
Five stars for the impressive execution of this ambitious, epic novel and for the excellent, beautiful writing. But I docked a star based on my personal reading experience - it's quite a heavy and dense read, such that sometimes I had trouble getting back into the story after putting it down for a while. I also don't really like stories that remove quotation marks from the dialogue because it can get hard to differentiate dialogue from normal narration, and I just don't get the purpose. Is it just a fancy and quirky stylistic choice?
The novel opens in the 1920s, at a party in Berlin where three actresses Anna May Wong, Marlene Dietrich and Leni Riefenstahl met for the first time and pose for a photograph together. Yup, the novel is a historical fiction with real-life famous people as its characters. There's even the two photographs of the three women taken at the party inserted into the book. The reader then follows the three women's lives in the subsequent decades, as they advance their acting (and also, for Leni, directing) careers against the chaotic rise and fall of the Nazi regime. The story is divided into three major segments which are individually split up into three mini-segments, each taking turns to focus on one of the women. Within each mini-segment are a number of chapters that really feel like short stories, because of the way they jump to whole new situations and often even a different character as the chapter's focus. There are lots of side characters, such as Marlene's Chinese maid and the lighting staff on Leni's film production team, and they are vividly developed too. I actually think some of the most memorable chapters come from the side characters.
Anna May, Marlene and Leni turn into strong, memorable characters too. I knew pretty much nothing about all of them - I'll admit it, I'd never even heard of Marlene and Leni before this novel - so getting to know their lives and legacy was fascinating to me. I restrained myself from googling them so I can get to know them from this novel, but after finishing it I did google them and I'm intrigued to see how closely the novel follows their real lives. However, I was expecting more connections between the three of them and their stories, but only Anna May and Marlene were really in each other's lives after they met at the party. So it felt disjointed, reading the three women's chapters together. They shared a common socio-political context and themes about art, being a female artist and fame, but still I had to re-orientate myself a bit when I move between the mini-segments.
Leni's chapters were also the heaviest, and the tone was quite different from Anna May's and Marlene's, although Anna May's chapters also dealt with racism in early 20th century America and the struggle to find home for the Asian American diaspora. Leni's chapters are very heavy because they go quite deep into the political climate of Nazi Germany, with Hitler and Joseph Goebbels both making appearances and even getting dialogue. Leni was also a controversial director of Nazi propaganda films, and this novel explores how aware and intentional she was in creating Nazi propaganda, raising questions about whether we can and should separate art from politics, and art from the artist. It's very bold of the author to tackle such controversial and complex issues in real history, approaching them from different perspectives, and she has the skill and is knowledgeable about them to do so with sensitivity. Even though the writing is a bit dense, I was very engaged in the story most of the time, and I really cared and felt for the characters.
Amanda Lee Koe is definitely one of my favourite Singapore authors now, along with Balli Kaur Jaswal. I'd only ever read one of her short stories from her award-winning collection "Ministry of Moral Panic," but I could tell her writing is really good, and this, her first novel, shows it even more. She's so smart I'd feel intimidated if I ever meet her in real life!!
Thank you to Pansing for sending me copy of the novel in exchange for an honest review.
The novel opens in the 1920s, at a party in Berlin where three actresses Anna May Wong, Marlene Dietrich and Leni Riefenstahl met for the first time and pose for a photograph together. Yup, the novel is a historical fiction with real-life famous people as its characters. There's even the two photographs of the three women taken at the party inserted into the book. The reader then follows the three women's lives in the subsequent decades, as they advance their acting (and also, for Leni, directing) careers against the chaotic rise and fall of the Nazi regime. The story is divided into three major segments which are individually split up into three mini-segments, each taking turns to focus on one of the women. Within each mini-segment are a number of chapters that really feel like short stories, because of the way they jump to whole new situations and often even a different character as the chapter's focus. There are lots of side characters, such as Marlene's Chinese maid and the lighting staff on Leni's film production team, and they are vividly developed too. I actually think some of the most memorable chapters come from the side characters.
Anna May, Marlene and Leni turn into strong, memorable characters too. I knew pretty much nothing about all of them - I'll admit it, I'd never even heard of Marlene and Leni before this novel - so getting to know their lives and legacy was fascinating to me. I restrained myself from googling them so I can get to know them from this novel, but after finishing it I did google them and I'm intrigued to see how closely the novel follows their real lives. However, I was expecting more connections between the three of them and their stories, but only Anna May and Marlene were really in each other's lives after they met at the party. So it felt disjointed, reading the three women's chapters together. They shared a common socio-political context and themes about art, being a female artist and fame, but still I had to re-orientate myself a bit when I move between the mini-segments.
Leni's chapters were also the heaviest, and the tone was quite different from Anna May's and Marlene's, although Anna May's chapters also dealt with racism in early 20th century America and the struggle to find home for the Asian American diaspora. Leni's chapters are very heavy because they go quite deep into the political climate of Nazi Germany, with Hitler and Joseph Goebbels both making appearances and even getting dialogue. Leni was also a controversial director of Nazi propaganda films, and this novel explores how aware and intentional she was in creating Nazi propaganda, raising questions about whether we can and should separate art from politics, and art from the artist. It's very bold of the author to tackle such controversial and complex issues in real history, approaching them from different perspectives, and she has the skill and is knowledgeable about them to do so with sensitivity. Even though the writing is a bit dense, I was very engaged in the story most of the time, and I really cared and felt for the characters.
Amanda Lee Koe is definitely one of my favourite Singapore authors now, along with Balli Kaur Jaswal. I'd only ever read one of her short stories from her award-winning collection "Ministry of Moral Panic," but I could tell her writing is really good, and this, her first novel, shows it even more. She's so smart I'd feel intimidated if I ever meet her in real life!!
Thank you to Pansing for sending me copy of the novel in exchange for an honest review.