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| 9 Aug. 2000 |
Exceptional First Novel: 'Love and Vertigo', by Hsu-Ming Teo
Penelope Davie
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Hsu-Ming Teo. Love and Vertigo. Allen & Unwin. RRP: $A18.95. |
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Love and Vertigo is an exceptional first novel. The
structure is mostly elegant, and feels natural, as if the narrator was telling a
story in the only possible way available to her. The characters are fat on the
page. Teo describes in loving and fearsome detail their eating, fighting,
digesting and fucking, they refuse to lie down and be read as two
dimensional.
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The first chapter, however, lets the rest of the book down.
This is a terrible shame if it deters readers from persevering. Where the rest
of the book fits together with a clever balance of ease and tension, the first
chapter reads as if Teo was directed to tie things together neatly at the start
and set the stage. The reader learns too much about Grace too soon, before we
care about her, and it is difficult to understand why she is in Singapore
dealing with a family she clearly feels antipathy towards. The descriptions fall
heavily — in the retrospect of
finishing the book they may make sense, but they do not sit happily at the
beginning of the novel.
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