Villefranche-sur-Mer |
Fifteen minutes
later, I asked my colleague if our staff was returning with the documents. She
said “ yes” because she told him to do that .
Half hour later,
there was no sign of him.
'Ambit Balik' literally means 'bring back' in Malay language. When she
called him, he was on his way home and he agreed to turn around. My colleague
asked him to 'ambil balik' and he had thought it meant 'ambil balik rumah'. Bring
home.
My colleague
said she should have been more precise but I thought her instruction was clear
enough given that it was not yet time to knock off from work. The staff was
thinking about heading home thus he had interpreted what she had said about
bringing back the documents to mean bringing them back home. It definitely made
no sense for him to bring home the documents over the weekend. Often I feel
that it does not need rocket
science for staff to understand that they should check
alignments and spelling before printing out any documents. Since they leave
everything to the professionals, perhaps it is time we invent robots who can be
programmed to assist some of us in doing the mundane part of our work.
I feel I am
becoming an alien as I notice that people do not understand what I am saying
and I am baffled as to the size of micro-managing necessary to get a
piece of work done according to my specifications. It can be exhausting as I usually assume that everyone has a certain degree of common sense.
Each day
everyone is distracted, not only we are participating in our daily physical
activities, we also have the social media and the virtual world to manage and
occupy our time with. We are definitely keeping ourselves so very busy. Often I
find that reading and responding to these whats app and instant text messages can
be time consuming particularly so when I have far
too many books to plough through and I cannot stop buying them.
I have recently
raced through The Rise
& Fall of Great Powers, an engaging read written by Tom Rachman. From its first chapter, I need to know what
actually is the story about Tooly @ Maltida Zylberberg who is the owner of World’s End, an isolated
bookshop in the Welsh countryside . There are two book worms in the story :
Tooly and Humphrey Ostropoler, a self-proclaimed Russian who has a passion for
reading. The plot takes its readers from 1988 , 1999 to 2011. Tooly’s real dad, Paul brings
her along with him globe trotting wherever his work takes him. When she and Paul are in Bangkok, she
is abducted by Sarah, a woman who
claims to be her mother. Paul
somehow vanishes from her life and she ends up being whisked from one country
to another and across continents with Sarah showing up intermittently while her
constant companion is Humphrey. One day, Duncan, an ex-boyfriend finds her on facebook and tells her that
Humphrey is ill and in need of
care. When she sees Humphrey who has lost his thick Russian accent, she becomes
intrigued and ends up on a trail looking for the missing links in her growing
years. While Humphrey has been responsible for her reading passion, her world
views have been very much influenced by a charismatic but unreliable and roguish man, Venn whom she has idolized
as a young girl. Her hobby as a teenager is to wander Manhattan, talking her way
into other people’s apartments by pretending that she used to live there. While
playing that game she meets Duncan who becomes her boyfriend in the late 90s. I find that Tooly is unreal
because as a child and as an
adult, she is good natured, incredibly cool, detached and smart. Nonetheless she is an endearing fictitious character.
When Tooly
tends to Humphrey, she asks him.
‘“Who’s your favourite writer,
Humphrey?’
“Samuel Johnson, Yeats and
Kears,” he said, pronouncing the two last names to rhyme,” Kafka, Baudelaire,
Baron Karl Wilhelm von Humboldr, Thomas Carlyle, Fichte, Demosthenes, Cicero,
Rousseau, Aristotle , and Milton.”
“That is who I pick.”
“ It’s not one.”
“Also ,” he added, as if the
unmentioned might complain, ”John Locke,
Plutarch, Thomas Paine, John Stuart Mill.” ‘
Her lawyer
friend , Duncan has demonstrated kindness towards Humphrey while he can be so
absent in his own family life.
‘But Duncan was a rare presence.
He missed most family dinners, often returning after the kids were in bed and
departing before they rose. When home, he was pursued by emails. His respite
was what Bridget termed “anger hour,” a nightly rant at the cable news channels
.It was peculiar: he spewed such vitriol in that house, yet acted with notable
kindness outside it . Accounts emerged from Bridget of his decency toward new
hires at the firm, toward strangers, and to Humphrey in the months before Tooly
arrived. Bridget once cited an entire chapter in her husband’s life of which
Tooly had known nothing, how he had nursed a sick friend till the person’s
death. When she inquired about this, Duncan changed the subject-he couldn’t
accept praise.
Then by breakfast, he was gone.
It was Bridget who poured the kids’ cereal and orange juice. She was present,
involved, interested. Yet it was Duncan ‘s absence that shaped the household.’
Tooly’s present
world is set against the
contemporary digital age.
‘‘For more than a year, Tooly
had remained aloof from that computer. At most ,she tried simple Web searches
like ‘ukulele.”nearly scared at the landslide of hits. Then , gradually, she
explored a little further. Eventually, hours vanished there. Like a black hole,
the Internet generated its own gravity, neither light nor time escaping. Cats
playing the piano, breasts and genitals popping out, strangers slandering
strangers. The lack of eye contact explained so much of what happened online.
Including her own new habit : prowling through the past.
In recent weeks, she had started searching for
names, old ones, of lost friends, former schoolteachers, fellow pupils
,acquaintances from cities she’d left years before. Through the online murk,
she spied their lives, piercing together what had happened:colleges ,employers,
married to, activities, interests. An employment history on LinkedIn might
suggest a glittering start – Trainee to District Manager to Vice President –
followed by an unexplained Self-Employed.’
There appear to be many ideas packed in the book but in essence the novel is about the unusual childhood of a young woman who has to piece together her own story and try to find a place where she belongs. Only after going through more than two-third of the book, the story of Tooly’s life gradually comes together . While the characters are quirky, complicated and flawed, the story is well orchestrated and intricately woven. I definitely want to read the debut novel by Tom Rachman “The Imperfectionists” .
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