If I Could Tell You

Beginning in the 1950s Glasgow s clearance programme relocated some 300,000 of the city s residents, many to so called new towns like East Kilbride and Cumbernauld, others to the outskirts of the city in areas like Castlemilk, Drumchapel and Easterhouse What could these people possibly have in common with residents in a tower block in Singapore One word community If you ve ever listened to someone who lived in one the affected areas places like the Gorbals you ll understand These were tight Begi [...]

From neglected children and lost young adults, to the developmentally disabled and the forgotten elderly, If I Could Tell You is narrated by a wide range of multigenerational and multicultural voices The setting for Lee Jing Jing s graceful debut novel is both exotic and excruciating A condemned public housing apartment building in Singapore Most of its residents have been relocated The skeleton crew of remaining occupants comprise the old, the poor, people who have had trouble finding a ne From [...]

I read this book slowly, that s because I didn t want to miss anything, everything written was so vivid I can picture myself into it, scene by scene page by page.It s very well written with different perspectives of multiple characters But I expected longer time frame of the stories.

If I could Tell You is a tender mosaic of the inhabitants of a tower block that faces destruction The narration is omniscient and omnipresent, circling in and out of the buildings and the minds of its inhabitants This forms an intriguing collage of voices, but Jing does not stop at intertwining the characters stories they also reflect each other to give the reader insight in misconceptions and conflicting ideas.Hovering in the corner of each person s story is a man s suicide The death and If I c [...]

A heartfelt and polyphonous examination of the lives of residents displaced by an en bloc HDB sale The most tragic of these is Ah Tee, a coffee stall worker whose suicide at the start of the book is the connecting thread that ties all of the various narrative threads of this mosaic novel together Characters come and go throughout the book, and by the end, we have a fairly comprehensive study of how they have been affected by the desperate voluntary death of a man to whom they paid so little at A [...]

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers To view it, click here for me, this book is ok to be read but not as interesting as i want to

I enjoyed reading stories of people who live in a typical Singaporean housing development.