Every unhappy family: S L Lim on ‘Revenge’
S L Lim’s second novel Revenge: Murder in Three Parts (Transit Lounge, September) follows teenage Yannie, who is bound by familial obligations to care for her parents instead of going to university. Only when she is middle-aged is she freed from her duties, and travels to Sydney to plot an act of vengeance on her successful brother. According to reviewer Cher Tan, Lim’s ‘riveting’, ‘fiercely feminist’ novel is an ‘astute rendering of the subtleties of familial power dynamics’. Tan spoke to the author.
In Revenge, you illustrate the complicated dynamics of blood family really well, with a particular emphasis on Asian families. The protagonist Yannie resents her family for the emotional and physical abuse they have inflicted on her, yet she is caught by a sense of duty and, at times, a glimmer of love. What first inspired this conceit?
Let’s abolish the family! If I could spring fully formed from a rock or from some kind of accursed spring I would definitely do that. More seriously, I think almost everyone loves their family. There’s a tenderness there, if only from proximity and presence. Even abusive families are often very loving. It’s a bit of a ‘no true Scotsman’ fallacy to say that violent parents don’t love their children, or violent spouses don’t love their partners. They often do. It just doesn’t make it OK.
On the idea of duty—I can’t remember if this was a direct inspiration, but I read The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams and was struck by how destructive the character of Laura is. She’s gentle and sweet but absolutely lacking in any intention to take responsibility for herself. Her brother Tom is stuck with her. It made me think of how weakness can be weaponised. The idea that your family ‘needs’ you, and you therefore have to do what they say, can be insatiably destructive. It takes ruthlessness to save yourself.
What struck me most when I read the book was how you stretch the genre of the (Eurocentric) bildungsroman to depict the ‘awakening’ of an older woman—rather than a young girl—who only manages to embark on a journey of self-discovery after she fulfils her social expectations (in this case, caring for her parents rather than marriage or motherhood). Can you speak more to this?
That’s very astute. I didn’t conceive Yannie’s trajectory as being one of self-discovery so much as finally enacting a series of longings, impulses and capacities which have been repressed for a long time. I wanted to bring her to a point where that repression becomes intolerable. Change occurs less as a conscious project than as an inevitable result. What is unbearable cannot be borne.
For Yannie, giving up her formative years for familial responsibility also means having to repress her queer sexuality. The scenes with her first love, Shu-Ying, are particularly evocative. What were you trying to convey through this? Do you think Yannie will eventually find another woman to settle down with?
Honestly, the main thing I was trying to express through the queer sex scenes was queer sex. One of my friends who was an early reader interpreted Shu-Ying as a stand-in for lost youth and talent. I think this has resonance but it wasn’t my explicit intention. I don’t think Yannie is the type to settle down, I think she’s basically an unmoored kind of person.
Even though there are many tense, emotionally wrought scenes in the book, there is also an underlying feeling of hope that drives the narrative. How do you strike a realistic balance between the two?
Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will! I think Yannie is someone who, in spite of everything, really loves the world. She’s attentive to beauty and to people as they are. There’s this quote from Sarah Schulman, that it’s an extraordinary act to see other people as real. I tried to make that come through with Yannie—even as she’s making very cynical observations of other people, she’s also observing them with deep attention. I think it’s one thing to be liked but another to be seen, and we don’t often get that even from people who really care about us. So the prospect this is even possible carries hope.
What was the last book you read and loved?
Happiness, as Such, a novel by Natalia Ginzburg. It’s structured as a series of letters written around the absence of Michele, the only son from this Italian family in the 1970s. It’s hinted Michele is involved in some kind of anti-fascist political work but the nature of that work is not revealed. From the family’s (and even the reader’s) perspective, he just seems sort of feckless.
I also recently read We Fight Fascists by Daniel Sonabend, a history of the 43 Group who, as the title suggests, confronted British fascists after the Second World War. It’s moving and funny and kind of slapstick. There’s a lot of, ‘And then we bashed some Nazis, but then they came back and bashed us, so we jumped over a fence and bashed some more Nazis, and …’ These books made me think of anti-fascists past and present, what they give up and the ways this remains unseen, often by design.
Category: Features
