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We, The Survivors (2019)

por Tash Aw

MiembrosReseñasPopularidadValoración promediaMenciones
1537177,308 (3.72)26
Fiction. Literature. Mystery. HTML:

From the author of The Harmony Silk Factory and Five Star Billionaire, a compelling depiction of a man's act of violence, set against the backdrop of Asia in flux

Ah Hock is an ordinary man of simple means. Born and raised in a Malaysian fishing village, he favors stability above all, a preference at odds with his rapidly modernizing surroundings. So what brings him to kill a man?

This question leads a young, privileged journalist to Ah Hock's door. While the victim has been mourned and the killer has served time for the crime, Ah Hock's motive remains unclear, even to himself. His vivid confession unfurls over extensive interviews with the journalist, herself a local whose life has taken a very different course. The process forces both the speaker and his listener to reckon with systems of power, race, and class in a place where success is promised to all yet delivered only to its lucky heirs.

An uncompromising portrait of an outsider navigating a society in transition, Tash Aw's anti-nostalgic tale, We the Survivors, holds its tension to the very end. In the wake of loss and destruction, hope is among the survivors.

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» Ver también 26 menciones

I couldn’t put down this book without remembering the lessons of John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath: that all men are born equal under the sun, and that the owners of the land have no right to legislate the lives of their workers.

In this novel we are faced with an unsparing look at the lives of the increasing armies of the dispossessed.

Tash Aw writes a gruesome, accurate tale of human beings as so much tinder on a bonfire. Where humans are moved like filth across the sea, over borders, to another human dungheap. There is filth, there is cholera, and worst of all, there is indifference. Another brown man dead? So what.

Migrant workers need a voice and a vote in the lands they visit, and the lands they settle in.

Not least the armies of Phillipine women who manage our children as nannies or our elderly as caregivers.

Not least the Mexican and other Latin American men and women who make American beds, pick their fruit, wash their dishes, wipe their children, and weed the gardens of increasingly ungrateful Americans.

Not least the Indians, Bangladeshis, Rohingyas who populate the sweatshops and construction projects of the Middle East and the Far East. ( )
  MylesKesten | Jan 23, 2024 |
The story of Lee Hock Lye, a convicted murderer as he relates his story, his life before the killing and prison, over several months to Tan Su-Min a doctor in Sociology who wants to understand the circumstances surrounding his case.

It is a strangely compelling and moving tale, beautifully narrated, but very sad and depressing. We never find out what exactly makes him kill a man he didn’t even know, maybe it was just the last straw in a very hard and unfair life. It is a portrayal of poverty and inequality and the crushing of hope. How poverty, prejudice and intolerance destroy people. ( )
  Matacabras | Jun 26, 2021 |
Il arrivait parfois que les travaux sur le port ralentissent et on voyait des migrants affluer en ville à la recherche de quelques journées de labeur temporaire ici ou là, grâce à quiconque accepterait de les employer. Au cours de ces périodes, la ville semblait fonctionner normalement ; autrement dit, une visiteuse comme vous ne remarquerait rien d’inhabituel. Vous verrier les bus et les marchés, les commerçants balayant devant leur porte, des gens assis aux petites cantines de rus en bordure de la chaussée, mais vous ne percevriez pas l’angoisse sous-jacente, la conscience que la ville entière dépendait du commerce avec toutes sortes de sites éloignés, de l’achat et de la vente de produits à des gens dont nous ne saurions jamais rien. Si en Amérique un politicien décide qu’il ne faut plus acheter de gants en latex en Malaisie, subitement, dix fabriques de la région doivent fermer. Les Européens veulent sauver cette putain de planète, alors ils interdisent l’utilisation de l’huile de palme dans les aliments : en l’espace d’un mois, le port entier est à genoux. La vie continue, mais vous sentez qu’elle s’échappe lentement, et vous craignez qu’elle ne revienne jamais. A cause de cette peur, vous vous sentez comme en suspens. De l’extérieur, la vie semble normale, mais intérieurement elle se fige peu à peu.
(p. 321-322, “2 janvier”, Partie 4, “Janvier”).


Un titre énigmatique, que la lecture du livre n’éclaircit pas directement. Qui sont ces survivants ? Ceux, je crois, qui ne vivent pas, qui ne font que survivre. Parce qu’il y a l’indigence, ou l’émigration clandestine, ou le travail physique au-delà du soutenable, et souvent un mélange de tout cela. Le narrateur, qui se raconte à une chercheuse en sciences sociales, a commis un meurtre et a purgé une peine de prison, ce n’est pas divulgâcher que de dire cela car on l’apprend dès les premières pages du livre. Et tout le roman raconte la vie de cet homme, à travers ses propres mots, jusqu’à en arriver à cet événement.
J’ai demandé ce livre sur netgalley, et les éditions Fayard ont été assez aimables pour me permettre de le lire. Ce n’est qu’en le mettant sur ma liseuse que j’y ai vu la phrase d’Edouard Louis faisant la promotion de ce livre, « L’un des plus beaux et plus puissants romans que j’ai ly depuis des années ». N’ayant pas un très bon souvenir de ma seule lecture d’un livre d’Edouard Louis, j’ai eu un peu peur, mais je ne me suis pas démontée et me suis lancée dans cette lecture. Grand bien m’en a pris car ce livre a vraiment quelque chose.
L’écriture est simple, presque sèche, le propos demeure toujours très factuel. Mais c’est dans toute cette sécheresse et cette apparente objectivité des faits que se dit tout cet indicible de pauvreté extrême, de manque de perspective dans la vie, de la médiocrité d’une vie passée à courir après le simple minimum. Le personnage principal n’est pas particulièrement agréable, ce n’est pas mon empathie pour lui qui m’ont fait aimer ce livre, mais bien cette capacité à décrire ces situations tellement difficiles à envisager pour nous dans le confort de nos maisons, protégés derrière les pages d’un livre.
C’est un livre à lire quand on a le cœur bien accroché, non qu’il y ait des descriptions difficiles dans ce livre, ou des événements scabreux. On croise bien sûr un peu de drogue, la question des gangs est effleurée, mais c’est plus la banalité de l’extrême dénuement qui m’a parue difficile à encaisser. Ce livre ne m’a pas laissée indifférente. Il ne cherche ni à être moralisateur ni à proposer quelque leçon ou solution que ce soit, mais il fait réfléchir. La Malaisie n’est pas un pays dont on entend parler tous les jours, pourtant c’est un pays qui exporte beaucoup de ses denrées, notamment la production de ses plantations de palmiers, que l’on traverse dans ce livre. Cela fait réfléchir sur nos actes d’achat, sur comment nous sommes liés à ces situations, qu’on le veuille ou non, combien on est impuissant mais combien il est hypocrite de ne rien faire.
Un livre qui mérite de trouver une large audience. Son auteur m’était inconnu et pourtant je m’aperçois qu’il a déjà un certain lectorat en France et ailleurs. J’espère que ce livre confirmera ce succès, car c’est une expérience de lecture que je ne peux pas qualifier de plaisante, c’est toujours difficile de se sentir remise en question, comme ça, l’air de rien, mais c’est une expérience de lecture enrichissante et déstabilisante, ce qui est pour moi le signe d’un bon livre.
  raton-liseur | Jun 22, 2021 |
This is laid out as a man telling his story to a woman researcher some years after the events told. The chapters of his story are interspersed with short pieces of the two of them in the present. It works as a device, in that it brings you back to the current and constrasts with the past. The narrator was imprisioned for murder and this is his life story to that point. He tells of life growing up as a chinese origin living in Malaysia. They are barely scratching a living and the impact of factory on the village's fishing has a significant role to play in his life. In fact the role of the world beyond the village is surprisingly evident. He talks of imigrants comming from elsewhere to work, and contrasts their position with that of his village, where they are squeezed between the low paying jobs and those using the illegal imigrants as cheap labour.
It is all told with a complete lack of self pity, all very mattter of fact. He tries to tease out the roots of the events and where there were turning points. At one point he does say that seeing options and being able to take them are two different things.
It's quite a bare life, in one sense, but at the same time, the teller never sounds as if he regrets his life. There is a sense of inevitability in the events, as told, that seems to be fated. And yet there are points at which the ending could have changed, but is that the benefit of hindsight or was there ever a point when things could change.
Thought provoking without being lecturing, it certainly makes you think about the impact of global events in small places. It's not clear who the survivors of the title might be. ( )
  Helenliz | Feb 22, 2021 |
I lived in Malaysia for three and a half years, a quarter century ago, but the main character is almost a type of the struggling poor ethnic Chinese. I admire much about this novel, but found I didn't like reading it although Aw's writing and characterization carried me along like one of the flood tides he mentions. I relished many of the details of Malaysian life but found I couldn't connect with the woman who records the protagonist's story; she seemed to me like a necessary distraction, a youthful child of privilege to contrast with his impoverished childhood and youth. Maybe there is just too much truth in this novel for me to enjoy reading it. ( )
  nmele | Sep 9, 2020 |
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You want to talk to me about life, but all I’ve talked about is failure, as if they’re the same thing, or at least so closely entwined that I can’t separate the two - like the trees you see growing in the half-ruined buildings in the Old Town.
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Fiction. Literature. Mystery. HTML:

From the author of The Harmony Silk Factory and Five Star Billionaire, a compelling depiction of a man's act of violence, set against the backdrop of Asia in flux

Ah Hock is an ordinary man of simple means. Born and raised in a Malaysian fishing village, he favors stability above all, a preference at odds with his rapidly modernizing surroundings. So what brings him to kill a man?

This question leads a young, privileged journalist to Ah Hock's door. While the victim has been mourned and the killer has served time for the crime, Ah Hock's motive remains unclear, even to himself. His vivid confession unfurls over extensive interviews with the journalist, herself a local whose life has taken a very different course. The process forces both the speaker and his listener to reckon with systems of power, race, and class in a place where success is promised to all yet delivered only to its lucky heirs.

An uncompromising portrait of an outsider navigating a society in transition, Tash Aw's anti-nostalgic tale, We the Survivors, holds its tension to the very end. In the wake of loss and destruction, hope is among the survivors.

.

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