Choose Me by Evelyn Lau

Pffftthhhhffft! Didn't like it, didn't like it at all. There are seven short stories in this collection, each perfectly interesting in and of itself. But together they leave a residual buildup in the brain, and your brain begins to object, where have I read this before? In Malay they refer to this problem when it occurs in cuisine as gelat - too much of a muchness, an overpowering of the same sort of flavour/texture going on. More charitably I could say that Evelyn Lau is clearly working variations on a theme with all these stories, but instead I'll say it's boring. The first two stories had me, they are good and sad and dark.

"'All right.' Sybil stood up, tucking her evening bag under her arm, feeling him watch her as she crossed the living room to the foyer. The sensation was of slugs sliding over her skin. She saw him in the mirrored closet doors as he came up to her from behind, holding a bottle of Chivas by his side like a weapon with which he meant to knock her over the head. Watching him, she thought that if anyone approached them later that night, it would be because of her. They would take him only because he was part of the package, and that was why he wanted her to go with him. He would never have made it on his own, and the knowledge of this caused her to admire herself for a moment in the mirror. Her eyes were overly bright and they flashed back at her with a desperate gleam that made her turn away from herself."

But then I began to see the pattern. By the last couple of stories I was annoyed enough to make a small tear in the margins, everywhere I noticed a detail reappearing from another story: once again the heroine finds that her unlovable husband smells bad (rank, rancid); and here the heroine catches her reflection and doesn't recognize it as her own; and here the heroine is cutting back her career to accomodate her partner who she actually doesn't like all that much. And always always always she is attracted to this older man mostly because he seems so besotted with her. YAWN! Now the last pages of my copy are in ribbons. I didn't get the problems these women have. They have no desire, but they still have sex. They don't love him, but they stay anyway and feel pity and contempt - charming.

Then I noticed the book is already out of print at amazon.com. What gives? I check my copy's flyleaf and here 'tis - published 1999 and 2000. But oh, what's this further down it looks like maybe the book was written in 1971. AH-HA, this is one possible explanation for all this outdated female trouble. And, OH-HO looky here, the author also wrote a non-fiction work Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid. Could someone be doing some necessary purging?

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