When Lifestyle, the leisure and entertainment section of Sunday's paper, devoted 2 full pages to this newly released book by former Life! writer Tan Shzr Ee and photographer Desmond Foo, I said
aw shucks, they beat me to it.
But before coming into the office earlier in the evening, I still mousied down to the bookstore to pick up 1 of the reported 1000 published copies.
Why so
Kiasu you may ask.
Well because I've been toying with the idea of getting one of these projects off the ground too. I like writing, I like taking photos. Its just that I don't know any publishers who would actually want to...err..publish me. And there's this
little problem of not having a transcript and a set of good stock pictures ready for editorial perusal =))
In short, I wanted to check out the competition without having actually done anything about the competition =))
And truth be told, I'm not too impressed with Shzr Ee's and Desmond's efforts. No, not a hint of sour grapes at all =P
Anyway, don't be misled by the title because it seems to evoke a sense of roads and places vanished from Singapore. Rather, the roads and places mentioned in the book have probably been vanquished from the consciousness of most Singaporeans, and presumably do not exist in the minds of the younger generation.
There are, for example, the Bukit Brown Cemetery off Lornie road, Singapore's last living village
Kampong Lorong Buangkok and the beach at the end of Jalan Bahtera where the carcass of an old abandoned ship stretches out from the sand into the water like a small jetty.
Frankly, I've never heard of these places before so
kudos to Shzr Ee for telling us.
But her's is a very poetic, literary style, pregnant with romantic recollection and intimate imagery. Weaving in, at the same time, a slice of history and a touch of real-life conversation. Certainly not your everyday Coffee-table book prose. And there are way too little photographs of the places mentioned in this collection of essay-type chapters to flesh out what she is talking about. What meagre few pictures, although artistically shot by ST photojournalist Desmond Foo, are in Black & White, supposedly a cost-cutting initiative. Making everything look a trifle too sombre and cheap.
Maps are included for the adventurous or recently armchair-TV reformed, looking for an alternative to VivoCity or CineLeisure on Sunday.
When Shzr Ee called Lost Roads a Scrapbook in the Preface, I wondered why. Its a little more than that though, I concede, after ploughing through it the better half of this gloomy Monday morning.
I'd say a Under-The-Coffee-Table book. Good for an informative read but better left below.
Labels: Books