![]() "Yun Ling has been recently diagnosed with aphasia and she retires so that she can document her past while she still has a fairly firm grip on her faculties. It is the late '80s and Yun Ling, a prominent Supreme Court justice in independent Malaysia has just retired and moved back from Kuala Lumpur, the country's capital, to her home in the country's highlands. This vignette might well capture the premise of this fantastic novel by Malaysian author Tan Twan Eng - that we spend almost our entire lives trying to find harmony between the twin pillars of memory and forgetfulness. The other one, Teoh Yun Ling is told, is her twin, the goddess of forgetting. ![]() It is only fitting that one of them is Mnemosyne, the Greek goddess of memory. ![]() In Tan Twan Eng's second novel, after The Gift of Rain, he continues to explore the harmony between the twin pillars of memory and forgetfulness, set against the backdrop of late 1980s Malaysia.Įarly on in the evocative new novel, The Garden of Evening Mists, the protagonist Teoh Yun Ling comes across an arresting pair of statues in her friend's tea estate gardens. ![]()
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