The Sum Of Our Follies

The Sum of Our Follies is a novel set in Lubok Sayong, an imaginary Malaysian town. Two narrators describe Lubok Sayong and its community of quirky inhabitants. The first is Auyong, a retiree from the city who operates a lychee factory in Lubok Sayong. The other is eleven-year-old Mary Anne, an orphan who is taken in by an irascible woman in charge of the Big House. Through anecdotes and gentle humour, the two narrators observe the events that change the town and their lives as modernity sets in and Mary Anne grows up.

In this major collection of his essays, Alberto Manguel, whom George Steiner has called “the Casanova of reading,” argues that the activity of reading, in its broadest sense, defines our species. “We come into the world intent on finding narrative in everything,” writes Manguel, “landscape, the skies, the faces of others, the images and words that our species create.” Reading our own lives and those of others, reading the societies we live in and those that lie beyond our borders, reading the worlds that lie between the covers of a book are the essence of A Reader on Reading. The thirty-nine essays in this volume explore the crafts of reading and writing, the identity granted to us by literature, the far-reaching shadow of Jorge Luis Borges, to whom Manguel read as a young man, and the links between politics and books and between books and our bodies. The powers of censorship and intellectual curiosity, the art of translation, and those “numinous memory palaces we call libraries” also figure in this remarkable collection. For Manguel and his readers, words, in spite of everything, lend coherence to the world and offer us “a few safe places, as real as paper and as bracing as ink,” to grant us room and board in our passage.

This book offers a scholarly perspective on heritage as a discourse, concept and lived experience in Malaysia. It argues that heritage is not a received narrative but a construct in the making. Starting with alternative ways of “museumising” heritage, the book then addresses a broad range of issues involving multicultural and folklore heritage, the small town, nostalgia and the environment, and transnationalism and cosmopolitanism. In so doing it delivers an intervention in received ways of talking about and “doing” heritage in academic as well as state and public discourse in Malaysia, which are largely dominated by perspectives that do not sufficiently engage with the cultural complexities and sociopolitical implications of heritage. The book also critically explores the politics and dynamics of heritage production in Malaysia to contest “Malaysian heritage” as a stable narrative, exploring both its cogency and contingency, and builds on a deep engagement with a non-western society in the service of “provincialising” critical heritage studies, with the broader goal of contributing to Malaysian studies.​

This book is really a number of short stories compiled over a period of years. They consist of a random selection of topics that are separate and yet connected to the one theme: What's life all about, who are we, and why are we here? Those questions bring up even more difficult questions, such as is the world I experience around me real? Are the people around me real? Am I real? Or am I and everything else in this world just part of some elaborate illusion, a dream conjured up by a supremely intelligent energy (God)? You will not find any answers to those questions in this book. Rather, you'll only find my point of view on the possibilities. It's up to you the reader to discern for yourself what the truth might be. It is best, though, not to believe what is written here, for that would only put the damper on your learning. It's better to absorb the reasoning hidden within and between the lines. Then, mix that reasoning with the ideas percolating in your own mind and come up with your own personal version of what reality may be. That's a very important thing for you to do, for combined with the ideas that are emanating from the collective minds of the rest of us seekers of truth, humanity as a whole can evolve and advanced to where we are destined to be. So come on an entertaining and enthralling journey through the thoughts in my mind and see if I can plant a few fertile thoughts in yours.