Picked this up at the Brooklyn Book Festival--why this was hanging out with all the kids' books, I have no idea. I've never read noir before, so I figured that short stories were a good way to cut my teeth, even if a couple people scoffed at the idea that noir stories could be set in a city as clean and outwardly respectable as Singapore. (I would argue that makes it an excellent setting.)

My chief complaint, I'm afraid, is probably traditional to the genre and can't be avoided in most cases: that's that, even though this collection did manage to include women writers (5 out of 14), there wasn't a single story with a female protagonist until Part III--though I actually had thought the first story was told from a woman's perspective until about two pages from the end, when another character cemented the lead's gender. Honestly, it would have been more interesting if left ambiguous. In any case, the lack of women or people of other genders was so pronounced that the first story with a female lead was jarring. There are only four stories with women narrators/over-the-shoulders (possibly three--"Spells" is a bit unclear, though I decided there were few enough women to put this in one in their camp).

You know what? Forget tradition. It's just plain lazy not to branch out in this day and age!

It was interesting to read these stories, so on the opposite side of what I saw from my reasonably sunny, short-sighted 5-to-8-year-old perspective. Obviously this is a side of Singapore that I was completely oblivious to, and probably not one that I'll see in a few weeks, since we'll probably stick to touristy areas and sites of nostalgia. But it was fun to read stories set in a place that I knew a long time ago and will be visiting again soon.

Favorite Stories:

"Kena Sai" - S.J. Rozan
Part social commentary, really--a young father falls in love with his son and Singapore just as he falls out of love with his restless, self-absorbed wife, and finds himself in a tight spot when she's ready to move on to the next thing--with child, but not ex-husband, in tow.

"Mei Kwei, I Love You" - Suchen Christine Lim
The first story featuring a woman main character, and a queer one at that. (Don't believe the character was specifically identified as a lesbian, so I'll leave it open.) I also loved the perspectives on religion and privilege--there was really a lot squeezed into this one story!

"Bedok Reservoir" - Dave Chua
A tad predictable, but I'd been waiting so long to get to a story told from a maid's perspective (and a second story clearly from the perspective of a woman) that this horrifying little revenge fantasy was like water in a desert.

"Murder on Orchard Road" - Nury Vittachi
I heartily approve of editor Tan's decision to end on a relatively lighthearted note, with this story

I liked "Reel" until the end--I saw the plot twit coming, but it wasn't explained at all (p94). The killer had no discernible motive, which was extremely strange given how heavily it was implied that they'd deliberately set out to do something heinous.

It seemed a bit as though Part I was stocked up with the heavy, truly dark stuff, with "Kena Sai" the first relative light in the tunnel. Part I was so heavy and adult that I worry sensitive readers might not make it to the lighter fare later on--I'm a voracious reader of fanfiction, but getting shoved into the brooding male sex fantasy of "Detective In a City with No Crime" was about as comfortable as a swim in the Arctic Ocean. Yes, yes, argue that it's par for the course all you want, but the aforementioned fanfiction seems to be making me a dark literature snob.

Quotes

35 - True, the state is a nanny and the bureaucracy does not know how to let a person live without rules, and so they reduce life to a schedule of permits and licenses to be applied and paid for. The have allowed seediness and confined it to certain quarters. The upper class are garrisoned with their respectability in other areas, all with rising real estate values.
Snerk. Perfect setting for a distopia. I'm waiting for the next round of distopian teen fiction set in a place where you start out on the sunny side--Hunger Games from the perspective of Capital City, or something. Not that that's related to noir, really, but I just really like this vision of "seediness confined to certain quarters."

66 - All white men looked the same to him.
I applaud this sentence for existing.

165 - I just found the end of this story very poignant. Here's Cha-Li trying to shoehorn the future she wanted into the present she was given, and it's definitely not going to work. She's still focused on her picture, not the big picture: defining what might happen in terms relative to herself rather than others.

212 - Like Natalia, she had wanted a better life. It was true that sometimes Natalia also considered suicide, but she knew she had to press on. If she died, her debts would simply be passed on to her family.

219 - I loved how the two main women in this story shared a kind of solidarity even though they'd never met.

237 - There was a certain Zen quality about the paradox that would give the race a uniquely Asian flavor.
Quoting the whole paragraph will spoil the ending, but I was delighted with the clever solution to an outlandish problem. ( )

I will admit I was not aware what the book is really about, apart from the fact there are many short stories set in Singapore. To my surprise the stories aren’t light and easy to read, these represent the darker shades of the city/capital life what only locals may have heard.

I have been following the news and media to know it still got all the problems other countries are facing, it’s not a country without a crime, but what made me like and appreciate the writers work is – having written a negative story, implementing culture marks and mentality, setting the atmosphere doggy and unpleasant. It’s a book that shows darkness may have various colors and nothing is as it seems.

I won’t say I enjoyed all the stories, some I left unfinished and some read till the end.
Apparently, the “Noir” is a series set for cities across the globe, not sure I will be reading the rest of the series any time soon, but I am sure it would be interesting to read those and have a culture shock, perhaps, and see how various writers from the globe has chosen to represent the city “noir” atmosphere.

If you are looking for something very slightly different, grab the book and read! ( )

I seem to have an issue with most of the non-USA based Akashic Noir books - either my expectations are a bit too high or something is really off.

Most of the stories can fit into the Noir definition as per the previous anthologies but yet again most of the stories could happen anywhere in the world - Signapore does not shine through; there is nothing that makes Singapore special. Which would not be bad in a book with Noir stories and I would have enjoyed a lot of those stories a lot more - but I was looking for the city - the way the San Francisco or the Brooklyn anthologies spotlighted their quirks.

I would not blame the editor and considering that all the stories were connected to Singapore, I guess the work was done but I expected a bit more. ( )

This was a disappointment. Several of the stories in Singapore Noir were pretty bad, and none of them struck me as being especially good. Writing a good short story is a difficult thing—you have to compress a whole world—its people, thoughts, events—down into a few thousand words. It's a skill that takes time to hone, and unfortunately most of these stories read like first drafts of things that students would hand in at a writing workshop. And for several of the authors, it seems, "noir" is a synonym for "misogyny"—or maybe it's just gritty to read about male protagonists ejaculating on women's faces? I would have far preferred more stories with female protagonists, as opposed to objects to whom things happened. ( )

On the collection of novels by Akashic in general:
- They reduce the carbon footprint of the reader and make them travel with 0 emissions to some far away places unless a resident of the city portrayed in the novels.
- They remind me of that old movie in which a car salesman had an epic "Jacob and the Angel" struggle with his underworld boss, the head of a car theft ring, while on a roller-coaster ride. As a reader either you are in a couple of pages or even after a couple of sentences, captivated by the short story narrative and you stay on this ride for the next novel, or it does not capture your imagination and you are thrown out of the ride.

- They rely a lot on the hunting-gathering skills of the author who has composed this anthology of short novels and who like a ringmaster in a circus, provides opening and inspiration to pick-up this book in the first place.

With Singapore Noir Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan skillfully assembled a posse of authors who not only love their subject, Singapore and its
elegant, neo-colonial, shady borrows or its not so manicured areas, its red-light districts or shaky wharves populated with antiquated wooden fishing boats. They grab your attention to the layered and multilingual characters that make Singapore, a city of five millions with 75% Chinese, 13 percent Malay, 8 percent Indians. This city faces Malaysia. It is a city where "crime does not happen". Each district receives soon a nice array of corpses from Bukit-Panjang to Raffles Place, and that is when there is a body to be found, Just enough and in so many varied ways that it will delight the Noir genre amateur. Lu-Lien Tan knows how to organize this mosaic in Chapters called "Sirens", "Love (or something like it)", "Gods and Demons" and to paraphrase Hemingway; "The Haves & the Haves-not".

Is Singapore the "perfect Asia" for fancy banking expats and their international children, the globalized city par excellence under which crackled varnish, multiple sordid secrets remain hidden, or a more authentic culture is just below this surface, remaining to be discovered, by these avenues of mirrors? So beware readers who think that entering a world of glass towers, chewing-gum police and tribunals will insulate you from being exposed to big trouble. Once finished with Singapore Noir's superb novels, your sense of what one can, and one cannot do will be pushed to the limits. ( )