by Kelly Kaur
STONEHOUSE PUBLISHING
2022/$22.00/300 pp.
Calgarian Kelly Kaur makes her fiction debut with an epistolary novel, a challenging form, which intersects through letters the lives of five women in mid-1980s Calgary and Singapore. The protagonist, Simran, is a 20-year-old Singaporean transplanted to the University of Calgary for an English degree, escorted to Canada by her father, wondering, in a letter to her mother, “What have I done?” Over the following three years in Calgary, Simran exchanges letters with her mother, sister Amrit and friends Anita and Amy. In these she details, in a vibrant and self-deprecating voice, the struggles and pleasures and comical mishaps of her new life: inspiring and discouraging classes, a roommate with smelly socks, badly behaved men, racist immigration clerks and welcoming friends, slippery sidewalks and dryers that shrink sweaters.
This novel is about the immigrant’s uneasy entry into Canadian culture, but it’s also about women fighting patriarchy. Through the letters, we follow the other women’s Singapore lives: Amrit’s loveless arranged marriage, Anita’s chosen marriage that has nonetheless become a hell, Amy’s struggles with her unhappy mother and Simran’s mother’s loving attempts to make her daughters obedient. The central theme is clear from the beginning: to survive and live fully, women must reject the patriarchy that threatens to destroy them. It is not a dated theme; the kind of sexual hostility Simran experiences from all kinds of men, for instance, could’ve come from a novel set in 2019 rather than 1986 (similarly, the mix of antipathy and welcome she encounters as a foreigner marks the life of recent newcomers too). But from the moment the novel hits this dominant note, it keeps repeating it, without adding significant nuance. One has to wonder why the overt repetitiveness was not edited out, since it also undermines what we expect from modern fiction, the richness created by implication. Compounding this is the relative flatness of the novel’s arc: while all the women’s lives do change, there is not enough dramatic thrall, as most troubles resolve quickly and triumph is the predominant tone, even in tragedy.
The subject matter, from domestic violence to mental illness, does have gravity and range. Its narrative treatment, however, stays largely in the shallows, with few pleasurable aesthetic and dramatic surprises and no real reckoning with the dark forces the women are escaping. What we do get is heart and humour and a message of resilience and courage. Letters to Singapore is the kind of novel that these days gets called “light reading,” and whether that is an endorsement, a diminutive or just a descriptor will depend, of course, on the reader.
Jasmina Odor is the author of You Can’t Stay Here: Stories.
