“Some people even swear that they have seen tigers eat durian in the jungles,” Ariffin jokes. “I don’t believe it, but to me, that shows how special they think the fruit is.”
In some parts of Malaysia, there is also the belief that the Orang Mawas, or Malaysian Bigfoot, love to feast on durians, and therefore the fruit grows thorns as a defense mechanism.
Light Years, however, is worth reading not for any of these reasons, narratively interesting though they may be, but because of the infinite tenderness Salter lavishes on the unremarkable and unredeemable moments to which he refuses the possibility of meaning anything.
Nghi Vo’s When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain is masterful in its ability to step back, to allow the fairytale stay in its frame, at a bit of a distance from the immediate action. That refusal to humanize more than warranted works hand in hand with the space that Vo gives for the non-human—even when it walks and talks a bit like a person.
When the terrors of the French Revolution had passed, many of those aristocrats who had survived sat down to write their memoirs about the last years of the ancien régime, and the turmoil that followed. Seldom has there been an age, or a group of people, so committed to remembering and recording, whose existence was predicated on subtlety of thought and eloquence of expression. Often they wrote at great length: the memoirs of the Duchesse d’Abrantès run to 18 volumes; those of the Comtesse de Genlis to 10. This need to write was born both of nostalgia for a time when they had been rich and powerful, and a desire to fix for ever, as one courtier put it, “the forms, the spirit and the manners that belonged to the world of high society”.
The dead are alive—
waxen scarecrows
of rotten joy.