Dish of the Day

We’re now resident in Maison KL after a smooth journey north yesterday. The 'we' in question comprise Noi, myself, Fi Fi, Fa Fa, Ayu, Ayiem and Rozaidah. The two girls came over to Still Road on Sunday and helped us post a pile of Christmas cards at the big post office building in Geylang on Tuesday morning before we set off on the bigger journey. We stopped at Abba & Mak’s in Melaka for a couple of hours, transferring the luggage to a larger vehicle and picking up the other kids. Auntie Idah was already here in KL as she’s been staying at our place whilst on some kind of English course with the British Council.

The highlight of our brief sojourn in Melaka had to be Mak’s famous Roti Telur Ikan Bilis, which loosely translates as egg bread with little fish. Mere words, however, fail to do justice to this most sublime of unhealthy snacks. Basically it’s white bread fried in a sort of egg-based confection, spiced to perfection, topped off by those fishy bits. Consumed with hot sweet tea, several pieces can arm you against any journey up the highway with a van full of noisy kids and some singer called Ashley Tinsdale(?) – out of High School Musical, I’m told – on the sound system.

Since our arrival it’s been largely a case of letting Mak Ndak keep some kind of discipline while I relax by completing my reading of Jostein Gaarder’s Sophie’s World, which I must say I found to be a relaxing read. I suppose I found some fascination in seeing how Gaarder deals with each period of philosophy or particular philosopher he takes upon himself to explain to what I presume is meant to be a teenage audience. I’m not sure that he’s equally successful with each area; generally I felt he’s better on the early Greek stuff, but it’s certainly quite something to see an attempt to bottle the whole Romantic movement in terms that might be intelligible to a bright teenager. The problem is that I don’t think it can be genuinely made to work even for very bright young readers. There are quite a few examples of risibly clunky exchanges of ideas between Sophie and Alberto, which I suppose might be put down to an unsympathetic translation, though I doubt it’s as simple as that. It just looks like there are times when stuff intended for a reference book is making it into the novel because the form (an introduction to pretty much all major western philosophical ideas) dictates that it must be there.

I suspect the real audience for the book has been an adult one of people hungry for some kind of easy way into ideas that, by definition, are not easy.

About halfway through the book Gaarder starts with some mildly entertaining postmodern fictive games relating to the reality of Sophie and her world, extending, in their turn, to the characters of the frame story. I was interested to see how all this eventually panned out, but generally I don’t find this kind of thing terribly fulfilling. Once you’ve seen it (or read it) done (the first time for me being in John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman, and I don’t think anyone has ever done it better) it becomes, paradoxically, a touch predictable.