By Noelle Q. de Jesus

The Inventors
Daryl Li
Rosetta Cultures (2023) / 272 pages / SGD 28

The Inventors is a handsome book, clean and elegant in design and substantial in heft; there is no mistaking it: it reads "literary". Unfortunately, there is no helpful introduction to contextualise these disparate pieces of creative non-fiction by Daryl Li, nor does the end biographical note really tell us who he is. A cursory flip of its 260 pages (sans notes and acknowledgements) makes evident the book's artful use of section dividers and a few photographs in black and white for which grayscale printing is necessary. Its title is instantly provocative, perfect for the novel that it isn't. Text on the back cover says it's a "meditation on the nature of memory", and blurbs signal lush prose portending unexpected philosophical insight. All set up great expectations.

The aforementioned dividers, on which brief literary or philosophical quotations appear dramatically in white on black, set off four distinct parts, each dated presumably the year they were written. The first, 'The Physics Of Memory', has three pieces: 'Entanglements', seemingly a review of a one-of-a-kind artistic culinary event in Singapore but is really the author's self-critique of his own social distance and failure to connect; 'Triptych', which appeared in this journal previously, and which to my mind is the more successful of Li's works – a reflection on the comfort of travel and the foreignness of home; and 'Gravity', in which he remembers, in fragmented fashion, his grandfather taking him as a child to Bras Basah.

The second part, 'Solaris', has three pieces: 'One: Interloper', 'Two: The Hall of Echoes' and 'Three: Dispatches'. And the third section, 'Moths', again comprises three parts: 'Scars', 'Ghost Stories' (which won a prestigious short story prize in its original iteration) and 'Metamorphoses', a kind of quasi-prose poem posing as a review. The book finally ends with a single still segmented piece entitled 'Cinders', a summary and analysis of the author's assorted writing, which has the feel of a journal entry.

It's very difficult to avoid the sense that the pieces which make up The Inventors were not composed to a structure or narrative (in fact, Li refers to this in his acknowledgements). Their shared location on the author's hard drive is evidently the first thing that ties them together. And Li's non-fiction prose is not bad; to be fair, he crafts a number of beautiful sentences. His voice, however, is the distant, detached authorial voice of narrative summary, one that philosophises from commonplace incidents in his life and his work, as opposed to a more immediate play-it-as-it-happens voice that tends to better hold readers captive. He describes an event or recounts an experience involving various single-capital-letter characters, and then, all of a sudden, departs to recall something else in the past that goes on for a bit before circling back to where he has started.

Like a child with a stick stirring water in rain puddles – first here than there, first small then large circles, Li arrives at small revelations. They are self-evident truisms on remembering, and readers watch him think. Memory is always flawed. Memory is a mix of truth and fabrication. Memory is a metaphor and a path to writing and storytelling. Li explains himself in the meandering middle section about the Singapore Botanic Gardens, which appears to be writing done for an NParks writing residency, a prospect he confesses as "unnerving":

Yet every piece of writing is undertaken with great uncertainty – without knowing where you will go, or where you will end up – and it is only in this condition that we write. Every essay, every sentence, every word must maintain the possibility of not-knowing, up until the end. This is the energy that drives writing's basic action. But there was, and still is, something different about this proposition, perhaps not just unnerving, but also daunting. Where do I begin? With what material do I work? Most of all, why does the garden make me feel the way it does? There is so little available to me, and so much that is baffling.

While a measure of not-knowing in the process of the first or even a second draft can translate to energy and excitement for the would-be author, it isn't necessarily this for the reader holding the published book. At this point, I opt to go directly to previously published pieces and to the short story award winner. This ought to have been a good call for the fiction, especially. However 'Ghost Stories' (and there is no way a reader can tell how different it is from the original prize-winning one) is peculiar in its arrangement of two columns on a page, and the layout is not inviting.

Call it the occupational hazard of a former sub-editor, but I am as sensitive to word and sentence choices as I am to layout decisions. Exquisite is a rare, rewarding happenstance, and even one misstep has impact on the reading experience. Any number of things can hurl me, like a limp ragdoll, right out of a book, whether it's a single run-on sentence found masquerading as a paragraph, a predicate in disagreement with its subject, or a word, phrase or clause that hangs there, modifying nothing.

Perhaps not every group of essays and a short story can make up a truly compelling book, although of course, writing, curation and editing are apt to make a tremendous difference. It's possible this is more an acquisitions issue on the part of the publisher. It's true that the great speed at which books are put out these days often results in vital corners being cut in many cases. Editing (both developmental and line) and lack thereof are just two of any number of things that can rip apart what John Gardner calls "the dream", "slips of technique" that distract the reader from focus, suddenly pointing to the existence of the flawed, fallible writer writing. Gardner was talking about fiction, but I believe every book regardless of genre ought to be a vivid dream from which a reader awakens only as he finishes it.

Like Li himself in his 'Entanglements' in which he writes of struggles to connect, like his unnerved self in the 'Interloper', but also like his past writing projects in 'Cinders' which did not progress, The Inventors does feel sometimes like a fragmented dream, fraying at its visible seams. It is interesting as a premise, eloquent at some points, but inevitably, profligate and often pointless in its parts, which fail to come together convincingly as more than their total sum.

_____