Read an excerpt from Michael Moorcock's latest book, LOVERS: Mervyn and Maeve Peake. A Personal Memoir over at Enter the Octopus.
Kam Raslan's right. In the preface for his new book, Confessions of an Old Boy: The Dato' Hamid Adventures he writes that we've known Dato' Hamid all our lives. Seeing as my own dad is an old boy of MCKK, the people I get to meet when he drags me to an Old Boy function and the people he tells me of, reflect the characters found in Kam's book. It really does feel like I've known Dato' Hamid all my life. Dato' Hamid is a civil servant of the Tunku Abdul Rahman generation. He is the sort of person you rarely see nowadays, a fine example of the anachronistic Malay. This generation, groomed in the ways of the colonial British would be out of place not just in 21st century Malaysia, but in Britain too. And yet, Dato' Hamid, in all his snobbishness and patronising ways, is essentially a Malaysian. Without people like him, our country would probably never exist at all. At least not like we know it now. I'm glad that Kam Raslan decided to capture this ...
Ted,
ReplyDeleteI read your comment on Faisal Tehrani at Sharon's blog, nice one. I like to read his books too.
Salam from Web Sutera
http://pasalbuku.blogspot.com
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Thanks for dropping by! I visited your blog as well. Interesting.
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