Novel · A way to begin
If We Dream Too Long
Goh Poh Seng · 1972
Synopsis
In the Singapore of the sixties, Kwang Meng, who has just left school, is bored in a job as a clerk. Shy and sensitive, he does not share the values of his school friends. He takes an afternoon off, claiming to be ill, to go swimming, goes home to a father who complains as always, frequents a bar where he befriends Lucy, who works there as a prostitute, and dreams of faraway countries and of melting into the sea he loves.
Context
Completed in 1968, the novel was published in 1972 by Island Press, a house the author founded to publish it himself, in three thousand copies. The local reception was lukewarm: the press remained reserved, the university did not support it, and a critic of the Straits Times judged its style loose and flat. The book found a better echo elsewhere: it was translated into Russian as early as 1975, then into Tagalog and Japanese, and entered the university curricula of Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines. It was reissued in 1994, then in 2010.
Who it is for
A short novel, under two hundred pages, in English; it does not exist in French and gives a portrait of the Singapore of the period.
Prizes and reception
Regarded by many as the first Singaporean novel in English; in 1976 it received the first fiction prize of the National Book Development Council.