Bookblog #52: A Perk of House-swapping



Shahriza Hussein, Legacy (Didier Millet Pte Ltd 2008)

I don't think I ever wrote my blog post in praise of house-swapping, specifically through http:homeexchange.com. Our initial interest in house-swapping grew from the obvious economic considerations: on our trip to Europe a couple of years ago, we stayed in five homes in four countries (five if you count Catalonia as different from Spain), each for at least a week, at no cost except that our absent hosts enjoyed our house for the same length of time. It made travel affordable. But there were other advantages: our Toulouse hosts alerted us to the Marciac jazz festival, which we otherwise would certainly have missed; in Barcelona, our hosts met us at the train station and gave us a quick orientation tour before delivering us to our apartment; in Granada our swappers, on returning from Australia, invited us to dinner at their proper home and then took us on a late night walking tour of the Arab quarter, the Albaicin; and the Sicilian exchange had so many delightful elements and by-products that our stay at Cinesi will surely remain a high point in memory for decades. Recently, getting to the point of all this, we completed the first part of a non-simultaneous swap: two people stayed in our house, which we vacated for the duration, in exchange for us having their house in the south of France some time later this year (that is, assuming that other circumstances such as the recent dramatic shrinking of our superannuation allow us to travel). One of our swapping-guests was Malaysian; on their arrival, she made us as a gift of this book, written by her brother.

Legacy is a book I wouldn't have seen otherwise, let alone read, and it was a great pleasure. It traces the fortunes of a Malayan family from the 1870s to the end of the Emergency. in the acknowledgements, the author (whose family name henceforth will be thought of as presidential -- I've just seen the Inauguration) explains that much of it draws on his family history, and indeed much of it feels like a guided walk through three generations' worth of Malayan history in the company of a handful of participants. It unfolds in short chapters separated by substantial time lapses, sometimes amounting to several years. As a result, most chapters carry a substantial burden of exposition, and there's a lot of what's known in science-fiction circles as 'As you know, Bob' dialogue. in this case, that's not actually a drawback. On the contrary, ignorant as I am (or was) about Malayan/Malaysian culture and history, I found I was being painlessly educated about the changing relationships of Malays, Chinese, English on the peninsula and being invited to engage with an unfamiliar, relatively benign perspective on English colonialism. And on top of that, there were all the pleasures of the family saga, with an occasional nod to Somerset Maugham from the other side of the cultural divide.

Posted: Wed - January 21, 2009 at 09:45 AM           |

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