Flooding the afterlife, these souls find themselves in an ad hoc and vaguely European town. By the end of the war, half of humanity has been wiped out. It is the beginning of the end, not an act of creation. However, this light turns out to be that of a nuclear explosion over Beijing at the start of a world war. The novel begins with what seems to be familiar territory, “In the beginning, there was the light,” a reference to the creation story in the Book of Genesis. This Side of Heaven can be seen as a development of Wong’s thinking and writing about religion and the self. This novel also fits into a subset of explicitly Buddhist works, namely, the short story “The Bodhisattva Makes Her Case” (2014) and the chapbook-length poem Satori Blues (2011). De Souza, but in structure it is closer to a collection of stories. At 170 pages, This Side Of Heaven is slightly longer than Mrs. He has published three short-story collections, The Boy With The Flower That Grew Out Of His Ass (2007), Let Me Tell You Something About That Night (2009), and Ten Things My Father Never Taught Me (2014), and a novel, The Last Lesson of Mrs. However, fiction is a burgeoning part of his corpus. Review of This Side of Heaven by Cyril Wong (Singapore: Epigram Books, 2020)Ĭyril Wong is usually described as Singapore’s first confessional poet and that is how he is best known.
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