'The South': a Luminous Exploration of Desire and Family as a Battlefield

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In a plantation burned by drought, under a sun that seems capable of setting the whole country on fire, two boys walk among sick trees that will soon be cut down. There, in the midst of dry weeds and the smell of living bark, desire bursts with the same silent violence that hovers over nature. Years later, that moment —short, clumsy and irreversible — will continue to project an elongated shadow. Tash Aw composes in The South a novel of initiati…