The lovely Jamie (Lonelygirlbookclub on Instagram) was doing a book swap and I jumped at the chance to try something new. Since I mentioned to her that I wanted to try more SingLit, she sent me Corridors by Alfian Sa’at (and one other book).

To be honest, I was pretty scared to read this because Alfian Sa’at is really popular on Bookstagram and in the Singapore reading community in general and I… am not really a short story person.

The most recent short story collection I read was Exhalation by Ted Chiang and interestingly, Corridors was the exact opposite of Exhalation in that the stories seemed to have no point. If it wasn’t for the blurb on the back of the book, I wouldn’t have guessed that these stories were about people at turning points in their lives. I honestly thought the first few stories were just vignettes in people’s lives – vividly written but without that much of a point to it.

What I really liked about these stories were how natural the conversations were. It’s really like being a fly on the wall – I could totally see these as real conversations that actual people were having. The English/Singlish used was also really on point. On the flip side, all the conversations sounded very similar to me. It’s like having real people talk, but the same few people are talking in all the stories.

Another thing I liked was that Sa’at doesn’t hesitate to make his characters unlikable. The makcik in Corridors would probably be an antagonistic character (with her not wanting to leave the hotel room while on holiday) if the story was told from a different POV, and the protagonist in Bugis just casually dehumanises migrant workers by wondering “if this were their country, the Bangladeshi workers men might make wolf-whistle sounds at her”, as though there is no possibility they’re acting like normal humans on an MRT minding their own business because they are normal humans on an MRT. It doesn’t make the protagonists more likeable, but it does make them more realistic.

As for the stories, I generally preferred the longer ones to the shorter stories because they had a bit more time to develop. That said, there weren’t any standout stories, the way Exhalation had The Lifecycle of Software Objects.

Overall, I think this was an interesting collection and I think short story lovers are going to enjoy this. I haven’t read many SingLit short stories but in my limited reading experience, I would rank this as a tie with Lion City by Ng Yi-Sheng, behind my favourite Track Faults and Other Glitches by Nicholas Yong.