Ponti

Author/Guide: Sharlene Teo

Why a Booktrail?

2003: Told from the perspectives of three women, this is a story of friendship and memory spanning decades

ISBN: 978-1509855315
Genre: Fiction

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What you need to know before your trail

2003. Singapore. Friendless and fatherless, sixteen-year-old Szu lives in the shadow of her mother Amisa, once a beautiful actress and now a hack medium performing séances with her sister in a rusty house. When Szu meets the privileged, acid-tongued Circe, they develop an intense friendship which offers Szu an escape from her mother’s alarming solitariness, and Circe a step closer to the fascinating, unknowable Amisa.

Seventeen years later, Circe is struggling through a divorce when a project comes up at work: a remake of the cult seventies horror film series ‘Ponti’, the very project that defined Amisa’s short-lived film career. Suddenly Circe is knocked off balance: by memories of the two women she once knew, by guilt, and by a past that threatens her conscience . . .

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Travel Guide

Travel BookTrail style to Singapore across the years

Ponti

The title of the book refers to a very interesting part of Malay Mythlogy. Pontianak is the name of a female vampire/ghost figure

This is also the name of the films in which the character Amisa is playing a role. The image of a female vampire is interesting. Amisa is beautiful on the outside but less so on the inside. She is bad and nasty to her daughter Szu. Szu becomes friends with Circe, and this relationship in many ways, saves her.

Jump forward to 2020 and Circe is working on a remake of the Ponti films. Full circle. We are now told that they are cult movies.

Singapore

“Singapore lies just one degree north of the equator and it feels like the bulls-eye where the sun is aiming a shot at the earth with the intention of killing it. in the afternoons this building heats up like a copper stove.”

The scene setting of Singapore was both dark and magical at the same time. It reflected the happiness of Szu and Circe’s school days and then contrast that with the dark Ponti horror movies. A city of two sides, two faces and the home of three women whose stories intertwine.