Literary Review

Review: 'The South' by Tash Aw

What happens when time bends, desires blur, and the land itself exhales truths that unsettle and endure?

Neil Czeszejko

12 Mar 2025 — 2 min read

Aw’s The South marks a departure from the expected, and yet anticipation hums on every page. The scenery that bursts before us is lush yet bristling, keening with life one moment, collapsing into stillness the next. Heat scalds skin, stiffens limbs, and saturates the senses as it seeps between clammy flesh and the body it depletes in desire.

In the dense reaches of a forgotten country, the characters all undulate with ripples of disharmony. Like time itself, they splinter apart, with memory and longing nipping at their necks. The narrative feeds off this fugue state by slipping between now and then, overtaking the logic of time. Meanwhile, across the expanse of an intoxicating summer, language sheds its restraint, surrendering to the haze.

Perspectives shift from third to first person, at once bringing us within the feathery reach of Jay’s fingertips and pushing us to the limits of his teenage sanity. Complexities undulate, with poetic forms winding around breathless moments of dissociated hunger one moment, then stretching out plainly—accessible to all, far removed from the rage of ignited being.

Dialogue, too, flees the frame of quotation marks during moments of acute intimacy, as though each word were painfully self-aware, baring itself for the scrutiny of both the speaker and the one receiving it as a sacrificial offering. The result is breathtaking.

The deeper we sink into Aw’s creation, the more tangled we become in the web of bodily and existential desires that form the roots of the land. In this reality, shame and guilt don’t exist, much like there is no weed in nature, only a plant deemed less worthy.

It’s no wonder that numbness pervades The South. It clings to the drudgery of life in the ravaged countryside, accentuating tensions and touches, searing all the more with their intentionality.

Revelations, too, appear sharper because of the suddenness with which they are flung into being. Unsettling and yet settled, they add to the strains that could be dismissed as youth, stupidity, misfortune, or inexperience. And yet every body harbours its own seed of experience, for better or worse.

In Jay’s case, that seed blooms in real time, stretching out his being. The body it reaches for, starved for survival, can crush, consume, or free him—though perhaps each is just another form of ruin.

Seekers of intensity will find themselves absorbed by The South, not just by its fevered heat, but by its quiet defiance, its refusal to temper passion into something palatable. Here, queerness is not burdened by shame but left to unfurl in the body’s own language, unspoken yet undeniable. Longing is survival, and survival is a reckoning. One that does not seek permission to exist.

An advance copy was provided by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.