SNIPPET - A Review of AB Hashim's Angus, Himself

Creating a piece of literature in this 21^st century is undoubtedly challenging. A.B Hashim successfully published this book in 2011 when he was 32 years old. The content of the book as a whole is revolving around a young adult love. The main character is Angus Baird who is a writer and the story has given the utmost focus towards this character. A.B Hashim had always brought up his stories whirling on young adult love stories. In his other work entitled Timid is also telling the same focus on young adult love story. In fact, Timid is a sequel to Angus, Himself. The author himself has been so passionate with young women and writing as he portrays that in this book. From a reader’s paradigm towards this opus is that, A.B Hashim tries to portray himself in this book through the character Angus Baird. He puts his passionate towards his hobbies which are photography and writing into an image of Angus Baird who has been addicted to alcohol. This probably shows that A.B Hashim has been so addicted to photography.

The author’s point of view towards young adult love is always about lust and somehow afraid of commitment, and as the reader that interpretation of love might be true if a person had been so westernized. He puts Angus as a person who addicted to alcohol and keeps making love with so many young women is proven that the author has quite a narrow selfishness. This is due to the fact that, in Asian culture we are open up to commitments and depict love should be a pure thing. Not just that, to prove of how a young adult love is afraid of commitment, the author inserts Fay Reid as supposedly be the only true love for Angus, but they split up because they do not want commitments to tie them up from being free of doing whatever they love. “I appreciate that but I simply can’t commit. The time is simply, NOT now. Yes. (149) From a reader’s perspective, the author does not have a clear point and proof to state that a young adult love is based on lust and afraid of commitment because he did not support his point adequately since he did not stating in clear details what are the commitments would be if Angus Baird and Fay Reid have been together.

In a broad sense after reading this story, the author has an expertise in writing a very straight forward poems. In fact, A.B Hashim is the only English writer from the publication of Lejen Press and since he is quite new in writing novels and poems, there are no specific evidence of any other authors are having the same point of view as him regarding the young adult love. After all, a book by Sarah Dessen entitled This Lullaby has almost the same point of view regarding the young adult love. This is somehow encouraging the idea of afraid of commitments is the fundamental of young adult love.

Stories that focus on the specific challenges of youth are sometimes referred to as problem novels or coming-of-age novels. In other words, this story is trying to highlight an issue related to social problems, which are gender, race, or class prejudice, is dramatized through its effect on the characters. This issue has been brought up by some means to challenge those young adult to prove this idea is wrong. A young adult is not always afraid of commitment, and loving based on lust. Regrettably this story has not been related to the Asian readers because the issue is centralized with a Western culture, although Angus Baird lived in Malaysia. The author could probe more on the Asian young adult love.

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18 April 2018

SNIPPET - A Review of AB Hashim's Angus, Himself

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