Title: Confessions of an Old Boy - The Dato' Hamid Adventures
Author: Kam Raslan
Price: RM 32.00
Go get this book!
This is a hilarious memoir of a retired civil servant, born and bred with colonial mindset. Dato Hamid recounts episodes of his long and blessed life through a series of short adventures.
He reminisces finding true love in ‘Dato in Love’ - the irony of this chapter is a-ma-zing. Dato then reflects on his young and dumb days (don’t we all have this black episode in life!) in ‘Beat Generation’.
Dato Hamid muses over his brief sojourn into making pocket money the civil servant way in ‘Ariff and Capitalism’. This is not one of my favorite adventures, possibly because it is less humorous and more real.
Then there’s the Dato’s foray into murder and mystery in ‘Murder in Parit Chindai’. I love this adventure, it’s a great suspense story made impossibly droll with the Dato’s distinct character deficiencies. Dato Hamid deserves the anti-hero of the year award for his spineless passivity in this mystery.
There are a few other adventures in this hysterical collection. Pick up the book in your local bookstore and read the first few pages – I guarantee you will most probably buy the book after that. Oh, and did I mention that Dato Hamid is purely fictional? You’ll never guess otherwise.
How much you enjoy this book will be proportionate to how truly Malaysian* you are.
Read Teddy's review here.
Read Sharon's review here.
* does not apply to Mat Rempits and its-my-duty-to-protest-against-Lina-Joy types, of course. Of course!
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