India, Aug. 21 -- In the introduction to Michel Foucault's collection of essays, Power, Colin Gordon invokes the author's submissions from Discourse and Truth: The Problematisation of Parrhesia. He notes that the "function of 'truth telling'", which in all its complexity is an "endless work", can neither "take the form of a law" nor can it come from one source alone. In today's world, when truth and facts can be made up, fiction seems to be a fertile ground to tell the subverted truth. Taiwan-born Malaysian writer Tash Aw has been making effective use of it.

Making connections between historical memory and truth, exploring the relationship between power and knowledge that Foucault notes, Aw has been spinning stories that make characters ...