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Sales rank: 235474
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$24.50
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Reviewer #1 Rating: Summary: Winner of the coveted Novel Prize, this postmodern, first-person tale of a contemporary Taiwanese gay man reflecting on his life, loves, and intellectual influences is among the most important recent novels in Taiwan. The narrator, Xiao Shao, recollects a series of friends and lovers, as he watches his childhood friend, Ah Yao, succumb to complications from AIDS. The brute fact of Ah Yao´s death focuses Shao´s simultaneously erudite and erotic reflections magnetically on the core theme of mortality. By turns humorous and despondent, the narrator struggles to come to terms with Ah Yao´s risky lifestyle, radical political activism, and eventual death; the fragility of romantic love; the awesome power of eros; the solace of writing; the cold ennui of a younger generation enthralled only by video games; and life on the edge of mainstream Taiwanese society. His feverish journey through forests of metaphor and allusion -from Fellini and Lévi-Strauss to classical Chinese poetry -serves as a litany protecting him from the ravages of time and finitude. Impressive in scope and detail, employs the motif of its characters´ marginalized sexuality to highlight Taiwan´s vivid and fragile existence on the periphery of mainland China. Howard Goldblatt and Sylvia Li-chun Lin´s masterful translation brings Chu T´ien-wen´s lyrical and inventive pastiche of political, poetic, and sexual desire to the English-speaking world.
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Sales rank: 235474
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$24.50
|
|
Reviewer #1 Rating: Summary: Winner of the coveted Novel Prize, this postmodern, first-person tale of a contemporary Taiwanese gay man reflecting on his life, loves, and intellectual influences is among the most important recent novels in Taiwan. The narrator, Xiao Shao, recollects a series of friends and lovers, as he watches his childhood friend, Ah Yao, succumb to complications from AIDS. The brute fact of Ah Yao´s death focuses Shao´s simultaneously erudite and erotic reflections magnetically on the core theme of mortality. By turns humorous and despondent, the narrator struggles to come to terms with Ah Yao´s risky lifestyle, radical political activism, and eventual death; the fragility of romantic love; the awesome power of eros; the solace of writing; the cold ennui of a younger generation enthralled only by video games; and life on the edge of mainstream Taiwanese society. His feverish journey through forests of metaphor and allusion -from Fellini and Lévi-Strauss to classical Chinese poetry -serves as a litany protecting him from the ravages of time and finitude. Impressive in scope and detail, employs the motif of its characters´ marginalized sexuality to highlight Taiwan´s vivid and fragile existence on the periphery of mainland China. Howard Goldblatt and Sylvia Li-chun Lin´s masterful translation brings Chu T´ien-wen´s lyrical and inventive pastiche of political, poetic, and sexual desire to the English-speaking world.
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