Ge Fei

I am so very confused about everything I have read or heard about his novella...and the novella itself, but I absolutely loved it!

Normally when I feel like I have read a different book to everyone else, it's because I has a bad time, but in this instance I had a wonderful experience I just don't think so many of the words applied to this story relate to it and/ or my experience with it.

Hero? The protagonist is a fascinating, but contemptuous arsehole.
Comic? I mean, it's amusing, but it doesn't seem explicitly comedic. It's at least as tragic as it is comic, probably a lot more.
Surreal/ Irreality/ Magic Realism? Am I missing something? I love and read a lot of works these labels apply to, but I don't see how they apply here. Is it really because China, but capitalist, because, if that's the case, what we call reality must blow a lot of people's minds.

I'm truly scratching my head. I'm so confused.

Regardless, I found this an incredibly entertaining and wonderfully written tale of failed love and bungling through life on the edge. There are definitely elements that reminded me of High Fidelity, with the focus on the audio equipment, rather than the music itsel, but this was very much it's own thing and less about pandering to the frail male ego, I think. Both protagonists have a rather deplorable and entitled view on women, but I think we're supposed to see that as more of a negative here, maybe?

Definitely made me excited to read more Ge Fei.… (more)

4.5 stars (may change to 5 stars later? Must think about it)

This novel is a retelling of the Peach Blossom Spring myth/fable, but placing the events in the late 19th/early 20th century, around the rebellions and fall of the last Chinese dynasty. I did a fair amount of googling and found a short translation of the myth. I would love to discuss how this is a retelling (I have thoughts but could be totally wrong)--also, how does [book:The Peach Blossom Fan|22748019] fit into this tradition?
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But this book. I loved it. It is the first in a trilogy and I want to read the rest but they are not out in English. This is a family/town saga, a look at revolutionaries and revolutions, a look at women of different classes. It is modern, but the storytelling (or maybe it's the translations?) have echoes of the storytelling in the Chinese classics [book:The Water Margin|552988] and [book:Monkey: The Journey to the West|100237].

Here, though, the main character is a woman. Around 14 when the story begins, Lu Xiumi is the only child of landowners. She has a tutor (she is the only girl in class), her best friend is her household's youngest servant. We meet her neighbors, parents, servants, and other residents of Puji. On the way to her wedding, the caravan in attacked and she is kidnapped by bandits--setting her life on a very different trajectory.

The author also has asides in the story (here presented as footnotes) that imply the characters were real people. They were not--at least per google. But I wonder how many of those asides will come to play in the next 2 novels in the trilogy?… (more)

An easy little slice-of-life novel, with an understated style and a straightforward plot. Cui is a nerdy audiophile engineer who lives at his sister's house in Beijing while he deals with the emotional fallout from his divorce, trying to make a big enough sale to get out of her house while dodging her attempts to set him up with new girls. The desire of someone who feels trapped to escape by making one last big score is perfectly relatable, but if I could sum it up in a phrase, the novel is really about how tenuous your sense of place in the world can be; your relationships, your personal history, your job, where you live, everything. You thought you had a solid marriage and then surprise!; you thought you had a stable living environment and then your sister says take a hike; you thought you could count on your friend until friendship becomes a one-way street; you thought that you were a part of a certain kind of society but then "all that is solid melts into air", in the famous phrase.

To that end, there are constant reminders of how social mores shifted from Communist solidarity to capitalist individualism in the post-Xiaoping era, along the lines of "we used to be poor, but at least we were all poor together!", so this is one of those novels where a book jacket-type description like "explores the changes that wealth has brought to Chinese society" is perfectly appropriate. A Westerner might satirize this view as "under Communism you were guaranteed nothing, but at least you were guaranteed!", but many Chinese really do have nostalgia for those days, as weird as that might seem. Part of that might be due to the intellectual class that Fei spends some time skewering. There's plenty of intellectuals droning on about the proper evaluation of historical figures like the Dowager Empress; Fei obviously doesn't trust their abilities to lead the country, although it's not clear what he does trust. This is also a fun read from an audiophile perspective: poor Cui puts all this work into building top-of-the-line audio rigs for rich idiots who only listen to garbage instead of the pieces he likes, and I recommend listening to all the music mentioned in the book. Even if you don't think that a traditional Chinese opera titled "The Red Detachment of Women" is up your alley (and it is not always an easy listen), often Fei/Cui's selections are excellent.… (more)