Any prowess I thought I had in navigating the farther reaches of I dunno consciousness, shall we call it Past the safe zones and into the lawless.
. . Nothing. I'm a novice. Can Xue is extraordinary and I am in awe,
This may not stand out in my memory in the same way as some of her other writing, This book is more like entering a fog, existing in the fog, experiencing the gradual and transient awarenesses as dense and as intangible as a fog.
. . My mind is a more familiar place when I'm midway through a Can Xue book, I see things that I'd previously not thought to notice, but that were there all along, The wild isn't tamed I just remember that I'm wild, Viena no grāmatām, kas jāpārlasa, lai kaut sāktu aptvert, kas īsti bija tas sirreālistiskais dzīvnieku, dziņu, sapņu un asiņu mikslis.
Mani ļoti pieķēra, jo atradu sevī iekārienu brist un plūst cauri tiem dažkārtējiem
džungļiem, Calling The Last Lover difficult is an understatement the plot surreally drifted in and out of my comprehension and there were many occasions where I was just reading to move forward, unsure of what Can Xue was writing or how and why it mattered to the story.
And yet, as translated by Annelise Finegan Wasmoen, it is an excellent piece of literature, The translation read smoothly and stood out by leaving the Chinese onomatopoeia untranslated, giving Can Xue's world a slight twist, a feeling of uncanniness, this pervades the novel with visions of snakes and wasps, otherworldly earthquakes and mazes of stories.
Reading much like a combination of Murakami and Kafka, The Last Lover is filled with allusions to reading how Joe, one of the main characters, transforms his reality into one connected story is a central component of the novel.
Parts of the novel stand out as intriguing pieces of writing, the vivid imagery and cryptic words creating a powerful sense of atmosphere much more of the novel feels impenetrable.
Can Xue has chastised her readers beforehand for being too ignorant for her works, for not reading the books on a deep enough level.
I must confess I have failed her reading The Last Lover, As much as I wanted to enjoy and experience it, much of the time, I felt like only sheer perseverance would let me finish.
The Last Lover, written by Can Xue and translated into English by Annelise Finegan, won the prestigious Best Translated Book Award for, as well as being longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the National Translation Award.
The initial set up and cast of characters is relatively straightforward, Joe is a salesman at the Rose Clothing Company in country A in the west, We are quickly introduced, in the firstpages, to his wife Maria and their son Daniel, his boss Vincent and his wife Lisa, one of Joe's key customers Reagan, a rubber plantation owner, and his employee Ida seemingly a Filipino although her nationality is only alluded to.
Joe is an avid reader:
"Since the previous year Joe had been envisaging a magnificent plan: to reread all the novels and stories he'd ever read in his life, so that the stories would be connected together.
That way, he could simply pick up any book and move without interruption from one story to another, And he himself would be drawn into it, until the outer world wouldn't be able to disturb him, . .
he always started right in on the first page of a book, and then slowly entered into its web, Often the story's background was one he developed for himself, Or perhaps it was all in his imagination, Invariably as he reached the middle of the book, he began to suspect that the sentences were jumping from his head onto the page.
Otherwise why was it that when he assumed the story was set in Mongolia, the hunters wearing short gowns in the beginning section all began wearing long robes"
And this is where Can Xue quickly takes the novel into a whole different dimension Joe's reading, his dreams and his fantasies start to merge with his real life, and the dreams, fantasies and life of the other characters.
There is a linear progression to the novel of sorts a form of dream quest but characters appear, disappear and morph seemingly at random, with various recurring motifs and background characters such as a mysterious blackclad Eastern woman West meets East is one key theme, wolf cubs, wasps, drippingwet crows and cats.
Literary comparisons are difficult, From modern literature the nearest I can come is Murakami's Wild Sheep Chase meets Ishiguro's Unconsoled, and from classical literature Calvino, Bruno Schulz, Borges, Dante and Kafka who the author acknowledges as influences "My literary works are the same as theirs: every piece has a solution, a taut emotional logic", interview in Bomb sitelink org/article/ . She also acknowledges Shakespeare, Cervantes, Goethe, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and the Bible,
The characters are all on a journey of sorts indeed over time most seem to join in the "long march", which starts as Lisa's private reverie:
"When Lisa was young, no one foresaw that the scarletcheeked, incredibly driven young woman would be one for reverie.
. . But there truly was a reverie that belonged to her, Every day it took place at a set time in the middle of the night, a secret of which no one was aware.
Every night after midnight, at the time of utter silence, a few strange people assembled at the walls of her bedroom and discussed the long march.
. . observing the shades assembled at the wall, with their unchanging, conspiratorial air, listening attentively to those tedious, nervous dialogues, and imagining the army's march through that endless hell, year after year, Lisa came little by little to understand that the long march was not another's, it was related only to her own life, something she should do her utmost to forget, but was also a deep thought destined to be inscribed on her heart.
"
Sometimes the stories form memorable vignettes e, g. a visit to a rural mysterious village where the inhabitants have taken up an unusual form of agriculture farming tortoises who live in jars:
"At first they ran into the village in packs, jumped into our jars, and sat there without moving.
Then, later on, we domesticated them, . . Before this, we planted rice paddies for our livelihood, After the tortoises came, no one planted any more, . . For a long time now they haven't eaten anything, . . Just think, you wouldn't want to run a business that required no investment You only have to change the water once a day! And a tortoise sells foryuan.
As each day lengthens the people of the village becomes more like tortoises, You didn't meet anyone on the road coming in, did you It's because they were all lying down inside their houses, "
At other times, the reader simply has to go with the flow, Towards the novel's end Joe travel to C a country which seems to resemble but which isn't China since China is separately referred to by name, presumably instead a China of his own invention.
He has been attacked by one of the frequently reoccuring wasps, and overhears a conversation between the flight attendant and a reappearance of the mysterious woman in black:
"Once people are out of the cabin the freezing wind will bite their faces," the attendant said.
"I got used to it a long time ago, Every morning I draw water at the side of the brook," the woman said, "At noon, the grass bakes in the sun, and Mother speaks to me from the balcony, She asks me whether I want a drink of milk, "
"You see this man, his face is swelling so terribly, ". The flight attendant pointed to Joe,
He wanted to move his lips into a smile, but they wouldn't move,
"His wife is a woman named Mei," the blackclad woman said, indicating him, "This morning, at home, she saw a wolf, It bit her clothing and would not let go, She grew agitated and cried out, "
Joe didn't understand what she was saying,
The reader can only sympathise with Joe whose wife incidentally isn't named Mei reading the paragraph in context makes little more sense.
The translation manages brilliantly both to make the text highly readable but retain the dream like air, One interesting decision by Annelise Finegan in this regard was to choose not to translate, but simply phonically transcribe into English, the many Chinese onomatopoeias that Can Xue uses, such as "weng weng" for a wasp's buzz, "wang wang" for a dog's bark, "pu tong, pu pong" for a parrot's flapping wings, "zhi ya" for a door opening, "hua hua" for pebbles rubbing together.
And Can Xue's themes are clearly powerful much more so that for example Murakami and seem to include:
the art of reading and taking reading to a new level where the reader opens his or her soul to the text
the relationship between the East and West and how each represents a sort of fantasy of the others
the relationship between husband and wife and the extent to which they can ever fully understand each other
"Sometimes the people one meets by chance were already by one's side"
memory vs.
fantasy
"What do you think, what is this memory then, after all"
"Memory is the things people think up, " Ida spoke too freely.
But I came away feeling than I as a reader hadn't quite measured up, Indeed the author herself sets the bar for the reader rather high from the same Bomb Magazine interview:
"Reading my fiction requires a certain creativity.
This particular way of reading has to be more than just gazing at the accepted meanings of the text on a literal level, because you are reading messages sent out by the soul, and your reading is awakening your soul into communication with the author's.
. . Most of my readers stop at the level of “dream reading,” which is still a conventional way of reading, "
For a review by a reader who managed to move beyond dream reading, I would commend:
sitelink musicandliterature. org/fea
.