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 show more 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. show less

Tales of utopias are often written in times of upheaval. Back in 421 CE, the Jin dynasty faced just such a time. That was when Tao Yanming wrote his story of a fisherman sailing upstream into a forest blanketed in peach blossoms. He found a village full of happy people, there since unrest in a previous dynasty six hundred years ago. They attributed their happiness in part to not having any contact with those outside, people who might upset their carefully constructed utopia. The fisherman show more left after a week. No one was ever able to find this paradise again.

This idyllic village at first seems to be like Puji, the location of Peach Blossom Paradise However, there the village leader walked out of his house one day, never to be seen again. So begins the unravelling of his family and village in the time of yet another dynastic upheaval in China, the Hundred Days Reform movement of 1898, implemented by the Emperor to shore up the increasingly unpopular Qing dynasty. That movement failed, the Guangxu Emperor was placed under house arrest, and the Empress Dowager Cixi returned to power once more. China embarked on decades of upheaval.

Still, reformers never give up. Strange comings and goings started in Puji, observed by the young Xiumi, daughter of the lost leader. Xiumi had had a very proper upbringing, as befitted a girl of her status, and in her innocence things were not always clear to her. Why did her father put such importance on his Peach Blossom Spring painting? Who was the young man who now came and went from father’s study, sometimes disappearing for days? Why were soldiers seen on the road past the village?

Xiumi was married off by her mother. Things went awry from the beginning, with her kidnapping on her way to her new home. What happened to her then reveals the terrible and all too common treatment of women in China at that time. Eventually she wound up in a village where the remains of a previous utopian vision had been put into practise. This inspiration combined with study created a desire in her to seek that elusive utopian state.

Ge Fei uses symbolism in his novel, from the peach blossoms representing immortality and lost paradise, to the pear blossoms Xiumi loves, representing hope and new beginnings. There are references to real people as well as fictional people and events forming part of the novel, but which appear to have verisimilitude by his use of incorporated footnotes, explaining their roles.

Ge Fei has cited the influence of Faulkner and Borges on his writing, and it is evident here. There is an air of dreamlike unreality to the peaceful times, periods in which time itself seems to stand still. These are balanced by the stark and raw events of the upheavals in Xiumi’s world and the world around her.

One of the questions here, is whether the struggle for a utopian society is worth it. Whether Ge Fei writing a novel about that earlier struggle from 1898, or more recent struggles is for the reader to decide.

This is the first book in a trilogy. Unfortunately there does not appear to be a translation into English of the second and third volumes. I’ll certainly be reading them when they appear. show less

This was indeed slightly surreal. A Beijing audiophile limps from commission to commision, navigating poverty as he builds high-end, high-quality sound systems for various wealthy amateurs. His wife has divorced him after her infidelities, his sister is ejecting him from her spare flat, his only friend is increasingly remote, and his work assignments are unavoidably drying up. And then a final, all-in job presents itself, for a shadowy, instinctively unpleasant client.

The surreal tone of show more the novel is due to characters’ unexplained motivations, inscrutable inner worlds that have become inaccessible due to social distancing and a distinct dispreference for really getting to know their fellow human beings. There’s no magical realism, just alienation, but that is surreal enough.

This may sound weird (and potentially off-putting), but The invisibility cloak felt to me as a successful version of Tommy Wiseau’s The room -- if that film had been competent, insightful, professional and emotionally intelligent. As in The room, the main character is a forty-something semi-recluse who is betrayed by his wife, his family and his friends while he does not understand why. But whereas Wiseau’s version is just some emotionally stunted weirdo’s transparently self-aggrandizing martyrdom whose preferred method of audience interaction is cheap melodrama, Fei’s short novel is thoughtful, full of empathy, well done, doesn’t overstay its welcome, and knows exactly how far it can push its premise. There’s a lovely idea at the centre of the book, namely that using alienation itself as a good-enough counter to alienation, and it ties the whole thing together beautifully. show less

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 show more 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? show less