Notes of a Desolate Man
by T'ien-wen Chu
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Description
Winner of the coveted China Times 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 show more 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, Notes of a Desolate Man 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. show lessTags
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Member Reviews
I really had to push my way through this novel, narratived by a Taiwanese gay man while his lover succumbs to AIDS. I'm not sure why it was so difficult for me. It is well-wrtten, certainly, and uses a provocative structure where the past is woven into the present, but for some reason it didn't easily hold my attention after about the first third of the text.
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Around the World in 80 Books
79 works; 4 members
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Author Information
11+ Works 109 Members
Awards and Honors
Awards
Series
Belongs to Publisher Series
Common Knowledge
- Original publication date
- 1994
Classifications
- Genres
- Fiction and Literature, General Fiction, LGBTQ+
- DDC/MDS
- 895.1352 — Literature & rhetoric Literatures of other languages Literatures of East and Southeast Asia Chinese Chinese fiction Modern period 1912–2010 1949–2010
- LCC
- PL2852 .T48 .H9313 — Language and Literature Languages and literatures of Eastern Asia, Africa, Oceania Languages of Eastern Asia, Africa, Oceania Chinese language and literature Chinese literature Individual authors and works
- BISAC
Statistics
- Members
- 97
- Popularity
- 330,648
- Reviews
- 1
- Rating
- (3.22)
- Languages
- Chinese, English
- Media
- Paper
- ISBNs
- 5
- ASINs
- 2
