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Chu, T’ien-wen Notes of a Desolate Man ISBN 13: 9780231116084

Notes of a Desolate Man - Hardcover

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9780231116084: Notes of a Desolate Man

Synopsis

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 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.

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About the Author

Howard Goldblatt, a Guggenheim Fellow, is an internationally renowned translator of Chinese fiction, including the novels of Mo Yan, the 2012 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

From the Back Cover

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 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 Levi-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 Lichun 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.

Reviews

Awarded the China Times Prize in 1994, this postmodern Taiwanese novel is a poetic, philosophical account of a friendship between two gay men, and the painful, bright reminiscences left over for one, Xiao Shao, when the other, Ah Yao, dies of AIDS in a Tokyo hospital. The story invokes meditations on the experience of being gay, loving, promiscuous and loyal within Taiwan's cultural constructs. Xiao's attitude toward life and love is melancholy, respectful and intellectual, in contrast to Ah Yao, who embraced the radical Act-Up political theater while saving his most violent anger for his mother. Xiao at one point contemplates marrying his sister's friend, but realizes his folly. At age 40, he thinks of himself as an old crocodile. Some of the funnier moments in the tale center around the assortment of New Age and traditional remedies he and his friends use to fight baldness, wrinkles and middle-age spread. Xiao, for all his dissatisfied longing, has a lover of seven years, Yongjie, a cinematographer, and Xiao is both detached and worshipful of his partner, knowing "it was invariably during my happiest moments that I felt the inconstancy of life." When Yongjie leaves to work in southwest China, Xiao nearly picks up a young man he dubs Fido, providing more opportunities for his inevitable comparison of beautiful youth with withered 40-year-olds. Xiao would be irritating if he merely repined for his golden years, but, in scholarly fashion, he mixes in apt commentary by such diverse sources as Michael Jackson, Levi-Strauss and Michel Foucault. The book ends on a note of uncertain piety, with Xiao making a pilgrimage to the Ganges. Chu T'ien-wen, acclaimed author of 15 books, skillfully weaves recent Taiwanese history into her narrative, from Chiang Kai-shek's time to the present, inserting a well-balanced note of reality into Xiao's often willful sentimentality. (June)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Notes Of A Desolate Man ($19.95; Jun. 17; 169 pp.; 0-231-11608-X): Extended ruminations on gay narrator Xiao Shao's literary, philosophical, and cinematic heroes and touchstones (Goethe, Montaigne, Levi-Strauss, Fellini, et al.) deaden the potential impact of this 1994 winner of the China Times Novel Prize. Ostensibly concerned with Xiao Shao's hard-won acceptance of his homosexuality, Chus earnest fiction does not in fact sufficiently emphasize its protagonist's candid contrast of his own timidity to the bolder life led by his friend (and former lover) Ah Yao, an extrovert and social activist whose death from AIDS seems simultaneously to raise Xiao Shao's consciousness and to drive him deeper into his self-protective shell. Perhaps that's the point, but it isn't convincingly dramatized in this never uninteresting but punishingly discursive and slow-moving fiction. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

The narrator of this dense, intellectual Taiwanese novel is Shao, a well-educated homosexual man of 40 who has recently lost his dearest friend, Ah Yao, to AIDS. His way of coping, of assuring himself of the reality of his life, is to write about it. Narratively, he proceeds not in a straight line but in abrupt shifts reminiscent of the jump-cut technique of one of his and Ah Yao's shared passions, cinema. Substantive discussions of the Japanese director Ozu and the Italian Fellini as well as intelligent comments about several other filmmakers are integral to the novel, as are considerations of Foucault, Levi-Strauss, and Buddhism. Reflecting Shao's and Ah Yao's cosmopolitan interests, both were well traveled, as is Yongjie, Shao's lover, who works on documentary films and whom Shao is desperately afraid of losing. That desperation is part of Shao's sense of deracination: homosexuals have no homeland, he says, and, implicatively, only one another to anchor their lives. It takes little stretching to see in his complaint a metaphor for the uneasiness of Taiwan vis-a-vis mainland China. Ah Yao's heritage is Japanese, which accentuates the metaphor, as does Shao's refusal to visit the mainland. More ambitious, intelligent, and intense than the preponderance of Western gay novels, this Chinese example is also intriguing because its author is a woman. Ray Olson

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