Notes of a Desolate Man - Softcover

Chu T'ien-wen; Howard Goldblatt; Sylvia Lichun Lin; Sylvia Li-Chun Lin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0231116098 ISBN 13: 9780231116091

Publisher: Columbia University Press, 2000

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.

About this title

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

In this postmodern tale of a Taiwanese gay man reflecting on his life, loves, and intellectual influences, the narrator, 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. 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.

Edition details

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0231116098
• ISBN 13: 9780231116091
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 184