{"id":70421,"date":"2021-07-05T01:01:40","date_gmt":"2021-07-05T05:01:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/?p=70421"},"modified":"2021-07-05T01:10:37","modified_gmt":"2021-07-05T05:10:37","slug":"i-arrogantly-recommend-by-tom-bowden-18","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/2021\/07\/05\/i-arrogantly-recommend-by-tom-bowden-18\/","title":{"rendered":"i arrogantly recommend… by Tom Bowden"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Peach Blossom Paradise<\/strong><\/a>
\nGe Fei [Canaan Morse, trans.]
\nNYRB Classics<\/p>\n

\u201cLet a thousand flowers bloom.\u201d \u2014Mao<\/p>\n

Magpie brought the cicada to the pawnshop, but the pawnbroker wouldn\u2019t take it. In fact, he wouldn\u2019t even look at it twice. He stuffed his hands in his sleeves and said dully, \u201cI know it\u2019s gold. But gold isn\u2019t worth anything when people are starving.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cA single death is a tragedy; a million deaths are a statistic.\u201d \u2014Joseph Stalin<\/p>\n

The hermit\u2019s hedgerow is like the Peach Blossom Paradise:
\nAfter these flowers blossom, no others will bloom.<\/p>\n

An old Chinese tale describes a remote spot stumbled upon by an outsider, who discovers a perfect place where all people and creatures are in harmony with each other, Peach Blossom Paradise. After his stay, he returns home, describing the paradise he discovered. Some dismiss his stories; others try but cannot again find the place described. Ge Fei weaves this tale with another search for Paradise on Earth, a pre-Maoist Communist Revolution that in part promises to liberate women from the tyranny of arranged marriages\u2014so that any man can fuck any woman he wants at any time.<\/p>\n

Xiumi, the novel\u2019s protagonist, is around 12 years old when the book starts. Her father is a government functionary, and thus part of the upper class\u2014an estate with land plowed by others and a house with live-in maids. He apparently goes mad, and just walks away from home one day, never to return. One doesn\u2019t need to know about the violent tumult across China resulting from the late-19th century Hundred Days\u2019 Reform to appreciate the shock and confusion among isolated rural communities far from any hub of reactionary or revolutionary turmoil about what is going on.<\/p>\n

By age 15, Xiumi\u2019s mother is almost out of money to run the household and sells her daughter into an arranged marriage. En route<\/em> to her fianc\u00e9\u2019s estate for the marriage, Xiumi is kidnapped and taken to an island while awaiting ransom. But neither Xiumi\u2019s mother nor her fianc\u00e9 is willing to pay her ransom, and thus the kidnappers rape and sell her off to another man. Passed among government officials and criminal kingpins, Xiumi learns ruthlessness and gains revenge. Perhaps worse, she also gains an ideology. Talk of revolution permeates the air, but when the characters in this novel ask each other what \u201crevolution\u201d means, the only working definition that they can guess at is \u201cthe ability to do whatever I want.\u201d<\/p>\n

While I was reading Xiumi\u2019s transformation into a nightmare, and understanding the forces that shaped her, I came across a review of Alex Kotlowitz’s An American Summer: Love and Death in Chicago<\/strong> in “How Can We Stop Gun Violence?<\/a>” by Francesca Mari, that focused on Kotlowitz\u2019s descriptions of a young man, Thomas, with post-traumatic stress disorder brought on by the many murders Thomas had witnessed since he was 11 years old\u2014friends, family, strangers. He is in a constant state of high-tension anger and anxiety. The only thing that quells it is violent release, which allows him to finally sleep.<\/p>\n

Xiumi\u2019s ideological vengeance\u2014her violent release\u2014ends with the death of her six-year-old son, whom she had never even bothered to name, consumed as she was by her revolutionary furor. The last quarter of the book regards Xiumi\u2019s atonement and repentance, largely by heeding Voltaire\u2019s advice to tend her own garden. A sense of redemption and grace concludes the book.<\/p>\n

Ge Fei is an excellent writer, with a talent for empathy, depth, and subtlety. This is only the second book by him recently translated into English, and it\u2019s the best novel I\u2019ve read so far this year. Translator Canaan Morse has a keen eye for key words and phrases deployed and developed throughout the novel, echoing its themes: the dangers of ideologies, the fact that ideologies are rarely women-friendly (even in the hands of women), and the need and ability to recover from ideological delusions\u2014\u201crecovery\u201d including humility and selflessness.<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a>The Invisibility Cloak<\/strong><\/a>
\nGe Fei [Canaan Morse, trans.]
\nNYRB Classics<\/p>\n

On the other side of serious historical fiction is light-hearted contemporary fiction, each skewering hypocrisies in its own way. Ge Fei, a professor of literature at Tsinghua University in Beijing, takes on (in part) capitalism at the nexus of government, commerce, and crime through the eyes of the narrator, Cui, who builds high-end stereo systems for high-end clients with no taste in music, an underlying frustration for Cui.<\/p>\n

Although his clients are wealthy, Cui is generally poor since he spends his money on high-end equipment, most of which he never uses because his apartment lacks ideal listening acoustics. As the book starts, his sister tells him he must move out (the apartment is owned by her and her husband). Challenged to raise enough money to buy a new apartment, the narrator\u2019s lifelong friend gives him the phone number of a mysterious man who wants \u201cthe best sound system in the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

The other subplot of The Invisibility Cloak<\/strong> is a search for a wife\u2014most insistently on his sister\u2019s part, far less so on Cui\u2019s, who cannot image a replacement for his beloved Yufen, who divorced him.<\/p>\n

What he needs, as his mother would put it, is a woman with \u201chatch marks.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a>Factory Summers<\/strong><\/a>
\nGuy Delisle [Helge Dasher and Rob Aspinall, trans.]
\nDrawn & Quarterly<\/p>\n

Aah, the rite of summer jobs, when school is still a part of one\u2019s life and the onset of adulthood looms ever closer. For many teens, it\u2019s an introduction to the weird world of adults (apart from one\u2019s family), whose occasional (or nonstop) pettiness has an authority ominously different from that suffered under among peers or parents: the friendly, overly-touchy mentor; the resentful coworkers (having to work only summers is a privilege).<\/p>\n

In Guy Delisle\u2019s newest graphic memoir, he details three summers he spent working in a paper mill in Montr\u00e9al, starting at age 16. The son of one of the plant\u2019s engineers, Delisle gets the gig easily enough, and immediately is challenged by the physicality of the work required during the four 12-hour shifts that make up a work week. The heat, noise, and danger contribute to the draining efforts required of the work, which includes monitoring and trouble-shooting multi-ton rollers that produce newspaper.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s an all-male environment (mono-cultural, too, it seems), where preening and posturing and physical and emotional toughness are prized. Delisle is just a kid, working a summer job, so most of the guys leave him be, letting him spend his downtime reading. (Reading is OK\u2014this is Canada, after all\u2014but weeping when Lennie is killed in Of Mice and Men<\/strong> is not.)<\/p>\n

He develops acquaintances among the workers over the years, sees the stockpile of wood for pulp diminish each year as use of recycled paper increases, sees his father at work, and uses his factory wages to pay for his art school and his factory time to motivate him to never work in a factory again.<\/p>\n

Watch: At Home with Guy Delisle<\/a><\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a>Echoes Shades<\/a><\/strong>
\nPiotr Zbierski
\nCharcoal Press<\/p>\n

\u201cI understand culture as an echo of nature, while its symbols, signs, products and rituals as shades of elements and phenomena that occur in nature.\u201d \u2014 Piotr Zbierski<\/p>\n

Photographing cultures in places as varied as Indonesia, Siberia, Africa, and Romania, Zbierski examines lives near nature\u2014traditional, oral cultures whose members live at subsistence level. This near to nature means death is close by too, as whimsical as it is final. Ritual and spirit worship give cohesion to death\u2019s arbitrary but inevitable appearance. Zbierski\u2019s black and white photographs capture some of the energy motivating these lives, from simple point-and-shoot documentation to disorienting presentations of the ordinary, each shot a synecdoche of the broader community and its harmonies.<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a>Permafrost<\/strong><\/a>
\nEva Baltasar [Julia Sanches, trans.]
\nAnd Other Stories<\/p>\n

Getting a job after someone\u2019s put in a good word for you must be the closest thing to falling in love. You settle into a weightlessness that is for a while deeply pleasing, as though your life\u2019s been whisked down a tree-lined promenade that crests at a bridge over still water. As you gaze at green mallards and their single-parent families, you let go. It\u2019s so painless at the end of the day. And there\u2019s so much beauty, born again in your own face, permeating the friendly halves of other people. Your senses are honed. You rediscover the sun, whose light shines all around you and falls over exteriors like geometric shapes at rest. I don\u2019t see how this state of being can be normal. If it were I might not be so shocked by everyone\u2019s eagerness to go on living day after day.<\/p>\n

The lesbian narrator of this wry novel accepts her sexual desires but not the heteronormative social norms that paired relationships tend to imply for her\u2014marriage, children, a home. Or, perhaps not \u201cheteronormative social norms\u201d but \u201ccontrolling mom norms\u201d: \u201cOne summer, we couldn\u2019t go away on vacation because your university fees went up.\u201d \u201cThe summer we couldn\u2019t go on holiday because you needed braces.\u201d \u201cI still remember that summer when we couldn\u2019t get away because your glasses broke and you needed a new pair.\u201d \u201cAnd what about that summer when we didn\u2019t move house so that you could take a two-week intensive tennis course?\u201d Et cetera.<\/p>\n

As a result, the narrator is horny but cold to intimate trust, intelligent but directionless, open to new experience but prone to suicide. If the first three-quarters of the book could be said to be the case for her life\u2019s uselessness\u2014and thus her icy indifference to much of it\u2014the last quarter of it is her reaction to having her bluff called.<\/p>\n

\u201cFamilies huddle like villages under siege. But the savagery that stalks and besieges us\u2014is life.\u201d<\/p>\n

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