I’m continuing the theme of #ReadIndies and the Far East, with two more books from independent publishers and from my favourite part of the world. They couldn’t be more different in style and subject matter, but both are by women authors and deserving of your time.
Qiu Miaojin: Last Words from Montmartre, transl. Ari Larissa Heinrich, NYRB, 2014
This book is one long cry of anguish, a passionate outburst of love declarations but also rancour at the end of a love affair, an acknowledgement of one’s own mistakes but also full of wonder and resentment. A living, breathing contradiction, a love letter and a suicide note (or rather twenty of them, which the author claims can be read in any order). The breathless, feverish quality of this work reminded me of Rilke’s beautiful translation of Letters of a Portuguese Nun, which I read in my early teens. These 16th century love letters (now widely believed to be fictional) were incredibly influential on the epistolary novels that followed and on the Romantic movement.
Perhaps Qiu intended this to be fiction too, and she certainly plays around with different characters and points of view (the letters are not just written by one character nor addressed to just one character), but the fact that the author committed suicide shortly after finishing this novel (which was published posthumously) makes this impossible to read without bearing that in mind.
In the very comprehensive and helpful translator’s afterword, we find out more about Qiu Miaojin, who was considered a bit of a prodigy in Taiwanese literature and a cult figure in queer literature, with her early success Notes of a Crocodile, about life as a lesbian university student and a crocodile who has to hide his/her true nature from society. The author then went to Paris for further studies in clinical psychology and feminism – but also immersed herself in art, literature and films. So it’s not just Montmartre as a location that appears in this work, but also numerous references to French and other Western culture, to Angelopoulos and Tarkovsky, to Western philosophers, and also Japanese authors she revered like Mishima and Dazai Osamu.
I’ll leave you with a few quotes to give you an idea of the style. It is so anguished and painfully raw and honest (ugly with feelings of violence towards the other but also guilty self-flagellation) that I could only read one letter at a time. It was the kind of book that left me giving a huge sigh of relief that I survived it – but in a good way. I dread to think what impact it might have had on a more vulnerable teenage me. And yet there is something so universal and beautiful in the way she describes love and hurt – albeit toxic love. This would have been a better reinterpretation perhaps of Wuthering Heights…
I love her like this not because she is perfect or possesses certain qualities well-suited for me: in other people’s eyes she is possibly just an ordinary girl. I love her like this because my desire matured for her. Yes, this is a milestone in my life that can never be erased.
I suppose my words here are a final attempt to forgive Zu. If this fails, I can’t keep living in a body that hates her so intensely. I’ll have to die, as a final act of reconiciliation for being alive, a reconciliation of my deepest love and hate intertwined. And a reconciliation with her being alive. My death will remind her of the seriousness and sincerity of life itself. There will be nor more problem of forgiveness; a place will remain as the foundation of our love.
I hate my personality, hate that I’m too passionate and ‘active’; and I hate that I long for you and need you too much… I hate that my passion makes me sick and that it becomes so easy for me to injure myself, hate that I suffer so easily, hate that my excessive neediness causes you to worry causes you to suffocate causes you to feel oppressed…
Bora Chung: Your Utopia, transl. Anton Hur, Honford Star, 2024
If you have read the previous collection of short stories by Bora Chung, the International Booker shortlisted Cursed Bunny, this collection is rather different: less wild surrealism and horror, instead more science fiction with real-life adjacent scenarios. What remains constant in her work, however, is her social critique and empathy for ‘the little people’ who toil away without much recompense to make a society wealthy and successful. Bora Chung is a committed activist in real life (and she writes about this in the afterword), and I did feel that occasionally the stories veer a little too much into blunt messaging territory. So overall I would say this story collection is less metaphorical and surprising than Cursed Bunny.
Some of the stories start off innocently enough, as if they were set in a world very similar to the one we know. The Center for Immortality Research sounds like any other office environment we know, with job title inflations, endless meetings, shuffling around of papers and changing corporate wording so many times that it loses all meaning. It’s a humorous piece about dysfunctional workplaces, except that it’s a Huis Clos scenario (hope I’m not giving too much away). A Very Ordinary Marriage starts off as a story about a husband who is suspicious about the phone calls his wife makes at odd times at night, but then turns out to be something considerably stranger than an extramarital affair. To Meet Her might be describing a typical fan meeting with a celebrity, albeit one who survived a terrorist attack a few years earlier.
The End of the Voyage appears more straightforwardly sci-fi (and is the one closest to horror, although there is nothing too gory in this book): set on a spaceship that is navigating somewhere far from Earth to try and find a solution or a cure or simply to outstay a deadly Disease that has attacked humans on Earth, turning them into cannibals. Maria, Gratia Plena is set in a hospital, but humans are now capable of scanning the memories of patients in a coma – and do so under the pretext that they might be able to uncover some criminal activities, while the professional scanner is disturbed and ultimately moved by what she sees in the woman’s past, whether real or imagined. Seed is a great little revenge story – or an ecological one, depending how you choose to look at it. But it’s the two stories narrated by machines – a car in Your Utopia and a lift in a residential building in A Song for Sleep – that struck me most. In our world today, when we are starting to fear and resent AI and robots, these stories try to demonstrate that sometimes the machines can develop more empathy than most humans.
Just listing the vague content of each story doesn’t give you a feel for things, obviously. Let me add that all this is done in a deceptively cool, detached tone (the polar opposite of Qiu’s impassioned one): the message and the style of delivery seem deliberately at odds with each other, and in this case it works perfectly. It’s a tricky style to pull off, particularly in translation: it can sound too impersonal or cold, or just plain flat, but I think Bora and Anton have created a formidable writer/translator combo. They really seem to ‘get’ each other and be able to play with the readers’ expectations, create something that seems light-hearted or plain at first glimpse, and then hits you with the full impact. Perhaps because Bora is a translator herself and because Anton also writes science-fiction tinged fiction, but it certainly works.
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