#ge fei

[laorientallibros]

"Memoria del Paraíso" de Ge Fei. Un kintsugi de oro (y sangre).

El kintsugi (金継ぎ) es una técnica japonesa de reparación de objetos de cerámica rotos. Su clave es que las secciones partidas del objeto se unen mediante una resina que se mezcla con polvo de oro. La idea es no negar esas fisuras, no esconderlas, darles el valor que corresponden dentro de la historia del objeto de reparado. La propuesta es noble, y triste. Rescatar un elemento herido y trabajar…

View On WordPress

[tomris-katun]

[journalofanobody]

"Heaven gives you no dead-ends."

Ge Fei, "The Invisibility Cloak

[journalofanobody]

"In a filthy, mediocre world, luck is the only religion."

-- Ge Fei "The Invisibility Cloak"

The hero of The Invisibility Cloak lives in contemporary Beijing—where everyone is doing their best to hustle up the ladder of success while shouldering an ever-growing burden of consumer goods—and he’s a loser. Well into his forties, he’s divorced (and still doting on his ex), childless, and living with his sister (her husband wants him out) in an apartment at the edge of town with a crack in the wall the wind from the north blows through while he gets by, just, by making customized old-fashioned amplifiers for the occasional rich audio-obsessive. He has contempt for his clients and contempt for himself. The only things he really likes are Beethoven and vintage speakers. Then an old friend tips him off about a special job—a little risky but just don’t ask too many questions—and can it really be that this hopeless loser wins? (Amazon)

I enjoyed this book and recommend it.

[journalofanobody]

"You should understand that nothing in this life is ever truly clear. If life is crazy, let it be crazy! If you tried to live every single detail of your life with perfect clarity, you surely wouldn't even make it through the first day. Try to be perfect, and where's the fun?"

Ge Fei, "The Invisibility Cloak"

[aether--or]

That is not to say that the language lacks distinctive characteristics, one of which I find especially interesting: the quality of time and tense. Chinese is a completely uninflected language, which means verbs do not conjugate, and nouns do not decline. Narrative time is indicated largely by the use of verbal complements, single or dual-character particles result, continuation, or other forms of change. This makes the interpretation of time highly contextual, more of a “feeling” than a direction, and this can cause real vertigo when one is working with experimental or stream-of-consciousness prose. American readers don’t like tense shifts; we equate them with bad writing. By contrast, Chinese readers are both better able to narrate the changing currents of immediacy and “pastness” and more comfortable with ambiguity, which makes their sense of narrative time much more mutable than ours.

[biblioklept]

Ge Fei’s Peach Blossom Paradise (Book acquired, 12 Nov. 2020) Ge Fei's novel Peach Blossom Paradise, translated from the Chinese by Canaan Morse, is forthcoming from. Their blurb:

[nyrbclassics]

NYRB Fall Preview 2020: NYRB Classics (October, Pt. II)

Also arriving in October are these two books, hailing from Russia and China. Nikolai Leskov—“Russia’s best-kept secret,” according to translator Donald Rayfield—wrote his strange folktales in the nineteenth century, while Ge Fei’s newly translated novel follows a woman fighting for equality in the chaotic Chinese climate of 1898.

Nikolai Leskov, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk: Selected Stories 

Nineteenth-century Russian literature abounds with gems, but none stranger than the stories of Nikolai Leskov. An inspiration for Walter Benjamin’s famous essay “The Storyteller,” Leskov’s work hews close to the old world of oral tradition. Its title story is a tale of illicit love and multiple murder that could easily find its way into a Scottish ballad.

Ge Fei, Peach Blossom Paradise

Ge Fei’s The Invisibility Cloak was a comic novel of contemporary China, but here, he turns a steely gaze to the year 1898, the country ablaze with hopes of revolution. Xiumi, a young daughter of wealthy parents who becomes a pawn in the reform efforts of several men, begins to fight the Confucian social mores that view women as property. Her campaign for change is a battle to win control of her own body—whatever the cost.