#yan ge

[caribeandthebooks]

Caribe's Fantasy TBR - Part 6

[virgilean]

Strange Beasts of China by Yan Ge

“Humans possess intellect, and claim the knowledge of the ages. They take neither sorrow nor joy from material gain or personal loss. Thus their existence is more difficult than necessary, as they strive too hard for cleverness, and push away from the heart. The fugitives fear capture, and the captured fear escape. They live out their days in uncertainty. What good fortune for the beasts, to lack intelligence; how cursed humans are, that they possess it.”

[smokefalls]

Our lives exist on the constant movement of atoms and subatomic particles. And our thoughts are trapped within the structures of language. I’m baffled both by the profundity of the former and the limitations of the latter. And the distance between them makes me feel sick every time I think about it.

Yan Ge, "No Time to Write" from Elsewhere

[heavenlyyshecomes]

For a whole month, a blank space ran where my newspaper column should have been. My phone stayed off, and I refused to see anyone. Let me vanish from the world. Only when it got dark enough for the trees to melt into the gloom would I return home, stumbling alone into the lift. Sometimes there’d be a few letters waiting for me, sometimes nothing at all. I’d sit by the window staring into the empty air all night, slipping into sleep at dawn. I never dreamed.

—Yan Ge, Strange Beasts of China tr. Jeremy Tiang

[dk-thrive]

To a certain extent, everybody in my life, the ones I deeply love and the ones I pass by on the street, is the same. We are objects in this universe, confined by our epistemological limits. We brush against one another for an exceedingly short moment and drift apart. We will never be able to understand ourselves, let alone one another. I bow down to the sublimity of the impossible.

— Yan Ge, “No Time to Write” from Elsewhere (Faber, 2023)

[mschocolateworld]

Boję się samotności, ale kiedy już jestem w związku, stwierdzam, że jednak lepiej jest cierpieć samotnie.

Yan Ge - “Kroniki dziwnych bestii”

[godzilla-reads]

✨ Books I’m Looking Forward To Reading ✨

📚 World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments by Aimee Nezhukumatahil

📚 The Wedding Party by Liu Xinwu (trans. Jeremy Tiang)

📚 Tooth and Claw by Jo Walton

📚 Strange Beasts of China by Yan Ge (trans. Jeremy Tiang)

📚 Under the Whispering Door by TJ Klune

📚 A Hero Born by Jin Yong (trans. Anna Holmwood)

[tigger8900]

Strange Beasts of China, by Yan Ge and translated by Jeremy Tiang

⭐⭐⭐⭐

In the fictional Chinese city of Yong'an, mysterious beasts live, work, suffer, and love alongside the human population. An amateur cryptozoologist seeks to record these beasts in nine separate, yet linked, stories. Along the way she delves into the mysterious histories surrounding the beasts, the ways they've been exploited to benefit humankind, and ultimately humanity's deepest secrets.

This book is a strange — but not unsuccessful — hybrid of short story collection and novel. Each chapter stands well on its own, and the first few especially could easily be read out of order. But as the story develops, each chapter builds on what came before, and by the end the reader is expected to draw on a full knowledge of the story to comprehend the whole. In addition, each chapter is bookended by bestiary-inspired text, first introducing and then concluding the species of beast that particular chapter concerns itself with. Despite my initial confusion as to what type of book I held in my hands, I wound up enjoying the unique format, particularly the way the closing bestiary entry would tie the chapter together so matter-of-factly.

The beasts themselves were often used as a mirror to focus the reader's attention on a troubling aspect of human society or behavior. I was strongly reminded of a manga series I'd enjoyed as a teen, Pet Shop of Horrors by Matsuri Akino. It's not that the story is that similar — for one, the horror elements in Strange Beasts are much lower-key — but I feel like it carried some similar themes at its heart, in terms of commentary on society. I want to write about my favorite chapters and why I liked them, but all of my favorite parts were the bitter twists in the story, things I can't allude to without spoiling them. There is more to it than what I can say here, though. The story evolves and deepens as the chapters go on, uncovering a situation far more complex than it first appears to be.

However, for as much detail as she gave the beasts and societal structures, the day-to-day details of the shops, transit, bars, and so on are left incredibly vague. I found this to be frustrating, feeling as if gaps had been left for the reader to connect the fictional world to the real world. But as I'm not from China, I struggled to know what real-world defaults to fill those gaps with. I'm also not sure if it was an issue in translation or the way the character was originally written, but I didn't find the protagonist to be very pleasant. She was constantly playing social games with people, saying only no-no-no while expecting to be begged around to a yes. I have no patience for this in my life, and as the story went on it began to grate on me in fiction as well. But as I said, this might be something culturally that did not translate.

Speaking of cultural issues, there's one chapter that I feel needs a specific content warning. The depiction of Prime Beasts in Chapter 8 may be disturbing to some readers, due to the beasts being described as dark-skinned and possessing several traits stereotypically associated with real-world Black populations in western society. I doubt it was deliberate due to the author being Chinese and none of the other beasts being ethnicity-coded that I noticed, but it was enough to make me do a double-take. While it's not really fair to hold an author accountable for cultural readings outside of her own culture, that doesn't mean such content won't disturb an unaware reader. So, be aware if that's something that might bother you. Unfortunately, that one's probably not a skipable chapter.