The Last Lover (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)
Book Information
- Publisher
- Yale University Press
- Published
- 2014-07-29
- Pages
- 336 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 19.3 x 12.95 x 2.79 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9780274747603
- ISBN-10
- 0300153325
- Price
- 3489 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Mystery & Thrillers/Thrillers/Psychological & Suspense
From the sensational Chinese author who has been called “a new world master,” a Kafkaesque novel set in a fictional Western nation Winner of the 2015 Best Translated Book Award for fiction, presented by Three Percent, a resource for international literature “[A] mind-bending novel. . . . Xue succeeds in creating a unique, immersive, tale of ‘intersecting dreamworlds.’”— Publishers Weekly In Can Xue’s extraordinary book, we encounter a full assemblage of husbands, wives, and lovers. Entwined in complicated, often tortuous relationships, these characters step into each other’s fantasies, carrying on conversations that are “forever guessing games.” Their journeys reveal the deepest realms of human desire, figured in Can Xue’s vision of snakes and wasps, crows, cats, mice, earthquakes, and landslides. In dive bars and twisted city streets, on deserts and snowcapped mountains, the author creates an extreme world where every character “is driving death away with a singular performance.” Who is the last lover? The novel is bursting with vividly drawn characters. Among them are Joe, sales manager of a clothing company in an unnamed Western country, and his wife, Maria, who conducts mystical experiments with the household’s cats and rosebushes. Joe’s customer Reagan is having an affair with Ida, a worker at his rubber plantation, while clothing-store owner Vincent runs away from his wife in pursuit of a woman in black who disappears over and over again. By the novel’s end, we have accompanied these characters on a long march, a naive, helpless, and forsaken search for love, because there are just some things that can’t be stopped—or helped.
Can Xue, pseudonym of Deng Xiaohua, is the author of many novels, volumes of literary criticism, and short works of fiction. Formerly a tailor, she began writing fiction in 1983. The Last Lover is her second novel to appear in English. She lives in Beijing. Annelise Finegan Wasmoen, an editor and literary translator, is pursuing a Ph.D. in comparative literature at Washington University, St. Louis.
Reviews
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Not for everyone, but for those who can handle the heavy surrealism, this is a real treat.
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Write a poorly scripted Chinese novel that rambles for hundreds of pages without a goal or a moral fabric. Change the names of the characters to Joe, Mary, Vincent, Mr. Reagan, and act as if the setting was somewhat in the US. Is this a cheap marketing trick to capture the US public? Throw in animals and more animals: snakes, ducks, and even a leopard. More animals enter the scene in the second half: mice, and a dog. Supplement this with tasteless sex scenes. This should entice intellectuals to find hidden symbols behind the zoological apparitions. I was able to endure this entire novel filled with incongruous events and a lack of resolution that is disturbing. since Can Xue has been considered for a Nobel Prize. Being a disciplined reader, I always finish the reading of novels. This one was a real ordeal. A succession of senseless banalities sugarcoated with pretenses of depth. I purchased this book in the hope of enriching myself ahead of the Nobel Literature Prize. I cannot fathom that Can Xue is being considered for this honor. I don't think that the Nobel committee is a group of mentacapts. There is no appreciation for the beauty of life, nature, and nobility. There is mention of opium in the end, and this might be the reason for the hallucinations described by Can Xue. The Long March is brought in tangentially, but it is irrelevant to the story. Noises are represented by repeated syllabs: wewe, gigi, etc. In the end,, after painfully laboring through this interminable novel, I am left with a feeling of frustration. I had just read "Our Lady of the Squids" before "The Last Lover." What a contrast!
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Held my attention. An ok book.
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Got this because it was required for a class and couldn’t even get halfway through the book. The amount of sexual content is appalling. I wouldn’t recommend this to anyone.
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estranho