Love in the New Millennium (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

My mind went so many places in this book I am not certain on how to rate it.I try to never give spoilers but for Westerners interested in reading this please keep in mind the author is considered Avant-Gard .Now visualize the TV show Seinfeld where each episode is everyday life about nothing and a group of people seem to know others but don’t realize then know the same people. Add in David Lynch twists, magical realism, the ebb and flow of love and partners, and Chinese humor. Then decide if you want to read the book.I am probably explaining this poorly. I had to take time reading this short book and believe I will read it again to flesh out more ideas.

I'm not quite sure I understand why I enjoyed this novel so much, but it was totally thrilling and absorbing. One of those books that you can't wait to return to in the future. It is 'experimental', meaning that anything can happen, characters can change from being young one moment to aged the next, houses can be caves or are suddenly underground or stand on a village street or vanish altogether. It's not exactly surrealism because the seemingly fractured narratives are too structured for that, and the unconscious is indistinguishable from the conscious. Love, sex, nature, history, death, it's all here. You care about some of the central characters despite, or perhaps because of the absence of psychological realism and the ending is very powerful: ' "In the end there must always be a way out: 'dark willows, bright flowers, a village appears'. Just believe me". "Yes, I believe you," said A Si, standing on tiptoe to kiss him.' I was a big fan of Merce Cunningham's choreography, where he used chance to compose the movement and where there was no narrative and the music was separate from the dance, and yet there was a sense of what it meant to be human, achieved partly through the individual dancers interacting, their expressions, even their smiles: I always came away from one his performances with a sense of harmony and of transcendence, and a belief that we are all greater than the sum of our parts. I had exactly the same feeling on finishing this wonderful novel.

最初に登場する未亡人でありかつセックスワーカーであるCuilanと妻帯者であり石鹸工場に勤務するWei Boのラブストーリーなのかと思いきや，各章では取り上げられる登場人物が変わり，それぞれは複雑に関係しあっている．不思議な世界観が描かれ，正直よく分からないのだけれどもまた読み返したくなる小説だった．私はこの作品を読んで，なぜかゴダールの『アルファヴィル』という映画を思い出した．