Notes of a Crocodile

Brand: NYRB Classics | Status: Còn hàng

500.000₫

"The narrator's obsession with her on again, off again girlfriend is something anyone who was young and in love and without prior experiences or financial resources and stuck in a provincial place can relate to this story. The "I don't need you, though I will die without you" - it's done in an existentialist, modernist way.

On every page, there are hints of what a special soul the author was - what her influences were - Nietzsche, etc., and how alone and stuck she must have felt, growing up in Taiwan under quasi-martial law. How she must have soaked up Western and Japanese literature as a way out, as a way of imagining an alternate life.

The crocodile metaphor is cute, ironic, philosophical, and deeply cutting satire, all at once. I laughed so hard every time the crocodile character interjected herself into the story." - Amazon Reviewer

Số lượng:

Winner of the Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize
Longlisted for the PEN Translation Prize
A New York Times Editors' Choice

The English-language premiere of Qiu Miaojin's coming-of-age novel about queer teenagers in Taiwan, a cult classic in China and winner of the 1995 China Times Literature Award.

An NYRB Classics Original

Set in the post-martial-law era of late-1980s Taipei, Notes of a Crocodile is a coming-of-age story of queer misfits discovering love, friendship, and artistic affinity while hardly studying at Taiwan's most prestigious university. Told through the eyes of an anonymous lesbian narrator nicknamed Lazi, this cult classic is a postmodern pastiche of diaries, vignettes, mash notes, aphorisms, exegesis, and satire by an incisive prose stylist and major countercultural figure.

Afflicted by her fatalistic attraction to Shui Ling, an older woman, Lazi turns for support to a circle of friends that includes a rich kid turned criminal and his troubled, self-destructive gay lover, as well as a bored, mischievous overachiever and her alluring slacker artist girlfriend.

Illustrating a process of liberation from the strictures of gender through radical self-inquiry, Notes of a Crocodile is a poignant masterpiece of social defiance by a singular voice in contemporary Chinese literature.