"We are the terminators of the kinship system," the narrator proudly proclaims after reading Levi-Strauss's Tristes Tropiques and Foucault's History of Sexuality.
This is a gay cultural tour that lacks only one thing -- any credible evocation of gay experience. There are very many ideas here, but gradations of feeling and perception are far more difficult to find. Plot-wise, too, this isn't a thrilling book. At times it reads more like a dissertation than a novel. For readers living in Taiwan, it may well be its Taipei setting that constitutes its most immediate attraction.
Some people will think this isn't so much a novel as a dissertation on mid-1990s youth culture, taking in alienation, designer fads, computer games, androgyny and the like, and containing more than its fair share of cultural theory. As a result, many readers are going to find the book more than a little wearying.
The best books all give pleasure, albeit pleasure of different kinds, with not all of them giving pleasure to the same sorts of people. But the weakness of this book as a novel is that it's more a catalogue of ideas and associations than a pleasurable story with developed characters and dramatic developments.
This novel was a major event when first published in Chinese. It took Taipei gay life seriously, and set it in a rich and elaborate sociological and cultural context. It was the product of a major Taiwanese writer who was to go on to reap great success.
Nevertheless, the issue of display will not go away. Was this writer merely bent on displaying her multiple talents, or was she genuinely intent on pleasing the reader? That the answer will be the former for many people is the reason this book is, in the final analysis, less than the masterpiece it might otherwise have been.
Notes of a Desolate Man remains a major landmark, but the feeling that it has been pieced together rather than written is in places unavoidable. Great books have to have something pressing to say. Chu Tien-wen does not, at least in this book, give the impression she is under that compulsion.
RSS