Novel
Notes of a Desolate Man
荒人手記
Chu T'ien-wen · 1994
Synopsis
In Taiwan, Xiao Shao, a homosexual man of about forty, keeps notebooks after the death of his childhood friend Ah Yao, carried off by AIDS in a Tokyo hospital. He mixes in them his memories of this friend, the pages on Yongjie, a cinematographer and his companion for seven years, who leaves to work in China, and meditations on philosophy, desire and fidelity. The book speaks of the fragility of the body, of youth, of beauty and of love.
Context
The novel appeared in 1994 in Taipei, from the publishing house of the daily China Times, and won the first edition of the grand prize for the novel created by this newspaper, worth a million Taiwanese dollars; it then set off a lively debate in the literary world. Cho Hwei-cheng's thesis, in 1999, reads in it the moral and spiritual decadence of modern urban life, and Wang Der-wei devoted a study to it as early as 1996. The book was translated into English by Howard Goldblatt and Sylvia Li-chun Lin in 1999, as well as into Japanese.
Who it is for
For reading a great Taiwanese novel of the nineties, available in English but not in French.
Prizes and reception
The book received the first China Times prize for the novel; Peter Kurth, in the New York Times, sees it as a novel of questions.
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