THE INVISIBILITY CLOAK - GE FEI (trans. CANAAN MORSE)

I do not actually remember when I came across this, I must have been thinking about how to read more Chinese novels. I then somehow found out that this one is highly-regarded and available at my local library so I basically picked it up on a whim. Glad I did, this very short novel, practically a novella, hit a very fascinating tone. The back cover describes it as “comic” and things I’ve looked up about Ge on the internet suggest he is considered a premier “avant-garde” writer in China though both of these things don’t seem quite right, judging on just this book. The book definitely isn’t funny ha-ha, it sort of has an absurd quality, but a realistic absurdity. The main character, Cui, lives in modern Beijing and builds sound systems for the nouveau riche who blather on and on as he puts in the systems and who don’t really know or care about music, nor can they really tell the difference in the quality of the sound systems, they just know that these items are status symbols and therefore they want one. Cui’s life is falling apart, he needs to make one last big sale to allow himself to buy an apartment and move out of his sister’s house. His friend sets him up with a mysterious rich man who is willing to buy the “greatest stereo system of all time” for a lot of money. From there the book does get a little bizarre and fantastical, essentially in the last 2 or 3 chapters we veer off into what almost seems like a different book, much stranger than the more realistic first 80% of the book. That first half plays like social commentary, it speaks to the ways in which the rapid and amazing development of China and especially Beijing has changed life for its residents over the past 20 or so years. It’s very interesting to read this stuff as a non-Chinese person who admires and envies China’s development and the way they run their society. Obviously, I’m looking in from the outside and so there’s a lot of rose-tinted glasses sort of thinking going on, but man, if he thinks they are getting alienated from one another and valuing money over arts, he wouldn’t be able to kill himself fast enough if he spent time in the USA. Also, there’s some digressions about classical music, since that’s what these audio nuts want to listen to and a nice little section about Eric Satie, a personal favorite of mine. In contrast, the final part of the book gets further out and suggests Murakami or Márquez. Less truly supernatural than these two but more of a sort of dream-like vibe. The pace picks up substantially, we gloss over months and years in a sentence while the earlier sections were more slow going and slow burn. This is his only English book so far, I really enjoyed it and hope they translate more of his stuff.