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WORK TITLE: The Invisibility Cloak
WORK NOTES: trans by Canaan Morse
PSEUDONYM(S): Ge Fei; Yong, Liu
BIRTHDATE: 1964
WEBSITE:
CITY: Beijing
STATE:
COUNTRY: China
NATIONALITY:
“He teaches at Tsinghua University in Beijing.” * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ge_Fei_(author) * https://paper-republic.org/authors/ge-fei/ * https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2016/11/14/invisibility-cloak-interview-ge-fei/ * http://www.wordswithoutborders.org/book-review/the-invisibility-cloak-by-ge-fei-kate-prengel
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1964, in Dantu, China.
EDUCATION:East China Normal University, graduated, 1985, Ph.D., 2000; University of Iowa, International Writing Program, 2009.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Teacher and writer. Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, professor.
AWARDS:Mao Dun Literature Prize, 2015, for “Jiangnan Trilogy.”
WRITINGS
Author of “Jiangnan Trilogy” and other novels, novellas, short stories, and essays, many of which are available in the United States, but mostly in the Chinese language. Novels in the “Jiangnan Trilogy” include Renmian Taohua (Peach Blossom Beauty), 2004, Shanhe Rumeng (My Dream of the Mountain and River), 2007, and Chunjin Jiangnan (Spring Ends in Jiangnan), 2009.
SIDELIGHTS
Born in 1964 in Dantu, China, Ge Fei, born Liu Yong, is a writer known for his “Jiangnan Trilogy,” for which he received the 2015 Mao Dun Literature Prize. Fei also wrote the novellas The Invisibility Cloak and Flock of Brown Birds, which have been translated into English. During the 1980s and early 1990s he wrote experimental fiction. In fact, according to Laifong Leung, author of Contemporary Chinese Fiction Writers: Biography, Bibliography, and Critical Assessment, “Ge Fei’s most significant contribution [to Chinese literature] is his experimental fiction, in which he subverts long-held assumptions, ideas, and practices, as well as readers’ expectations.” Fei earned a Ph.D. from the East China Normal University in 2000 and attended the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa in the United States in 2009. Fei teaches at Tsinghua University in Beijing.
"JIANGNAN TRILOGY"
Ge Fei is known for his experimental literature, but his award-winning trilogy harks back to classical Chinese works and is much more traditional in style. The trilogy consists of Renmian Taohua (Peach Blossom Beauty), Shanhe Rumeng (My Dream of the Mountain and River), and Chunjin Jiangnan (Spring Ends in Jiangnan).
Leung gave a brief synopsis of the three novels, which feature female members of four generations of the Lu family: “Encompassing more than a century of recent Chinese history, these three novels share one theme—the search for Utopia—and the disastrous consequences.” The three protagonists’ lives all end tragically, contributing to the pessimistic tone of the novels.
The Invisibility Cloak
In 2016 The Invisibility Cloak was translated by Canaan Morse, cofounder of the literary quarterly Pathlight: New Chinese Writing, and translator of Chinese prose and poetry. In the novella set in Beijing, Cui, a builder of stereo amplifiers, was doing well in the 1990s during the boom in serious music. He was able to buy a decent apartment and married his girlfriend Yufen. But after she cheated on him, then divorced him, he is now a forty-something loser who is childless and living with his married sister in her drab apartment. Both the sister and brother-in-law want him out.
Cui finds no pleasure in life except for his part-time work building high-fidelity stereo equipment and vintage tube amplifiers for wealthy and eccentric clients. Now, he barely scrapes by as he views with contempt his pompous paying customers who know nothing about music but want the most expensive sound system so they can show off. Cui has Beethoven, his antique speakers, and not much else. Although Cui is altruistic enough to help Yufen’s new husband out of trouble, and naïve enough to trust a mobster, he tends to blame other people for his own misfortune and bad decisions.
Then the powerful and sketchy businessman, Ding Caichen, asks him to do a special job with no questions asked. His choices are to take the job or be homeless. “Despite its short length, Fei constructs for the reader a deep dive, and the book begs the reader to plunge in and surrender to it. I recommend you do so,” noted Kate Prengel online at Words without Borders. Noting that Fei prefers to let some mysteries linger with a protagonist that believes the best attributes of a person tend to live on the surface, a writer in Publishers Weekly commented: “The novel’s relentlessly flat tone could frustrate, but amplification isn’t always necessary to produce a memorable effect.”
In an interview at Paris Review Online, Fei explained to Lydia H. Liu that he wrote the story to contrast the nonmaterialist 1980s with today: “Twenty-some years later, the change that’s occurred in this respect is unbelievable—from an incredibly rich spiritual life to a total lack of spiritual enrichment. Materialism is the word of the day. Money. Advancement. I wanted to add clarity to the meaning of classical music, what it meant to the people who lived through that earlier time.”
According to William Morris in a review on the Cleaver Web site: “In this fabulist tale set in contemporary Beijing, Fei is taking part in a conversation about past and present, values and ideologies, and whether it is possible to believe in anything in today’s world.” Observing how Cui becomes a sucker and a philosophical Everyman struggling to survive in ruthless Beijing, a writer on Kirkus Reviews Online noted: “The plot may be slight, but the author packs in wit, social commentary, and an emotional depth that will lift the reader’s spirits like few recent books.”
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Leung, Laifong, Contemporary Chinese Fiction Writers: Biography, Bibliography, and Critical Assessment, Routledge (New York, NY), 2016, pp. 95-96.
PERIODICALS
Publishers Weekly, August 1, 2016, review of The Invisibility Cloak, p. 44.
ONLINE
Cleaver, https://www.cleavermagazine.com/ (September 27, 2016), William Morris, review of The Invisibility Cloak.
Kirkus Reviews Online, https://www.kirkusreviews.com/ (July 20, 2016), review of The Invisibility Cloak.
Paris Review Online, https://www.theparisreview.org/ (November 14, 2016), Lydia H. Liu and Wun Tsun Tam, author interview.
Quarterly Conversation Online, http://quarterlyconversation.com/ (December 12, 2016), Lucas Klein, review of The Invisibility Cloak.
Words without Borders, http://www.wordswithoutborders.org/ (May 17, 2017), Kate Prengel, review of The Invisibility Cloak.*
Ge Fei (author)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Liu Yong
Native name 刘勇
Born 1964 (age 52–53)
Dantu District, Zhenjiang, Jiangsu
Pen name Ge Fei (格非)
Occupation Novelist
Language Chinese
Nationality Chinese
Alma mater East China Normal University
Period 1986 - present
Genre Novel
Literary movement Xianfeng Literature
Notable awards 9th Mao Dun Literature Prize
2015 Jiangnan Trilogy
Ge Fei (Chinese: 格非; pinyin: Gé Fēi; Wade–Giles: Ke Fei, born 1964), pen-name for Liu Yong (刘勇), is a notable contemporary Chinese author whose works were prominent during the late 1980s and early 1990s.[1] Ge Fei was considered one of the preeminent experimental writers during that period. He is currently a professor of literature at Tsinghua University.
Contents
1 Biography
2 Work
3 Awards and honors
4 References
5 External links
Biography
Ge Fei was born in Dantu, Jiangsu, in 1964. He graduated from East China Normal University in 1985. He received his PhD in 2000.[2] He was invited to participate in the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, United States, in 2009.[citation needed]
Work
His most prominent work is the novel Peach Blossom Beauty (人面桃花, Renmian Taohua, 2004), which explores the concept of utopia, and is laden with classical allusions.[citation needed] It is the first book of his Jiangnan Trilogy, of which the second book, My Dream of the Mountain and River (山河入梦 Shanhe Rumeng), was published in 2007. The third is Spring Ends in Jiangnan (春尽江南), published in 2011.[3]
The title of Renmian Taohua is taken from a classical work, and has also been used by the director Du Haibin for his documentary on a gay club in Chengdu (2005). The English name for the film, Beautiful Men, is not a direct translation.
The novellas The Invisibility Cloak and Flock of Brown Birds are the only works by Ge Fei to be available in English. They appeared in 2016 in translations by Canaan Morse and Poppy Toland respectively.[4]
Awards and honors
2015 Mao Dun Literature Prize, Jiangnan Trilogy[5]
Ge Fei
格非
wikipedia / worldcat / MCLC / Chinese Short Stories
Ge Fei (original name: Liu Yong) was born in Jiangsu Province in 1964. He graduated with a degree in Chinese from Shanghai’s East China Normal University (ECNU) in 1985 and taught at ECNU for several years after graduation. In 2000, he received his PhD in Chinese literature and joined the faculty of Qinghua University in Beijing. He published his first story “Remembering Mr. Wu You” in 1986, followed by “Mizhou” in 1987, a story which brought him instant fame. The subsequent novella A Flock of Brown Birds, published in ’87, established him as one of the standout writers of experimental “avant-garde” fiction during that decade.
In 2004, he published Kinds of Beauty, the seminal first work of a historical trilogy that also includes Rivers and Mountains Fall Asleep and Spring Comes to the South (sometimes referred to as The Last Southern Spring). He doesn’t participate in as many public events as his compatriots do, and devotes the time he does not use for writing to his teaching. When asked about what he’s working on, he will frequently respond that he’s a professor, not an author, even though practically speaking, he happens to be one of the founders of contemporary literature in China. Several of his short stories have been translated into English, French, Japanese, and Italian. His first English novel, The Invisibility Cloak, will appear in English in 2016, as well as an English translation of his novella A Flock of Brown Birds.
Original Works
Collections (1)
相遇
Novels (3)
Shan He Ru Meng (山河入梦), January, 2007
Renmian Taohua (人面桃花), January, 2004
Yinshen Yi (隐身衣)
tr: The Invisibility Cloak, by Canaan Morse
Novellas (6)
Hese Niaoqun (褐色鸟群)
tr: Flock of Brown Birds, by Poppy Toland
Mi Zhou (迷舟)
tr: The Lost Boat, by Caroline Mason
Fengqin (风琴)
Yuji de Ganjue (雨季的感觉)
Jin Se (锦瑟)
Xiang Yu (相遇)
Short stories (8)
Zhuiyi Wu You Xiansheng (追忆乌攸先生)
tr: Remembering Mr Wu You, by Howard Goldblatt
Qing Huang (青黄)
tr: Green Yellow, by Eva Shan Chou
Mengnalisha de Weixiao (蒙娜丽莎的微笑)
tr: Mona Lisa's Smile, by Jim Weldon
Ma Yulan de Shengri Liwu (马玉兰的生日礼物)
Jiezhi Hua (戒指花)
Chulian (初恋)
Liangzhou Ci (凉州词)
tr: Song of Liangzhou, by David Haysom
tr: Song of Liangzhou, by Charles Laughlin
mayulandeshengriliwu (马玉兰的生日礼物)
tr: Ma Yulan's Birthday Present, by Canaan Morse
The Invisibility Cloak: An Interview with Ge Fei
By The Paris Review November 14, 2016
At Work
From the cover of The Invisibility Cloak.
Ge Fei is one of China’s foremost experimental writers. He started his career in the eighties with “vanguard fiction”—self-reflexive works focusing on history, historical narrative, memory, and myth. Now, for the first time, one of his novels is available in English: 2012’s The Invisibility Cloak, translated by Canaan Morse. It’s the first in our monthly book club with New York Review Books. Set in cutthroat, consumer-driven Beijing, the novel follows Mr. Cui, a down-at-heel Everyman who lives with his sister in an apartment where the wind is always blowing through a crack in the wall. Cui designs and installs custom stereos for hyperrich audiophiles and intellectuals, for whom he has an unreserved contempt. Then he reels in a promising but shady client who demands the best sound system in the world: an assignment that takes Cui to an unexpectedly dark place. The Invisibility Cloak is a comic tour de force; Kirkus Reviews wrote that it “packs in wit, social commentary, and an emotional depth that will lift the reader’s spirits like few recent English-language books.”
Last month, Ge Fei visited New York, where he appeared in conversation at Columbia University’s Weatherhead East Asian Institute. He was joined by Morse, his translator; and two moderators, Lydia H. Liu and Wun Tsun Tam. The exchange below is a condensed, edited version of their discussion, including some questions from the audience that day.
INTERVIEWER
How did you come up with the idea for the book?
FEI
What constitutes Chinese reality, particularly from the eighties onward, is always changing. With The Invisibility Cloak, I thought back to 1980, when I was an undergraduate in Shanghai and I felt that life for Chinese people was extremely spiritually rich. People didn’t care about material possessions so much, they didn’t care about clothes, what shoes you wore, what kind of watch you wore, they didn’t care if you knew rich people. In fact, wealth was held in contempt. Every weekend my friends would go to classical-music concerts—Bach, Beethoven, Haydn. Twenty-some years later, the change that’s occurred in this respect is unbelievable—from an incredibly rich spiritual life to a total lack of spiritual enrichment. Materialism is the word of the day. Money. Advancement. I wanted to add clarity to the meaning of classical music, what it meant to the people who lived through that earlier time.
The writing and structure of this book have a deep connection to a question that’s chased me all my life. When everything is moving in one direction—toward money, advancement, and feeling insecure about it—are there people out there who intentionally go the other way? I discovered that in one of my circles of friends in Beijing, these hi-fi enthusiasts, there were a number of such people. It reminded me of a metaphor from a Japanese author I like. He talks about crickets living in a closed box, no sunlight, no windows. You have these singing insects in there, they lay their eggs, they hatch, they grow, they sing, they die. Are there people who are willing to make themselves invisible and keep away from the “sunlight” of contemporary society? The author also mentions seeds—when flowers turn to seed, some will float in the wind and fall into fertile soil, while others will fall into dark corners or on top of trees. I was interested to find that there are people in China who’ve resisted modernity, who have held onto their own value systems. The character I chose as an entry point for The Invisibility Cloak is modeled on one of the great eccentrics I know in Beijing, one of my hi-fi enthusiast friends.
INTERVIEWER
Much of the novel is dedicated to audiophile culture and the pursuit of the greatest possible sound system. As an audio enthusiast yourself, can you comment on the spirituality of music and its relationship with these speakers, these machines, in your writing?
FEI
The centers of construction, sales, and distribution of audiophile equipment—we might call it “specialized audio-reproduction equipment”—are in Europe and America. But those with the greatest love for this equipment are in Japan, Taiwan, and mainland China. These are people who’ve carried their appreciation for sound quality to a fairly extreme degree. The nineties was really the golden age for audiophiles. I tried consciously to incorporate their specialized, material knowledge into this book. For instance, the fact that I specifically name the Autograph speakers won’t mean much to those who don’t deal in hi-fi, but music aficionados, the cognoscenti, will recognize it right away. For a long time, I was dreaming about writing a horror novel. I wondered if I could apply this desire to a novel about music. Readers might ask, How do you put together a horror story with all this talk about classical music? That was the challenge I decided to overcome.
INTERVIEWER
Your earlier novels were about the countryside—you come from a village south of the Yangtze River. Now you’re writing about the city, especially the modern city. Can you talk a little about the difficulties you encounter there, given that a lot of Chinese literature focuses on rural China?
FEI
For Chinese authors, the question of writing on the city is extremely important. There are many other writers like me who were born in the countryside and moved to big cities. I left my hometown at sixteen, I lived for twenty years in Shanghai, and then I lived for sixteen years in Beijing. Authors like us have spent most of our lives in cities. This is a question I put to my students on a regular basis, and many of them have said our fundamental experiences are still tied to the countryside. But I had one student who gave me a different answer that’s particularly correct—he said that fundamentally China has always been built around rural value systems, and therefore cities are still unfamiliar to us. We don’t understand them. Writing The Invisibility Cloak, I made a point of going to southern Beijing, walking around the streets, memorizing the images, the scenes, understanding what went where, and what was there. I was inspired by a great critic who pointed out if you’re going to write about the city, you have to write about a specific place—you can’t write purely on the basis of your imagination alone. A friend and I would go out during the freezing cold Beijing winter sometimes, and my friend would even go on his bike and then call me up and say, This isn’t right, this isn’t right, you should know that such-and-such street is actually here. Writing from that perspective is going to become one of the most important aspects of the authorial experience in China. In the same way that Balzac and Flaubert did real research, Chinese writers have a duty to their urban spaces.
China is being urbanized extremely quickly, and it’s created all sorts of social problems. It’s motivated a profound consideration among Chinese citizens. One of the major problems is this oppositional structure, rural versus urban—it’s oversimplified. People forget that China has had cities for thousands of years! We have our own organic conception of the relationship between city and countryside. The Chinese writer Yu Dafu mentioned this. He said cities like Beijing and other places in the South have been around since the Tang Dynasty, in 600 through 700 B.C. They’ve developed their relationship with the countryside. That relationship was marked very clearly by a particular freedom of exchange—we have people who come to the city from the countryside to take up post officials, we have people who come to the city to settle lawsuits, we have retiring businessmen, retiring scholars, who move back to the countryside. There was a back and forth that existed without the hindrance, the barrier of class consciousness. In a lot of those ancient cities—for instance, in my homeland of Jiangsu—we have parks, private gardens, water features, human-made geography that imitates natural geography. Then along came a totally new and slightly horrifying city—Shanghai! It wasn’t that its buildings were huge or anything, but they invented the concept of class consciousness, a pride of being “Shanghainese,” and pitting it against the identity of being a hick from the countryside. During my time in Shanghai, I kept running into conflict with the Shanghai natives. When Chinese intellectuals talk about urbanization destroying the environment, changing relationships between people, it’s rare when they remember that China has an organically grown form of urban consciousness. It’s hard now because we are inextricably tied to the rest of the world, and the exchange of ideas occurs on that international level—but still, the relationship between the modern urban city, the Ancient Chinese urban city, and the rural countryside should be understood as a triumvirate, not a simple opposition.
INTERVIEWER
One of the groups in The Invisibility Cloak that’s criticized most stridently is the group of intellectuals who like to blow hot air and make revisionist arguments that don’t stand up.
FEI
If there’s one group of people in China that I despise more than any other, it would be the intellectuals. As I was studying and teaching, I would go home, back to my parents’ house, and they would say, Oh, we can’t fix these problems, we’ll leave all this to you and the intellectuals. I used to have high hopes and expectations for the educated in China, because of course the scholar has always enjoyed an elevated position there. Scholars are supposed to be the people who take on the world’s problems as their own, who shoulder the world’s burdens. It wasn’t until the late nineties that I began to change my opinions, and I discovered that those who are outside of the intellectual community have ethical standards that we have a lot to learn from, and they’re the ones we rely on for the idea of the country and strong development of the country. These are people who are very misunderstood within the academic circle. I had a significant change in my personal ethics with regard to the rest of the world. Now I have two circles of friends, academics and nonacademics, and it’s from the nonacademics that I’ve learned more about who and how to be. It’s very easy for us to put labels on these people. This friend of mine who’s the model for the main character, he sold shoes, he’s worked in clothing factories, he has opinions on Chinese-Japanese relations, relations with America and Chinese politics. He has his own philosophies, completely different from my intellectual friends. When we all get together, he’ll end up in arguments with them, beating them right down. That particular transformation has changed the way I build relationships with people who are outside my immediate academic circle. It’s not just their meaningless talk. I thought, Are we giving the country to these people? That might not be a good idea. We look at officials and there may be plenty of them we don’t like, but at the very least they seem to have some experience of the actual world. Meanwhile, your scholars, so many go from book to book, and they analyze systems of value, of benefit, and of resources based on what they’ve read.
INTERVIEWER
What’s the meaning behind the name The Invisibility Cloak?
FEI
The Invisibility Cloak was not the book’s first title—it was something like Leftover Fragments of Emotion in the Floating Life. I used it, but it gave me a really unlucky, inauspicious feeling. I wanted to add aspects of the horror-movie concept into the title. One of the main characters in the book is invisibility—he carries an invisibility cloak, he disappears yet he reappears, he is the sudden face in the mirror, the flicker in the one frame that then disappears. The model for Cui, the protagonist, this guy has stubbornly built his own quotidian life. I think the destruction of the quotidian life is one of the most unfortunate consequences of modernity. This guy doesn’t wear T-shirts, it doesn’t matter how hot it is, he will never wear short sleeves. He always eats fish, he never eats meat, he never gets up before ten, he will do everything he can to make sure he doesn’t not get out of bed before ten in the morning, and he obviously calls me up at midnight. He keeps to his own life. He’s built this individual ideological structure, which is something I consider admirable and wish more people would do.
The Invisibility Cloak
263.31 (Aug. 1, 2016): p44.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
The Invisibility Cloak
Ge Fei, trans. from the Chinese by Canaan Morse. New York Review Books, $14 trade paper (120p) ISBN 978-1-68137-020-0
Fei's first novel to be translated into English, a slight tale about a hapless audiophile, is shot through with an eerie melody. The down-on-his luck protagonist, who constructs bespoke audio systems for Beijing's elite, is divorced from his unfaithful wife and beset by a manipulative sister scheming to evict him. He stoically endures these financial and domestic troubles but inwardly seethes with Dostoyevskian rage. Disdainful of his pretentious, pontificating clients and a ruthlessly competitive society that has seen the "deliberate humiliation of the craftsmen," the hero finds sanctuary in the connoisseurship of his artistically crafted sound equipment and the beautiful strains of music they emit: "I felt as if I had no business enjoying this luxury in such a polluted, chaotic world." His specialized knowledge confers on him "an illusion of hiding in the quietest corner of the deepest place on earth," that is, a kind of pleasurable invisibility. When his only friend sets him up with a sinister client looking to buy the "highest-quality sound system in the world," the craftsman agrees to the immersive project, which introduces him into a shadowy, inscrutable world and a shrouded woman as invisible as he is. Fei, who won the 2015 Mao Dun Literature Prize, is content to let certain mysteries linger, perhaps sharing with his protagonist the belief that "the best attributes of anyone or anything usually reside on the surface." The novel's relentlessly flat tone could frustrate, but amplification isn't always necessary to produce a memorable effect. (Oct.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Invisibility Cloak." Publishers Weekly, 1 Aug. 2016, p. 44. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA460285657&it=r&asid=012ca73d77a16a9e5af6a2ce32f14d83. Accessed 23 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A460285657
Book Reviews
from the September 2016 issue: There Is No Map: The New Italian(s)
“The Invisibility Cloak” by Ge Fei
Reviewed by Kate Prengel
Image of “The Invisibility Cloak” by Ge Fei
Translated from the Chinese by Canaan Morse
New York Review Books, 2016
The Invisibility Cloak by Ge Fei—translated beautifully from the Chinese, albeit with a certain appealing clunkiness, by Canaan Morse—is the first of his novels to be translated into English. It tells the story of two Beijings: The grimy, hardscrabble Beijing, inhabited by gangsters and hustlers; and the shiny, modern Beijing, home to professors and international businessmen. These twin cities, both equally real and equally fantastic, exist side by side, and Fei’s narrator, Mr. Cui, takes the reader back and forth between the two. We meet Cui, a middle-aged “audiologist” who builds and repairs stereos, standing in front of a hulking apartment complex waiting to deliver a new sound system to a client in a scene reminiscent of Raymond Chandler. Cui is the ultimate outsider, a poor man who resents and looks down upon his rich clients, their beautiful wives, their class presumptions, and their tastes in terrible pop music. And yet, Cui is no Philip Marlowe tough guy, but a scrounger, barely hanging on to his livelihood. He idealizes beautiful music, beautiful machinery, and beautiful women, but he can’t hang on to any of them himself—his own wife, Yufen, left him years ago—and his resulting anxieties are legion:
The security door for Unit 3 popped open. A woman in a gray athletic shirt leaned out from the doorway. She peered at me and at the mud-flecked minivan behind me, then finally caught sight of the KT88 [amplifier] at my feet. She smiled and gushed, “Oooh, it’s so pretty!” I wasn’t sure if she was being polite with her praise or slightly patronizing. The way she spoke reminded me of Yufen. Her face and form did too. I couldn’t help but look her up and down a few times, as faint ripples of panic and sorrow crossed my heart. The KT88 amplifier I had worked so hard to build sat on the concrete stoop, its silver, velvety body shining in the morning sun.”
Such ironies—Cui is skilled enough to win a beautiful wife and make a beautiful machine, but not rich enough to hold on to either—are a refrain throughout the novel. Beijing’s rich can wear American shirts and drink top-shelf liquor. They can pay top dollar for beautiful sound systems. And yet they don’t value what they have. They use their stereos to play third-rate pop CDs. They drink too much and throw up in the bushes. Meanwhile, Cui and others in his class live hand-to-mouth while what is beautiful in their lives slips inexorably through their fingers. People die, friends drift apart, siblings become bitter enemies. Years earlier, when Cui was about to marry Yufen, his mother warned him that she was too beautiful for him to hold on to. Sure enough, she left him for another, richer man.
Cui tries to say that times used to be better. He gets a little nostalgic about the 1990s, when Western classical music was playing on all the radio stations and lots of people were buying expensive stereo systems. And yet The Invisibility Cloak ultimately presents the world as unchanging. The narrative flows easily from the present to the past, moving smoothly back and forth from Cui’s childhood to his present, middle age. The novel is set in today’s Beijing, but the earthquake season of 1976 continues to impact Cui and his friends and family. Time seems almost irrelevant. In the same way, dreams flow into reality. The dead appear in visions, and it almost doesn’t matter whether the visions are real as they are folded easily into the characters’ messy, complicated reality regardless.
Cui’s sister, pushing him to remarry, introduces him to one of her coworkers, a good-hearted but plain and downtrodden mother of a sullen teenager. While Cui is briefly tempted, his dismay over her plainness, her speech impediment, and her dirty, cramped apartment torment him, even while he admits to himself both her decency and his need for a place to live.
I chatted with Meizhu until late in the evening. To be honest, I felt extremely well-disposed toward the woman. Lisp or no lisp, she was a compassionate, honest person, no doubt. In a world like ours, individuals like her are scarce and becoming harder and harder to find. That her situation was so much more desperate than mine triggered a sort of impulse within me—the naïve impulse to care for her for the rest of her life. Yet this idea only flickered once, then disappeared. As I cast an eye over the cluttered, airless apartment, I realized with some distress that even if I did marry her, where the hell would I put all my sound equipment?”
Eventually, and despite his lack of money, Cui decides to buy a small house just outside of Beijing. A childhood friend introduces him to a gangster who commissions him to build the best sound system in the world. The gangster is icily terrifying, but Cui admires him far more than his usual clients. Unlike them, the gangster is both unpretentious and intelligent, and he listens intently to the music Cui plays him. What remains of Cui’s introduction into this shadowy world this reviewer will leave up to the reader to discover. Despite its short length, Fei constructs for the reader a deep dive, and the book begs the reader to plunge in and surrender to it. I recommend you do so.
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Kate Prengel
Kate Prengel is a writer and art critic. She lives in New York with her partner and their two children.
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THE INVISIBILITY CLOAK
by Ge Fei, translated by Canaan Morse
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KIRKUS REVIEW
This slim comic novel, the first by acclaimed Chinese author Ge Fei to be translated into English, follows the travails of a likable loser trying to stay afloat—financially and emotionally—in contemporary Beijing.
Cui builds tube amplifiers for a living. In the mid-1990s, during a boom in serious music interest in Beijing, Cui did well enough to buy a two-bedroom apartment and marry his girlfriend, Yufen. Four years later Beijing’s interest in serious music has died out and Cui is struggling financially. Worse, his mother’s warning that Yufen was “a little too easy-come-easy-go” has proven prophetic: recently, around the time of his mother’s death, Yufen “sweetly” asked for a divorce because she’d become involved with a man from her office. Cui let her have the apartment while he kept a valuable set of Autograph speakers. He now lives in his older sister's apartment, but she and her husband, who moved into his mother’s house, want him out ASAP. Ge Fei’s depiction of Beijing life is cynical—from the pompous professor who insists Cui install only the best sound system but knows nothing about music; to Cui’s manipulative sister; to his friend Jiang Songping, a glad-handing factory owner who patronizingly gives Cui Tommy Hilfiger shirts and helps him “fish” for clients among his wealthy acquaintances in order to show off his “highbrow tastes”; to the general graft and corruption apparent in the author’s descriptions of recently built apartment complexes. And it would be easy for a cynic to consider Cui a sucker for helping Yufen’s new husband out of a jam or trusting a mobster’s promise to send his payment after Cui installs his most valuable sound system. But page by page, Cui lives by his own moral compass until readers find themselves rooting for this philosophical Everyman to overcome every setback Ge Fei throws his way.
The plot may be slight, but the author packs in wit, social commentary, and an emotional depth that will lift the reader's spirits like few recent books.
Pub Date: Oct. 11th, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-68137-020-0
Page count: 120pp
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: July 20th, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1st, 2016
THE INVISIBILITY CLOAK
by Ge Fei
translated by Canaan Morse
NYRB Classics, 127 Pages
reviewed by William Morris
The narrator and protagonist of The Invisibility Cloak—the first English translation of a novel by acclaimed Chinese writer Ge Fei—is not an inherently likable person. Cui sees intellectuals as mainly full of nonsense. He is also quick to play the victim, blaming those around him for his misfortunes. But it would be difficult to read this novel without at times empathizing with the narrator. His wife left him, he’s living in his sister’s crummy apartment, and the only real solace he finds is in sitting in the dark, listening to Beethoven on CD. In a moment of particular insight and self-awareness, Cui thinks:
I’m certainly not a nostalgic man; maybe my heart was heavy because this place used to be called “home.” The scraping of tree branches against the roof; the moon in the leaves; the whirr of cicadas and the crash of rain; the smell of coal dust brushed from the furnace on an early morning, all used to accompany me to bed night after night and gently touch my soul in the darkness. But once that unique sort of loneliness settles in your chest, you feel the fear of time and life extinguished, as if the best years of your life had finally been squandered completely.
Cui works as an audio technician, building hi-fi stereo equipment for wealthy businessmen and intellectuals. His clients listen mostly to insubstantial pop music, and know very little about sound systems. The disdain Cui feels for these people seems justified—he scrapes by, doing thankless jobs, and sees his masterful creations used mindlessly by those with greater power and influence. In his daily life, Cui has a sense of beauty squandered.
Cui has been allowed to inhabit a drafty, lifeless apartment owned by his sister and her husband, but they now have plans for the property and insist he move out. Forced to make it on his own, Cui agrees to do business with Ding Caichen, a mysterious, powerful businessman looking for “the highest-quality sound system in the world. The more extravagant the better.” Cui’s situation is a helpless ultimatum: either work for the eerie, possibly dangerous Ding, or be homeless by the end of the year.
The publisher’s back cover description promises that The Invisibility Cloak will appeal to readers of Haruki Murakami, and it’s not wrong. Like many readers, I’ve fallen hard for Murakami’s writing. In The Invisibility Cloak, I see many elements of plot and character reminiscent of Murakami: a quirky narrator, a series of weird sexual encounters, extensive reference to Western culture and music, and a looming, if vaguely articulated, menace. Alas, there are no talking cats or empty wells, though neither would have felt out of place here.
Ge Fei
Ge Fei
But to suggest that Ge Fei’s novel is nothing more than a continuation in Murakami’s tradition would be to undersell the distinctive qualities of both writers. This is no pastiche or ventriloquist act. In this fabulist tale set in contemporary Beijing, Fei is taking part in a conversation about past and present, values and ideologies, and whether it is possible to believe in anything in today’s world. On her deathbed, the narrator’s mother tells him “everyone has a wife waiting for him somewhere.” She tells him that when he meets this woman he will know. This seems like a comforting piece of old-world wisdom, perhaps. The series of women Cui encounters throughout the novel, however, fall into two mutually exclusive categories: those he thinks may be the “wife waiting for him” and those he could feasibly marry. When his dead mother later comes to him, as promised, in a dream, she can’t give any tangible advice beyond a cryptic shake of the head.
Reading in translation can be difficult. The reader has to wonder how much of the writer’s original voice was translated, and how much was lost in the process. Cui’s narration is sure of itself, the voice consistently critical of the world at large. English language readers won’t feel out of place in Ge Fei’s Beijing, a metropolis teeming with modern trappings and economic disparities like any major American city.
The Invisibility Cloak checks in at just about 130 pages, and follows a first person narrator through a mainly chronological story. And yet, there’s something about this book—something unreal and quietly mystical in the things left unsaid—that leaves me in awe, unsure what to say or how to feel. This is what great fiction strives to do: return us to the world unsettled, wondering what invisible happenings around us keep time turning, keep the music playing.
The Invisibility Cloak by Ge Fei (tr. Canaan Morse). NYRB Classics. 144 pp., $14.00
We’re all familiar with unreliable narrators, those first-person storytellers whose words we are not sure we can trust. In The Invisibility Cloak, Ge Fei takes this to the next level: he gives us an unreliable narrator in an unreliable career struggling with unreliable characters in an unreliable country.
Cui (pronounced Tsway) is a recently divorced stereo amplifier builder in late middle-age whose best friend is a swindler and whose sister lies to him to get him to move out of her apartment. He worries whether he’ll have marriage proposals thrust on him from every divorcee he’s set up with and whether his clients’ payments will come through, yet says he’s “the kind of person who likes to let [his] perceptions float on the surface of things,” that “everyone has an inner life, but it’s best if we leave it alone.” But he can’t even understand, or accommodate, his own reactions: early in the novel, he says, “I didn’t shed a single tear at my mother’s funeral. I hurt as much as the rest of them, but I just couldn’t cry. I didn’t know what was wrong with me.” Then later, after describing how his mother disapproved of his marriage: “For a long time after that, I quietly ridiculed her, hated her, to the point of hoping she would die a little sooner. And when she finally passed away, I didn’t shed a single tear for her at the funeral.”
The duplicity, of course, will be taken as commentary on life in China today. And indeed it is: over a decade ago someone said to me that China was so flooded with counterfeits that the only thing you could know were real are your own false teeth, and it’s only truer now. Cui’s main clients for his top-notch amplifiers tend to be either intellectuals or business owners. The intellectuals he describes as wanting “amplifiers to bring out the feeling or color of the music,” but “Dealing with them involves learning how to endure their pontificating”:
For instance, there’s a handful of professors who love to warn me every time we meet that a society like China’s could collapse at any moment. I’ve never brought the subject up myself, yet they still seize every opportunity to sit at their dining tables and guide my understanding. . . . Then there’s another handful who take the exact opposite approach. They believe China is right at the zenith of her history, and that the whole world is gazing up at us in admiration.
The business owners, on the other hand, have “fat wallets and empty souls.” He plays them a “Nursery Record” to show off the quality of his sound system and introduce his clients to orchestral compositions. “You’d think you had fallen in love with ‘classical music,’” he says. “It’s all a delusion, of course.”
It’s a delusion for himself, as well; not even the music at the heart of Cui’s career and audiophilia maintains a reliable purity. “Not only have I never been swindled,” Cui says, “instances of hidden defects or poor-quality replacements have been extraordinarily rare . . . I personally attribute this to a higher-than-average ethical conscience among members of the community.” But this idealism is disabused when one of his clients, a lawyer, retorts, “You know, by day the Nazis sent thousands of Jews to the furnaces without batting an eyelash—they even tossed in newborn babies. But that never prevented them from kicking back in the evenings with their coffee while listening to Mozart or Chopin. . . . The moment capitalism takes root, it creates its own hero.” Cui is as much part of China’s self-deluding economy as the rest of the novel’s cast of characters.
Of course, characters that deceive and distort are not just a commentary on China today, they are a main feature of fiction at its finest. Think of The Story of the Stone, or Jane Austen. One of the reasons Ge Fei’s fiction is as refreshing as it is as Chinese literature in translation is that it is not weighted down with the epic sweep and melodramatic significance of much of what contemporary Chinese literature has so far gained attention in the West. On the contrary, Ge Fei’s writing is both toned down and in tune with contemporary fiction from around the world: as the narrative progresses by digression, there is very little explanation of what the book is about.
Ge Fei’s significance as an author is his ability to bring commentary on contemporary Chinese society into fiction aware of theories about fictional unreliability. As a child Cui’s friend Jiang Songping is described as “a natural politician,” able to convince everyone “that Antonioni was posing as a movie director in order to infiltrate our country’s borders and assassinate the Great Leader, Chairman Mao,” and also “that every pomegranate contained the same number of seeds . . . three hundred and sixty five”; Cui’s sister confirms her distrust of Jiang by counting a pomegranate and finding three hundred and seventy-one, but Antonioni was indeed denounced during the Cultural Revolution for his 1972 documentary Chung Kuo, Cina (likely as part of the Gang of Four’s campaign to undermine Premier Zhou Enlai’s engagements with the outside world). The plot of The Invisibility Cloak hinges on Cui’s plan to buy an apartment with money earned selling his prized Tannoy Autograph speakers—only in production from 1954 to ’74—which he bought at auction at a low price (and which were his only demand in the divorce); explaining the name, though, he writes, “Of course, the English word ‘autograph’ has plenty of direct equivalents in Chinese, but for whatever reason, someone in the hi-fi community translated it as ‘autobiography,’ and the mistake has been accepted as the norm.” China’s tortuous representations of the West and Western fiction’s self-aware blending of fact and factitiousness merge in Ge Fei’s depictions.
The “invisibility cloak” of the title is only mentioned in passing: detailing the mythology surrounding the previous owner of the Autograph speakers, Cui says, “The wildest story I heard was that he could show up at any event unseen because he wore an invisibility cloak.” Perhaps the shady buyer of Cui’s Autographs puts on such a cloak of his own, but if so it only earns the subtlest of suggestions; Cui does not make this connection himself. Or perhaps our external selves and dishonest interactions with others are cloaking our own inner lives and making them invisible. But such conclusions are left for the reader to piece together. As I said, Cui never explains what his story is about. But would we believe him if he did?
What is reliable in The Invisibility Cloak is the translation. This is Canaan Morse’s first full-length novel, but he is one of a new generation of ambitious translators who are redefining standards of quality in writing English without sacrificing accuracy in treating the Chinese. Lexical range tends to flatten in translation, but checking his English against what Ge Fei wrote I am again and again impressed with Morse’s vocabulary (or his handling of a thesaurus as well as a bilingual dictionary), and his ability to find lively, expressive language that never comes off as stilted or stiff. This is essential for any work in translation, of course, but when the work revolves, as it does here, around questions both of reliability and communicability, it is an added bonus that readers do not need to worry about whether The Invisibility Cloak’s inner life has been left alone in another language.
Lucas Klein—radio DJ, union organizer, writer, translator, and editor—graduated Middlebury College (BA) and Yale University (PhD), and is Assistant Professor in the School of Chinese at the University of Hong Kong. Klein recently translated Xi Chuan’s Notes On the Mosquito: Selected Poems.
Published in Issue 46