It seems to me that we really need to read a book - I mean any book - more than we are led by our nature in reading ourselves as we peruse its pages, i.e., searching for what we want from it, despite all our pains in opposing it.
I mean, books are often good in their own way, and what is taken away from them is only our part of the reading process: our knowledge, our expectations and our moods above all.
This method may, in the end, be able to actually add to ourselves something new, rather than merely confirming what we have - basically - acceptance or rejection.
It occurred to me, because as soon as I began to read Tsan Chieh's "Love in the New Century" and went beyond the first twenty pages, I paused for a while to abandon my preconceived notions and brush off what I was looking for, in favor of what I might find between the lines of this year's work in about 400 A page, from Dar "Sard", translated by Yara Al-Masry from the Chinese language directly.
In this novel, ex-lovers always appear in a veil of suspicion, giving the characters the opportunity to experience feelings in a different time and place.
Rather, it is the self-experience when it changes, while it thinks that it is the things around it that have changed.
It is a heated confrontation between the pain of awareness in the present and the comfortable innocence of the past, and the future that would destroy and reshape all of that.
And I think that this way of surrendering myself to the book - instead of trying to control it and subject it to my expectations - was my effective trick to embark on this delicious and slippery adventure at the same time. As there is no connected story that can be referred to in this text, the novelist, in my opinion, was not preoccupied with a related narrative context as much as she was preoccupied with thoughts, visions and feelings that she poured into scattered and divergent moulds. But it can - with a little scrutiny - return it to certain concerns. This type of writing may not be liked by many, but the fun, in my opinion, is not limited to the story. There is a lot that attracts attention and attachment as well, without following a thread that leads us to what happened to the characters and events in the end.
This is a text par excellence, in which Tsun Chieh delves deeply into ambiguous language and ideas, telling about one thing, but it may mean a thousand other things.
It is a text lined with ambiguous meanings, and the more the reader is open in his reading and abandons himself, the more he can tire of it and be filled with it.
Therefore, if one wants to know the subject of the novel, he will find many answers by the number of those who have read it or are rather lost in it.
The text is full of several characters with intertwined destinies and intersecting obsessions, without any of them losing their uniqueness, even at the level of feeling.
For example, the characters are obsessed with searching for their hometown, a phrase from which no one has escaped, but each in his own way;
There are those who really search for the place, and there are those who search for their sense of it, so when they meet a suitable lover, they feel as if they are in their hometown, and there are those who look at their hometown as a journey in time, patting their nostalgia for all the time that has passed without return.
In this novel, ex-lovers always appear in a veil of suspicion, giving the characters the opportunity to experience feelings in a different time and place. Rather, it is the self-experience when it changes, while it thinks that it is the things around it that have changed. It is a heated confrontation between the pain of awareness in the present and the comfortable innocence of the past, and the future that would destroy and reshape all of that. The characters are obsessed with fear of missing out, the pressure of age is leaking from the hands, so they change their miserable jobs and work in others that give them a sense of themselves. She does this in the last quarter of an hour, but in complete satisfaction, despite the exhaustion and age and the change of things around her.
As things here remain on the edges, it is difficult to say for sure, as many dead people cross the characters, talking, angry and singing, without the reader being fully able to determine which of the two groups actually live on the earth and which is in its interior. Suddenly cities, buildings, and trees appear, and the countryside and the port, before I disappear, deepen the idea of the edge, the fading of borders, the ambiguity, and the ever-present possibility. The novelist does all this with a logic that saves the text from naivety, for there is always a line of return that rationalizes all of this and makes it possible. The distance clouds between what is happening in the mind of the character of hopes or fears on the one hand, and what is on the ground on the other hand. It seems remarkable that Tsien Chieh could do all this while writing the novel without planning but letting herself follow the dictation of the moment of writing.
I did that and brought up the deep meanings and the funny and painful situations at the same time.
Therefore, I was certain that this text is an important lesson in writing according to the conditions of this genre, and perhaps the novel's long list in the "Man Booker Prize" is further evidence of the uniqueness that it contains.
It remains for me to commend Yara Al-Masry's ability to translate this work with the necessary clarity and fluidity despite its complexity and overlapping plots, which is always very necessary, but in such novels it becomes even more urgent.
And I imagine that coming out of this work with a beautiful translation was behind great effort and patience.
Time and time again, I admire Dar Sard's publications for their limitations;
It appears to be the slow and tireless work of selection and execution.