In this avant garde masterpiece, memory is a fluid concept. The protagonist, a writer, is at a publisher-sponsored retreat to finish his novel. The beauty of the location however cannot compensate for the anxiety and hallucinations he experiences while watching a flock of brown birds pass by his window, and his sense of temporal disorientation is further compounded by the appearance of a strange woman who calls him Ge Fei. Fiction and reality blend into one as the story unfolds. Ge Fei’s prose renders in exquisite detail the fragility of time.

Flock of Brown Birds

Literature & Fiction

Fei, Ge

Literary

Penguin Australia

A lightly surreal story of misfortune, menace, and high-end stereo equipment in the cutthroat, capitalistic world of modern China. An NYRB Classics Original The hero of The Invisibility Cloak lives in contemporary Beijing—where everyone is doing their best to hustle up the ladder of success while shouldering an ever-growing burden of consumer goods—and he’s a loser. Well into his forties, he’s divorced (and still doting on his ex), childless, and living with his sister (her husband wants him out) in an apartment at the edge of town with a crack in the wall the wind from the north blows through while he gets by, just, by making customized old-fashioned amplifiers for the occasional rich audio-obsessive. He has contempt for his clients and contempt for himself. The only things he really likes are Beethoven and vintage speakers. Then an old friend tips him off about a special job—a little risky but just don’t ask too many questions—and can it really be that this hopeless loser wins? This provocative and seriously funny exercise in the social fantastic by the brilliantly original Ge Fei, one of China’s finest living writers, is among the most original works of fiction to come out of China in recent years. It is sure to appeal to readers of Haruki Murakami and other fabulists of contemporary irreality.

The Invisibility Cloak

NYRB Classics

An enthralling story of revolution, idealism, and a savage struggle for utopia by one of China's greatest living novelists. In 1898 reformist intellectuals in China persuaded the young emperor that it was time to transform his sclerotic empire into a prosperous modern state. The Hundred Days' Reform that followed was a moment of unprecedented change and extraordinary hope--brought to an abrupt end by a bloody military coup. Dashed expectations would contribute to the revolutionary turn that Chinese history would soon take, leading in time to the deaths of millions. Peach Blossom Paradise, set at the time of the reform, is the story of Xiumi, the daughter of a wealthy landowner and former government official who falls prey to insanity and disappears. Days later, a man with a gold cicada in his pocket turns up at his estate and is inexplicably welcomed as a relative. This mysterious man has a great vision of reforging China as an egalitarian utopia, and he will stop at nothing to make it real. It is his own plans, however, which come to nothing, and his "little sister" Xiumi is left to take up arms against a Confucian world in which women are chattel. Her campaign for change and her struggle to seize control over her own body are continually threatened by the violent whims of men who claim to be building paradise.

Peach Blossom Paradise (New York Review Books Classics)

Genre Fiction

El invisible

Contemporary

Adriana Hidalgo Editora

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