Publishers Weekly
★ 08/10/2020
Chinese writer Ge Fei (The Invisibility Cloak) begins a trilogy with an engrossing retelling of the Peach Blossom Paradise myth, about a fisherman who, after briefly discovering a utopian society hidden from the outside world, is unable to find it again. The story takes place during China’s failed Hundred Days’ Reform in 1898, and the myth serves as a metaphor for the fleeting idealism of revolutionaries. After a landowner vanishes from the Chinese village of Puji, an intellectual appears on the estate and openly challenges China’s dynastic traditions, captivating the landowner’s daughter, Xiumi. When the intellectual’s body later turns up bloated in a river, his diary is confiscated by Xiumi, who learns of his involvement in a shadowy pro-republic revolutionary group. Xiumi is then kidnapped into sexual slavery by criminals protected by the government, and after she escapes, she becomes radicalized and determines to organize her village against rural anarchy and imperialist rapacity. Rather than offering a well-trodden narrative of romance and revolution, Ge Fei shows that a determined revolutionary isn’t necessarily a shrewd one. Xiumi fails to revolutionize Puji and pays dearly for her attempt. Whether the cost was worth it may be what the subsequent volumes seek to answer in this stirring, illuminating saga. (Oct.)
From the Publisher
Shortlisted for the 2021 National Book Award for Translated Literature
"An engrossing retelling of the Peach Blossom Paradise myth. . . . Rather than offering a well-trodden narrative of romance and revolution, Ge Fei shows that a determined revolutionary isn’t necessarily a shrewd one . . . [A] stirring, illuminating saga." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Peach Blossom Paradise has none of the solidity of settled history. Or rather, its unspoken point is that history itself is the incalculable sum of countless individual desires and misapprehensions. . . . A degree of delicacy is required to conjure the theme of transience, and it seems to me that Canaan Morse’s translation into English is exemplary, capturing the novel’s many registers—its childhood innocence, its biting humor and its streaks of terror and brutality—while preserving the narrative buoyancy that seems to leave the entire novel levitating in midair.” —Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal
"A complex work of alternative history (its invented characters commit deeds that parallel those of real revolutionaries int he late 1890s and early 1900s, while forming and breaking plenty of romantic attachments), it has been gracefully translated by Canaan Morse, following its initial publication in China in 2007." —Jeffery Wasserstrom, The TLS
”It is impossible to enter the deeper aspects of contemporary Chinese literature without also entering the world of Ge Fei.“ —Enrique Vila-Matas
“Unlike the spiritually stifled Beijing of The Invisibility Cloak, the rural milieu that Peach Blossom Paradise depicts is electrified, however fleetingly, by a sense that another world might be possible. . . . It has to be a rare achievement for a book this richly (and, for the most part, traditionally) plotted to end up feeling like one long, vaporous sigh.” —Andrew Chan, 4 Columns
