The Backstreets: A Novel from Xinjiang

by Perhat Tursun Narrated by Fajer Al-Kaisi

Overview

The Backstreets is an astonishing novel by a preeminent contemporary Uyghur author who was disappeared by the Chinese state. It follows an unnamed Uyghur man who comes to the impenetrable Chinese capital of Xinjiang after finding a temporary job in a government office. Seeking to escape the pain and poverty of the countryside, he finds only cold stares and rejection. He wanders the streets, accompanied by the bitter fog of winter pollution, reciting a monologue of numbers and odors, lust and loathing, memories and madness.



Perhat Tursun's novel is a work of untrammeled literary creativity. His evocative prose recalls a vast array of canonical world writers while drawing deeply on Uyghur literary traditions and Sufi poetics and combining all these disparate influences into a style that is distinctly Perhat Tursun's own. The Backstreets is a stark fable about urban isolation and social violence, dehumanization, and the racialization of ethnicity. Yet its protagonist's vivid recollections of maternal tenderness and first love reveal how memory and imagination offer profound forms of resilience. A translator's introduction situates the novel in the political atmosphere that led to the disappearance of both the author and his work.

Editorial Reviews

The Nation - Yangyang Cheng

A work of creative genius that takes as its theme the homelessness many Uyghurs feel as strangers in their own land.

Asymptote - Lauren Bo

Tursun, as rendered into English by Byler and Anonymous, writes with the ease and confidence of some of the greatest philosophical and absurdist writers of the twentieth century.

Times Literary Supplement - Nick Holdstock

There are many political – and perhaps ethical – reasons why The Backstreets deserves a wide readership. But above these should be an appreciation of its literary merits, not least of which are its sustained tone and imagery (well conveyed by Darren Byler and his co-translator).

The Economist

Visceral and often disorientating, The Backstreets illustrates the painful effects of racism and exclusion. It is a strange and devastating novel, a portrait of what it means to become a second-class citizen in your homeland.

NPR Books - Lily Meyer

The Backstreets is an agonizing testimony to the anti-Uyghur policies and prejudices that led to [Tursun and the co-translator's] disappearances. It is also good writing of the sort that makes me feel like somebody has wrenched my head 90 degrees to the left: It's both clear and disorienting, an utterly new way of describing the world.

Words Without Borders - Anita Felicelli

[A] disturbing, socially vital work of literature...

Washington Independent Review of Books - Emily Walz

[D]isorienting, disturbing, evoking a swirl of feelings in the reader.

starred review Monica Carter

The Backstreets is a politically charged, emotional novel about the impacts of prejudice, industrial city life, and desolation on China’s Uyghur people. It is a major literary event that is honest in its portrayal of oppression.

Tony's Reading List - Tony Malone

[A]n excellent work and a pleasure to read. In a relatively short novel, the writer manages to express a people’s plight wrapped up in a story of a walk, and in the pollution that surrounds the walker.

J. M. Coetzee

Wryly intelligent, acutely receptive to the sounds and smells of the life around him, but also half crazy, convinced that the universe is bombarding him with messages in a code he cannot read, and—finally—subjected to the casual contempt of his Han Chinese masters, Perhat Tursun's young hero gives us a darkly poetic record of a struggle to make sense of a world of oppression. A brave and heartrending book.

Elif Batuman

The publication of Perhat Tursun's The Backstreets, together with Darren Byler's illuminating introduction, is a landmark event in English-language world literature. Tursun's narration of the life of an Uyghur office worker in Ürümchi is unforgettable and quietly mindblowing. The style, mood, and scope are evocative of Camus (or maybe of an alternative Camus who wrote from an Algerian perspective), while still feeling utterly distinctive and unprecedented. A triumph.

Wall Street Journal - Sam Sacks

The Backstreets is undoubtedly an important political document, but it is, most of all, a significant addition to the canon of outsider literature.

The Arts Fuse - Bill Marx

A fierce and brave cry of moral repugnance.

The Spectator - Cindy Yu

Poignant and disturbing . . . Life as a persecuted minority colours the book, but Tursun breaks loose of narrow victimhood. The Backstreets is a compelling read in its own right.

Gary Shteyngart

The tragedy of the Uyghurs deserves nothing less than this absolutely brilliant and penetrating book. It is a moral imperative for readers to understand what is happening to this besieged population, and Perhat Tursun's prose is worthy of Kafka's.

World Literature Today - Oliver Dixon

This is a hugely important novel both as an excellent work of narrative art and as the encapsulation of the plight of an imperiled, suppressed ethnic group and its culture. Its translator, Darren Byler, should be loudly applauded for rendering this key text into lucid, well-judged English and bringing it to a global audience, as should his anonymous Uyghur co-translator.

The Guardian - Luke Hallam

Given its author’s disappearance, The Backstreets will inevitably be received as a totem to the Uyghurs, first and foremost. It is that. But it is also more: a rare book that stands out because of the oppressive intensity of its narrative style, one reminiscent of the modernist writers (Dostoevsky, Camus, Freud) . . . At the same time, it carves out a distinctive voice that is uniquely bleak and beautiful.

The Modern Novel - John Alvey

A remarkable work.

The Book Beat - Tom Bowden

The Backstreets reads like a mash-up between Kafka and David Lynch.

The Atlantic - Ed Park

Close to a perfect work of art.

Financial Times - Nilanjana Roy

One of my favourite novels of recent times.

Vancouver Sun - Tom Sandborn

[A] slight, sorrowful, tone-perfect novel . . . Tursun’s novel sings with a kind of lyrical despair and anomie, all rendered with sensual depth and persuasiveness.

The New Yorker

Named a Best Book of 2022 by The New Yorker

Cha: An Asian Literary Journal - Serena De Marchi

Tursun constructs a psychoanalytical auto-fictional biography of a city at the borders of the Chinese state, showing us the ordinary alienation and the mundane repression Uyghur bodies are subjected to in their everyday life. . .The existence of this text in English is a truly luminous event for world literature.

Coda Story - Bradley Jardine

A modernist masterpiece about life in China’s Muslim heartland.

Shu-mei Shih

If there ever is a work of literature that captures the existential condition of presently intensifying settler colonization of an indigenous city, it is Perhat Tursun’s short, masterful novel The Backstreets. This beautifully translated novel should be on the reading list for every conscientious person and adopted for world literature classes on high school, college, and graduate levels.

The Millions

One of The Millions' Most Anticipated Books of 2022

Foreword Reviews, starred review - Monica Carter

The Backstreets is a politically charged, emotional novel about the impacts of prejudice, industrial city life, and desolation on China’s Uyghur people. It is a major literary event that is honest in its portrayal of oppression.

JM Coetzee

Wryly intelligent, acutely receptive to the sounds and smells of the life around him, but also half crazy, convinced that the universe is bombarding him with messages in a code he cannot read, and—finally—subjected to the casual contempt of his Han Chinese masters, Perhat Tursun's young hero gives us a darkly poetic record of a struggle to make sense of a world of oppression. A brave and heartrending book.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940178202869
Publisher:	Tantor Audio
Publication date:	02/28/2023
Edition description:	Unabridged

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