I wish I could’ve liked this book.
I think what makes this book really difficult is how monumentally large it is - in scope and in content. Lingshan isn’t just a novel or autobiography: in many chapters it also aims to preserve and archive local traditions, history, poetry, folk songs, legends, and personalities. Not an easy task, and Gao’s writing and retellings often get overwhelming and a little tedious. Sometimes it feels as if he felt the need to document every village he visited - many little details are documented, important preservation but at what feels like largely the expense of the reader.
Gao’s journey spans a vast chunk of China (though an appreciably long journey, one that isn’t a picture of the whole country). From the mountains and forests of rural Sichuan in southwest China, he follows a route that can be traced along the Yangzi River through Guizhou and Hunan to Shanghai. The story ends with Gao in Beijing, where he originally fled from and returns after his journey.
I think the way these two points are explored in the book are pretty compelling. Gao’s journeys take him to the periphery of Han Chinese civilisation - to areas traditionally occupied by ethnic minorities like the Miao, Qiang, and Yi peoples. His archival of these folk traditions feels driven by a sense of urgency. He understands the value of this preservation, and laments the loss of oral legends and stories lost to time and more crucially, human destruction. The destruction of local artefacts and history to the Cultural Revolution is a constant source of regret.
Central also to this book is a snapshot of a changing China. Gao’s exploration of the industrialisation and modernisation of China, as well as the lingering effects of the Cultural Revolution and other government campaigns takes place in what feels like a forgotten part of China. There’s a brief passage in the beginning of the book that’s stuck with me, where Gao is in the middle of a vast mountain forest of ancient sequoia trees:
I put out my hand to verify my existence, but I can’t see it. It is only when I flick my lighter that I see my arm is raised too high, as if I were holding a flame torch. The lighter goes out even though there’s no wind. The surrounding darkness becomes even thicker, boundless. Even the intermittent chirping of the autumn insects becomes mute. My ears fill with darkness, primitive darkness. So it was that man came to worship the power of fire, and thus overcame his inner fear of darkness. p. 99
Gorgeous. The entire passage reads even better (but I can’t include everything for the sake of brevity). From this point on, the reader sees overlogged forests, polluted rivers and lakes, species of animals, fish and plants going extinct, and rural villages on the verge of transforming into tourist destinations. Gao’s writing isn’t very opinionated much of the time, and to read this is to read what feels like an honest account.
What is particularly poor about this book is its English translation, which I can describe as atrocious at worst and “literal” at best. Chinese is a very complex language and a word for word translation is impossible. That the English translator did what she did here is tantamount to a crime. Many poems and folk songs lose their meanings in English, and though that may be excused since Chinese poems are notoriously difficult to translate, even factual historical lists are translated poorly. It’s obvious that the prose in English is terrible - batshit crazy even. I’d almost certainly suggest reading the original Chinese source text or an alternate translation - because I could not imagine a worse way of adapting this text.
Part of this is why I get the sense that some literature often describes the novel as alienating to the reader. This is exceedingly true, but I think not completely by merit of the novelist himself. While it is true that the modernist prose is difficult at times, this is amplified for the entire text by a terrible translation. For a 500 page book, this proves excrutiating.
I keep returning to this in my mind, month after month. I think while I had initially mostly written it off it was nonetheless a really compelling book in hindsight. I wish I engaged with it more critically.
3.5/5
Written 26 July 2022 Adapted from my review on Goodreads.