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A review by andrewspink
The Backstreets: A Novel from Xinjiang by Perhat Tursun
3.0
What a strange book! It is saturated with superstition, and magical significance is attached to all sorts of things like walking with the left or right foot over a line or various numbers. And the protagonist is obsessed with numbers, assigning all sorts of meanings to various apparently random numbers. He is also obsessed with smells.
There is no real plot to the book. For most of the time, the protagonist is wandering through the fog looking for a house to stay, but not being able to find the address. It is very reminiscent of Kafka's The Trial, with a similar dream-like state, and I was also reminded of Albert Camus' The Plague, although the reason for that that was harder to put my finger on. The atmosphere evoked, I suppose.
Some of the sentences were hard to make sense of. It is hard to know if that is the translation or in the originals. For instance, 'the handle of the bicycle'. Bikes don't have handles, they have handlebars.
Without the introduction, the whole book is also hard to make sense of. There we learn that the author belongs to the oppressed Uighur minority in Eastern China. Then a lot of the book becomes more understandable. But a lot remains a mystery. At least for me.
The copy of the book this is based on was kindly supplied by the publisher in return for an honest review on Netgalley.
There is no real plot to the book. For most of the time, the protagonist is wandering through the fog looking for a house to stay, but not being able to find the address. It is very reminiscent of Kafka's The Trial, with a similar dream-like state, and I was also reminded of Albert Camus' The Plague, although the reason for that that was harder to put my finger on. The atmosphere evoked, I suppose.
Some of the sentences were hard to make sense of. It is hard to know if that is the translation or in the originals. For instance, 'the handle of the bicycle'. Bikes don't have handles, they have handlebars.
Without the introduction, the whole book is also hard to make sense of. There we learn that the author belongs to the oppressed Uighur minority in Eastern China. Then a lot of the book becomes more understandable. But a lot remains a mystery. At least for me.
The copy of the book this is based on was kindly supplied by the publisher in return for an honest review on Netgalley.