Thursday, June 28, 2018

Fantasy? Book Review: The Invisible Valley by Su Wei, Translated by Austin Woerner




  The Invisible Valley is a Chinese Novel by Su Wei - a professor of Chinese language and literature at Yale, translated into English by Austin Woerner for publishing in 2018 by Small Beer Press, which publishes more "literary" works of fiction than the typical SF/F publisher.  Indeed, whether or not The Invisible Valley counts as "fantasy" is questionable - there's the hint of the supernatural at times in the book, but even that hint is extremely minor at best- hence the question mark in the title of this post.  But what is clear is that The Invisible Valley is an incredible piece of literature that I have to strongly recommend, regardless of whether or not it counts as genre or not.

  The Invisible Valley is a story about family, love and relationships and what those truly mean.  Taking place in China during the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1960s-1970s), the story follows a Chinese Man, Lu Beijing, sent for agricultural "re-education" into the Country who encounters a polyamorous family of mountain people who challenge his way of thinking.  While this story also involves are a legendary giant snake and a potential haunting, it's not really about them, but rather a story about family and love and its incredibly powerful for that.

More after the Jump - a warning, I'm going to struggle to really explain my feelings about this story, so I hope this review does this book justice.

--------------------------------------------------Plot Summary-----------------------------------------------------
Lu Beijing was sent to a work camp as part of the Chinese Cultural Revolution's "re-education" program, meant to teach City men about agricultural labor after the Maoist revolution.  But one day he picks up a stray tag on the ground and finds himself "Ghost Married" to the dead daughter of the work crew's foreman, as part of a custom whereby the elder child - even if dead - must be married before the younger child can be married.  The foreman promptly puts Lu on cattle duty, forcing Lu to live in the mountains in care of a the crew's herd of cattle.  The mountains, where legends suggest lies a giant snake that can devour anything that disturbs its slumber.  And then there's the signs Lu seems to find that his "ghost wife" is haunting him, and that there might be more to her death than anyone knows.

But what Lu finds in the mountains instead is a strange family of mountain people, a woman Jade, several children, and three adult men, the quiet Stump, the pious Kingfisher, and the strange Autumn.  The children are the product of Jade and a mixture of the other adult men, and Lu finds himself confused at their collective....but finds himself drawn to the young adventurous boy named "Smudge" and enticed by the lovely woman Jade.  And then there's the young man Autumn, whose mind knows poetry and philosophy far beyond his years, of whom Lu doesn't know quite what to think.

As Lu comes to grips with this strange family, as well as the truth of what really happened to his ghost wife, he will learn more about not just himself, but the meaning of family....and love.
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The Invisible Valley is pretty much the opposite of a quick read, despite not being technically a very long book (it's 400 pages long).  It's also written in a reflective style with a seemingly oft forgotten framework that I'm not particularly used to - the book is ostensibly being told by an older Lu in our times to a writer to make a fiction story out of, but this framework often disappears for pages at a time and never comes to anything of its own.

And yet none of that really matters that much because the story is engrossing, even where it seems like little is happening for pages at a time.  It helps that five of the main named characters - Lu, Jade, Kingfisher, Smudge, and Autumn are deep and complex in interesting ways.  Jade, Kingfisher, and Autumn in particular are interesting - Kingfisher probably the least, but he's certainly fascinating in how he comes about in the end, with him making a decision at the end which one would totally not expect from a pious often dictatorial man who in one notable event in the book commits a monstrous harm upon Lu and other members of the family.

Then there's Jade and Autumn, both of whom take what are seemingly common character archetypes in this type of story and subvert them in interesting ways.  Jade, as a woman who has kids with multiple members of the family, and who Lu finds himself attracted to (and the feeling is mutual), is a woman who at times takes charge, while at other times holds back, in ways that aren't always consistent, but always feel very natural.  I don't know how to describe it better than that - she's not a woman who is willing to take shit lying down, and is definitely not one to be okay with being treated as anything less than a valuable person (a scene near the end where she and Lu have a confrontation over how he values her and their potential offspring is particularly interesting), and yet at the same time she at times will let the other men in the family take charge (not in that way, thankfully) and harbors prejudices and possessiveness of her own.

Auburn is a character who is maybe a bit more typical, and yet just as engrossing.  You will probably foresee part of the twist regarding Autumn coming (I know I did) and yet how the book is going to have that play out in the end surprised me quite a bit.  He's very much a modern book character (I wish I could find out when this book was published in China, but I can't find it anywhere) set in a time period which requires him to hide a large part of who he is (okay, not going to keep trying to talk around it, he's gay). As he comes to know Lu more, and falls for Lu while still trying to remain reserved, it's hard for a reader not to really hope for the best for him, and the situation he finds himself in never stops being heartbreaking.

As  you can guess from the above, while I said this story is engrossing, it is not a happy book - and the framing device does make clear pretty early that its not heading toward a happy ending. So if you're looking for a romantic story that will result in a heartwarming ending, don't look here.  This is a story about love and family, but it is not about those things bringing unconditional good to individuals or the world.  Each of the above characters is to a certain extent a tragic figure, and their stories definitely more fit that rubric than any other.

The translation itself is....interesting.  For some reason - and this is just weird, not really a complaint or anything - dialogue is represented in this book by paragraphs/sentences that begin with em-dashes, not quotation marks.  There's also more than a few passages of poetry/songs in this book, which I'm betting are translated not quite literally as they tend to keep rhyming schemes even in the English translation.  I'm not the best judge of poetry honestly, so I won't say much more on this, but the translated verses are generally fine at conveying the images/moods meant to come across.

The book has flaws mind you.  The other Re-Eds are consistently less interesting than Lu and the family, and Lu's ex-girlfriend who comes back into play on various occasions is more of a straw character than anything else, with not great gender dynamics there.  Autumn's story might also be too much of that of the tragic homosexual for others' taste, though I think it's done in a way that is interesting and worth reading (as I'm straight).  The final adult in the family, Stump, also is kind of bland and he's just kind of there.

Still, I really enjoyed The Invisible Valley and would recommend it for those interested in a story, often-tragic, about love, family and relationships.  It's really well done, even though I know I've described it poorly.
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