The Last Lover
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- £12.99
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- £12.99
Publisher Description
In Can Xue’s extraordinary book, we encounter a full assemblage of husbands, wives, and lovers. Entwined in complicated, often tortuous relationships, these characters step into each other’s fantasies, carrying on conversations that are “forever guessing games.” Their journeys reveal the deepest realms of human desire, figured in Can Xue’s vision of snakes and wasps, crows, cats, mice, earthquakes, and landslides. In dive bars and twisted city streets, on deserts and snowcapped mountains, the author creates an extreme world where every character “is driving death away with a singular performance.”
Who is the last lover? The novel is bursting with vividly drawn characters. Among them are Joe, sales manager of a clothing company in an unnamed Western country, and his wife, Maria, who conducts mystical experiments with the household’s cats and rosebushes. Joe’s customer Reagan is having an affair with Ida, a worker at his rubber plantation, while clothing-store owner Vincent runs away from his wife in pursuit of a woman in black who disappears over and over again. By the novel’s end, we have accompanied these characters on a long march, a naive, helpless, and forsaken search for love, because there are just some things that can’t be stopped—or helped.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The latest mind-bending novel from Xue (Vertical Motion) is about resisting the "invasions of daily life." In the Western nation of Country A, Joe, a clothing company manager, decides to quit his job to read more books. Vincent, Joe's boss, has been neglecting work and his wife, Lisa, to pursue a woman who might be an apparition. Joe's customer Reagan is losing control of himself and his farm after sleeping with one of his workers, Ida. As desire weaves these characters through a city of wet crows, a plantation overrun with snakes, a pastureland infested with wasps, and an island of invisible turtles, they ponder the ties between love, nature, and death. When these threads begin to converge, Joe and his wife, Maria, share a realization that prompts Joe to follow the story east to an ancient country. Layered in symbolism, the majority of the book is spent in an "unusually intense, approximately hallucinatory state." By threading the fable with image patterns and reoccurring onomatopoeias like "weng weng," Xue stitches themes together and succeeds in creating a unique, immersive, tale of "intersecting dreamworlds." It is a challenging work, but readers committed to experimental and innovative fiction will be snared by this mental journey.
