Name: Backstreets
ISBN: 9780231202916

Darren Byler

Perhat Tursun

A Novel from Xinjiang

Backstreets

Shona Tiger

Thank you to NetGalley and to Columbia University Press for this eARC.

Perhat Tursun is an Uyghur author who was reportedly imprisoned in 2018 for sixteen years by the Chinese government. In his surreal, stream-of-consciousness novel, an unnamed Uyghur man wanders the foggy streets of Ürümchi, Xinjiang, one night, while looking for a place to stay. The narrative is split between memories of his childhood and village, his experiences as a student in Beijing, accounts of his days at work in this new city, and the disturbing and nightmarish encounters of this night. He bumps into hostile strangers, and wanders into a home where a woman threatens him with a cleaver. He ponders—obsesses over—the meanings of numbers. He is assailed by smells, a major theme in the novel, with horrifying odours creating an unsettling atmosphere, particularly with his vision obscured by the fog. He talks a lot about physical contact, bodies—especially those of women, and sex. He hears things, including a woman screaming, and he knows this is not real.

Even without knowledge of what has happened to the author, this is a heartbreaking account of what it’s like to be unmoored. The narrator has been subjected to childhood trauma, and uprooted through colonization. The narrative shifts, digresses, and comes back in on itself, like the fog in the novel, and one feels just as lost as the narrator. He repeats over and over that he does not know anyone in the strange city, and one feels his complete disconnection and dislocation.

This felt to me very much like reading Marechera’s House of Hunger, with a similarly seemingly unreliable narrator who has very clearly been through and is going through great trauma (also in first person narration). There will also be comparisons to that famous stream-of-consciousness novel, Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway; however, any similarity to it is only in style.

I cannot say I enjoyed this unsettling book, but I am glad I read it.

Rated: 6/10.

Read with: Dambudzo Marechera’s House of Hunger.

Backstreets A Novel from Xinjiang

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