But then traveling light is, at heart, about going solo. What's the point of winnowing your stuff down to something you can sling over your shoulder if you have to wait around for someone else to gather their stuff at baggage claim? It was an unsettling realization, the first few times I traveled by myself — ventures that felt so far from my experiences growing up as to almost require their own vocabulary — that it could be so blissfully easy. It felt like shirking responsibilities that hadn't actually been assigned to me. For so long, travel had been all about strengthening ties; to feel like there were no strings on me gave me a sense of guilty exhilaration.
After my interaction back in Singapore, however, I had doubts as to my ability to write this next novel. If there were readers out there who believed I didn’t have the right to tell a story set in Singapore—the land of my birth, the only home I knew—who was I to embark on this novel, set in a part of southern China that I’d only visited twice, during a time period that I knew almost nothing about? While I am Chinese, my family hasn’t lived in China for several generations. My relatives live in Singapore, Hong Kong, or the US. English is my first language, and my years in America have chipped away at my ability to read Chinese. If I wasn’t Singaporean enough to tell a Singaporean story, then how could I possibly be Chinese enough to tell a Chinese one?
“Tangerine” is over the top, but it is also endearing and even impressive in the force of its determination to conjure a life more exciting than most lives are. It’s not Tangier that the novel summons but the desire for Tangier, less a city than a blurry reverie of romance and adventure. It requires readers already infected with such daydreams, but when it finds them it will be just the ticket.
Thumbing through The Drug of Art, the first major publication in English of the poetry of Czech modernist Ivan Blatný (1919–1990), provides for a rich visual experience. The poems expand and contract, sometimes spreading into prose, sometimes remaining clipped and brief; they are peppered with the accents of multiple languages, inflected with lines of gray text; and some appear alongside images of typed or handwritten originals. The collection, edited by Veronika Tuckerová, spans Blatný’s oeuvre, and much of the book’s stylistic innovation responds to the task of presenting the work of a writer whose motives are difficult to determine, and of translating poems that are precariously perched within the Czech language to begin with.
Although the first half of the novel suffers from an excess of backstory, which interrupts the sense of quiet urgency she has introduced in her characters, Ordinary People is nonetheless a deftly observed, elegiac portrayal of modern marriage, and the private – often painful – quest for identity and fulfilment in all its various guises.
What’s so interesting about this particular puzzle, though? What’s the “so what” factor here? It has to do with how all human communities seem to inherently divide their citizens into separate classes, often people who live side by side without understanding how vastly different their experiences of the same geographical spaces are. Miéville doesn’t explicitly call out, for example, how homeless individuals and families navigate cities compared with people in more stable homes, but the comparison is right there under the surface of the economically depressed Besźel alongside the thriving Ul Qoma.
Once readers notice this uncomfortable theme, another question naturally emerges: Who and what maintains the separation between one person’s experiences of a place and someone else’s? What happens when the borders fuzz together, when one person crashes into another?