Whether we’re managing a demanding career, caring for children, or both, most of us have dreamt of not being bound to the metaphorical hourglass through which our day seems to slip. But what we actually want is more time, not the absence of time altogether. Being unaware of the passage of time felt like being trapped in a single chaotic moment that never ends. I had no way of knowing how long I’d been sick for, when my caretakers would bring me dinner, or how long my recovery might take. Without a sense of time, seconds stretched indefinitely into the future. When I asked my caretakers for food or coffee, they seemed to disappear for hours before they returned.
In addition to my difficulty perceiving short spans of time, my comprehension of longer periods of time was also affected. I referred to every past event in my life, whether it was my doctor’s appointment the day before or an audition I’d taken years ago, as having happened “yesterday.” I couldn’t remember what date, month or even year it was. I forgot what times of day were appropriate to call friends and family on the phone, and I didn’t understand what people meant when they said they were “busy.” Bedridden and unable to comprehend time, my illness seemed to drag on for eternity with no end in sight.
On November 15, 1966, five police officers entered the Psychedelic Shop, in San Francisco, and purchased a thin volume of poetry, “The Love Book,” for a dollar. This sequence of erotic poems celebrating a woman’s sexual pleasure was by the Beat poet Lenore Kandel. As soon as the money exchanged hands, the deputy arrested the clerk for selling obscene material. The officers then confiscated copies of the book, detained and frisked customers, and put out a warrant for the store owner, who was jailed the next day. Then they headed across town to City Lights Booksellers, which also sold “The Love Book.” A decade earlier, in 1957, the police had impounded Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” at City Lights and arrested the bookseller for peddling pornography. Now history repeated itself as the cops seized Kandel’s poetry and took the clerk into custody. What followed was San Francisco’s last, and longest, obscenity trial over a literary work, and the only one featuring a female writer.
Smith’s characters were real people; plucked from their peaceful rest as she peered under the tombstones of obscurity and discovered the creepy crawlies hiding there.
Smith transforms words from dusty journals, long-forgotten novels and foxed magazines into a tale more sensational than anything written by Ainsworth or his contemporaries, Thackeray and Dickens.
Zhang constructs an unsettling, vertiginous world. Her ornate style reflects the opulence her characters guard so closely, her command of sensory language is impressive, and it’s hard not be mesmerised by prose that is as rich and as startling as the food her protagonist prepares. This ambitious novel frustrates and tantalises in equal measure.