Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
All the Rivers Run South

All the Rivers Run South

Yu, Ouyang

Paperback

General FictionLiterary Fiction

ISBN10: 1923099000
ISBN13: 9781923099005
Publisher: Puncher & Wattmann
Published: Nov 7 2023
Pages: 416
Weight: 1.19
Height: 0.93 Width: 5.83 Depth: 8.27
Language: English

I want to say that Ouyang Yu plays with language, but he doesn't: what he does is recognise that language plays with us. This digressive, almost hallucinatory narrative unites Ouyang Yu's abiding obsessions: identity, history, cultural hypocrisy, race, the nature of storytelling. How do we approach a story as loose as life - one that will honour the messiness of life lived in what cannot help being both its first and final draft? All the Rivers Run South is about the work of addressing oneself to history, to a history that cannot be told in one way (something which might also be said of Ouyang Yu's own work). It recalls something Javier Marías said about fiction that in it, material truer than history is made available to us. The author creates history, giving us life as it is lived, and the struggle to make sense of that - as personal history, as geopolitical history - while remaining open to serendipity and to the death, figurative as well as literal, of the author, constituting history's only guaranteed warrant. Ouyang Yu provides comfort for the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable. All the Rivers Run South is a salve and salvo for anyone who has ever thought, with Calderón, that man's greatest crime is to be born. - Declan Fry

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