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
The Last Lover

The Last Lover

Can Xue
Finegan, Annelise

Paperback

Series: Margellos World Republic of Letters

Literary Fiction

ISBN10: 0300153325
ISBN13: 9780300153323
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: Jul 29 2014
Pages: 336
Weight: 0.75
Height: 1.10 Width: 5.10 Depth: 7.60
Language: English
Awards: Best Translated Book Award
From the sensational Chinese author who has been called a new world master, a Kafkaesque novel set in a fictional Western nation

Winner of the 2015 Best Translated Book Award for fiction, presented by Three Percent, a resource for international literature

[A] mind-bending novel. . . . Xue succeeds in creating a unique, immersive, tale of 'intersecting dreamworlds.'--Publishers Weekly

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.

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