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Dorothy Tse (author), Natascha Bruce (translator), Owlish, Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2023. 224 pgs.
Dorothy Tse’s Owlish, translated from the Chinese by Natascha Bruce, is a novel that keeps you gripped. It does so through a strange, constant pull that gets stronger as the narration moves forward, producing a slow realisation that what is pulling the reader along is how very open to interpretation everything in this book is.
The plot, with its blurry contours, describes a passionate love story that acts as a stand in for a shifting identity—exactly what or who the two poles of this amorous entanglement are is partially up to the reader. The main couple in this story could be the lopsided one composed of Professor Q and the life-sized multilingual mechanical ballerina atop a music box. Or it could be that of the student protesters, perennially in the background, and the city of Nevers, an only slightly more fantastical version of Hong Kong. Or it could be the puritanical, repressive and fragile Maria and her husband, the same Professor Q, who embraces a mechanical doll; or Professor Q, again, and Owlish himself, lost in a symbiotic embrace—now they are two, then only one.
Pushing this further still, the main couple could also be composed of the reader, and their relationship with Nevers: the deeper it is, the more exact and painfully close to the bone the novel is. We can also detect another intense love story in between the pages, and that is the one of Dorothy Tse herself and literature. Time and again, we feel in Owlish the lingering memory of stories by Calvino, Kafka or Orwell, and of the classical and modern Chinese and Japanese tales of metamorphosing beings and shape-shifting realities. For every one subtle reference to world literature that a reader like myself can spot, there are, for sure, many more hiding in between the story threads, the words, the language, the sentence construction. Hidden in plain sight, of course, is also Walter Benjamin—Nevers, the fictional name given to Hong Kong, is also the name of the town in Burgundy, France, where Benjamin was put in an internment camp in 1940. Far from being an abstruse interpretation, this is made particularly evident in the Chinese title of Owlish, which is 陌根地 (mak6gan1dei6), a pun on the region of Burgundy, normally written as 勃艮地 (but6gan3dei6). In his Theses on the Philosophy of History, written shortly before his death on the back of envelopes that were his sole pieces of writing paper, Benjamin rages against those who speak of the inevitability of progress, and the generalised complacency that brought forward fascism: Nevers. Burgundy. Hong Kong. Owlish.
The most visible plot in the novel is definitely not the only one in the book: Professor Q is on the run from boring duties and the growing awareness that he may not be a great poet after all, and, as he spins around in his depression, he alights on a mechanical ballerina named Aliss, with whom he absconds by day in an abandoned church. There, he tries to cheat himself out of his despondency by engaging in pretty unerotic and lurid sex with the doll, granting himself a few more weeks of narcissistic self-delusion until a predictable burnout in which his real (insofar as life in a novel is real) life and his fantasised one blur into one single nightmare. His superiors at university know of his secret activities, and force him to get in line—in a scene that appears too close for comfort to what is happening in many universities in Hong Kong, where a new political atmosphere, in the wake of the National Security Law, has effectively banned all activism from campus, as well as brought about modified curricula, banned student unions and newspapers, and seen the departure (most often voluntary but also enforced) of many academics and students, among many other changes.
Owlish was started before the 2019 protests and finished in 2020 just before the National Security Law was enacted. So while we do see the protests in the background of the novel, and look on helplessly as young people go on strike and express on the streets their desire for a different political structure in which to live and dream (one of the words that were used in 2019 to indicate “to join a protest march”), only to be met with institutional indifference and violence. There is very little dialogue in Nevers: the characters mostly think to themselves, and the few times in which they speak to one another, there is a speaker, and a mostly acquiescing listener, by turns cowed into submission, or trying to end the exchange as fast as possible.
And so, with a feeling of inevitability and regret, Nevers is made to march towards a future its citizens have had no hand in choosing. We know, from an email wrongly forwarded to Maria—Professor Q’s wife, who has a high ranking government job—that the city planners want to completely reshape the city. Maria, scared of the implications of an email not meant for her eyes, deletes it, and calmly goes about deleting everything else that clashes with the quiet life she is determined to live: she will delete Q’s indiscretion. She will delete any unfitting aspiration. She will delete the protesters, and the heavy price they paid for their unauthorised dreams.
How to cite: Sala, Ilaria Maria. “All the Subtle References: Dorothy Tse’s Owlish.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 14 Dec. 2023, chajournal.blog/2023/12/14/nevers.
Ilaria Maria Sala is a writer and a ceramist, based in Hong Kong. She writes in English and Italian, and occasionally in other languages. She is the author of three books (the latest, Pechino 1989, published in 2019 in Italian, is a memoir in words and photos.) Her writing has appeared on The New York Times, Cha, The Guardian, Le Monde,Zolima, and many other publications. People drink and eat from her ceramics in three continents. [All contributions by Ilaria Maria Sala.]