by Wu He, translated from the Chinese by Michael Berry (China, Columbia University Press)

I’m not sure how to define historical fiction. How true does regular fiction need to be to become historical fiction? Is historical fiction something more than entertainment? If so, is it less entertainment than entirely fictional fiction? (Has anyone ever stayed within realism and written entirely fictional fiction, not bringing in some small history, some personal history? I doubt it.) Is this novel—which is maybe not even all that fictional—historical fiction? I’m not sure it really even matters, I’m just having trouble imagining a way to pin this book down long enough to write about it. It’s a book built on the past but that needs the future too, the time ahead.

On October 27, 1930, at a sports meet on an aboriginal reservation in the mountains of Taiwan, the Atayal tribe rose up against the Japanese colonial regime, slaying one hundred and thirty-four people in a headhunting ritual. The Japanese response brought the tribe to the brink of genocide

That part is true, if that kind of thing matters to you. The impetus of Remains of Life is something like an investigation into this event, The Musha Incident. In the afterword, author Wu He writes:

This novel is about three things:

First, the legitimacy and justification behind Mona Rudao launching “The Musha Incident.” In addition to the second Musha Incident.

Second, the Quest of Girl, Who was my next-door neighbor during my time staying on the reservation.

Third, the Remains of Life that I visited and observed while on the reservation.

All this happens concurrently, in a single unbroken, stream-of-consciousness paragraph, with fewer full stops than there are days in the week. In the text, translated by Michael Berry, a conversation with one of the villagers (the “Remains of Life”) can spark a winding, philosophical assessment of the facts of the Musha Incident—

History records the facts, but contemporary history never investigates the facts, it instead investigates the “legitimacy of historical incidents”

—which can eventually abruptly be broken by the appearance of Girl, Wu He’s neighbor and guide who introduces him to even more of the Remains of Life, characters allegorically named, and sometimes renamed, for how Wu He sees and thinks of them: Girl; Boss; Pimp-Bastard; Old Man; Playboy; Skinny Monkey; any of whom might want to talk about any imaginable thing, even their thoughts on the honesty of the novel being written by Wu He.

I need to be loyal to the true face of my writing.

Clause by clause, the novel grows. Conversation, rumination, and observation are modes used to braid Wu He’s three threads, all inspiring and clarifying each other. The past refracts and informs the present, and the way we carry ourselves through the present dictates how we can think about the past. The novel builds. It cycles, it morphs, it reacts. And it grows. The block of text just keeps growing, like life. The relentless prose brings to mind Thomas Bernhard, or even Pierre Guyotat in some regards, but the effect of the prose is to me most like W.G. Sebald. There’s a shared bravery in their not explaining that which can not fully explained, and a peace in looking at it anyway. The text of Remains of Life is not showy circumlocution, or the kind of modernist mishmash you probably think of when you hear “single unbroken paragraph” or “stream-of-consciousness.” It’s a careful, thoughtful accrual of exactly what all an honest man can take in while carrying on. It’s a difficult book to read, though not because it’s hard to pay attention to, or hard to follow—t’s actually delightful, line by line—but because the structure of the book forces the reader into the same position as the narrator: because there are no breaks or refrains, you have to take what you read and carry it with you, forward, into the future and into meaning.

I don’t give much thought to the past destroying the present or the present destroying the future, that’s how I will spend my Remains of Life—in bed with my mind devoid of all thoughts and contemplation

To circle back to my initial questions, Wu He’s Remains of Life is historical fiction, though it doesn’t function remotely like any I’ve read before. It certainly deals with history. It’s a way to start thinking about it, at least. But the reason it should win the Best Translated Book Award isn’t that it’s great historical fiction, it’s that it’s decisively present fiction in a way that no other book I’ve read is. The overlapping layers of consciousness and threads of story serve to collectively mirror back a life; a man, heartbroken, does not so much investigate as he does accrue. He has freewheeling conversations with everyone he encounters because he wants to know more, and they have conversations with him because he listens. He gathers. He adds to himself without reducing the people around him. Their existences are also true. The past becomes both more and less clear. He meditates. He’s trying to understand a number of things, but he doesn’t know if that’s possible, or even predict how he might go about accomplishing understanding. He meditates. He’s content to just try. He carries forward into his own ever-changing Remains of Life. So he goes on, his eyes, his ears, and his heart all wide open, available for whatever happens in the next conversation, or on the next line.

Reading for BTBA, it becomes an even more important question, because I need a damn good answer to keep on reading. So why the hell did I keep on reading Wu He’s Remains of Life? The jacket copy opens with

On October 27, 1930, at a sports meet on an aboriginal reservation in the mountains of Taiwan, the Atayal tribe rose up against the Japanese colonial regime, slaying one hundred and thirty-four people in a headhunting ritual.

Am I reading to educate myself about this event? I didn’t even realize that Taiwan was one of the places Japan had a colony. No, fuck no. If that’s the answer, I’m putting that book down. Besides, this would be the wrong damn book for that. As that same copy says later, “Written in a stream-of-consciousness style, it contains no paragraph breaks and only a handful of sentences.” Not the type of style that lends itself to historical or cultural edification, though one I’m a sucker for. I love Bernhard and By Night in Chile may be my favorite Bolaño. So stick with Remains of Life because its stylistic prose is compelling and unrelenting? Well, no.

I’ll stop being coy and cut to the end. I don’t know why I stuck with this book. I don’t know why I’m still thinking about it. So, that’s the reason why? Because even though I wasn’t in love, even though the answer to each reason to stay was “No, not that,” I still didn’t want to walk away, and that confusion itself fascinates me. I have no idea the last time I was so uncertain in my response, so willing to continue to work and engage and struggle, hoping to crack through to deep pleasure. There have been times I’ve done that work for pages upon pages and realized no breakthrough would come, so I dropped the book. There’ve been times it did happen, suddenly and intensely: Shishkin’s Maidenhair comes to mind.

I want to talk about that prose style. However difficult Bernhard’s prose can be, and his mood so fiercely off-putting, it’s hypnotic, and that takes readers in. There’s repetition, there are base phrases and the sentences use them like breathing, a way for the reader to fall as with a tide. Remains of Life gives you no such thing. The narrator is not the madmen so common to Bernhard’s works but he is a man adrift in his thoughts and in his pursuits, and sees no distinguishing one avenue from another. Commas are a brief break, and may come when you need them, or take you by surprise. At other times, you need one and there’s nothing there.

He’s a man living in a reservation village, fascinated by the way contemporary history views the tribal uprising and subsequent slaughter by Japanese troops. His neighbor identifies herself as the granddaughter of the leader of the headhunt and from there his unbroken narrative begins. In Wu He’s afterward he identifies three topics, which I’ll rewrite to my own understanding as: the historical investigation, and the possible interpretations of that history; the lives of the people, their connections to and dissociations from both past and the contemporary; and the life of that neighbor, known as the Girl, and without quite recognizing it, coming to fall in love with her. He can write about any one or all three at any given moment, and a subtle switch from one to another can occur across the space of a comma. The scarce periods are his way of resetting completely. Of finally shutting down a stream, needing to switch from one of these topics to another. Even when he is focused, thought carries on from thought. Prior to this is dense and intricate political, ideological, and moral thinking about his research and the headhunt, then the period to clear his mind:

By the time I wrote down the words A Politicized Headhunt I prepared a hodgepodge hotpot with sardines and flowering cabbage and hastily ate before crawling into bed and passing out into a deep sleep, after I woke up I sat down in the living room, the mountain mist felt like it was right on my front doorstep, in my daze I seemed to still be stuck on those “two questions,” I already forgot if there was anything I had written that could destroy one’s dignity, but I know that strong white spirits can destroy one’s awareness, I paced back and forth in front of the kitchen cabinet, rummaging through all the items inside, until I actually did get my hands on a bottle of some kind of hard liquor, it took only one look to see that it was 66 proof, probably one of the Ancestral Spirits secretly stashed it there before going home, after all there is nothing wrong with preparing for an emergency, I’ll be sure to give it back to him a little later once it is dark when he comes back with his bag full of white spirits, I took a sip and the primitive flavor wasn’t bad, by the time I took my second sip a well-dressed woman with long black hair and a cool gaze had suddenly appeared outside my screen door, I waited for her to say something but after three seconds she was still dead silent, I had no choice but to sip my way over to the screen door, the woman with the long hair grinned and I immediately recognized that it was the Girl and she was wearing a tight dark-green dress, she was so well dressed, all so that her breasts would really stand out, I raised my cup to her but she shook her head, “I came over to invite you to observe the ceremony the day after tomorrow,” her breasts were pressed right up against the screen door, I told her to be careful not to get her shirt dirty, “It’s okay these are my pajamas,” I almost wanted to tell her that it was no big deal, my birthday suit is my pajamas, “I’m going to Christmas morning prayer and joining the church, you wanna come,” wearing your birthday suit to bed is much more convenient as you can wear it both summer and winter

Like Girl, most characters don’t have names, instead an identity the narrator gives to them, based one something about their life, their physicality, their personality, and this can shift, without warning, as his conception of them does. It both distances him from them, and creates intimacy, in line with his role in the village. He’s an outsider, but he’s the most honest outsider they’ve encountered, because he knows that’s his role. He lives alone, he wanders, he visits people and they visit him. It’s an independent pattern of life that they all recognize and respect. He pressures no one. Many have come to research the Musha Incident, but he may be the first to simply live there.

The narrator himself may explain my uncertainty about Remains of Life. He is unsettled: in his own identity, in his role in the village, in the village’s role in his life, in what his future will hold, in his understanding of the past, in culture’s understanding of the past, and on and on. He may not have many answers, and answers he finds are slipping away, to be replaced. In a book as complex as this, with a narrator so willing to confront uncertainties, maybe it’s not surprising that’s mostly what I’m left with. Throughout the novel, he talks to as many people as he can, in conversations both long and short, about whatever the other person wants. In that spirit, I want others to read this, so conversations can come, and maybe I’ll figure out what I make of it all.