![]() ![]() I love my own kind - womankind,” Lazi contends in one of many letters to Shui Ling. The two embark on a tantric, mostly agonizing battle of wills, alternately courting and rejecting each other. Lazi falls in love with her slightly older female classmate Shui Ling, a love she strains to resist and equates with a crime. Set in Taipei in the late 1980s, directly following the cessation of martial law, the novel follows a wry, soulful and somewhat miserable young woman nicknamed Lazi, who spends much of her time alone, reading, writing and decoding her obsessions deep into the night while somehow scraping by at one of Taiwan’s most esteemed universities. Bonnie Huie’s translation is nothing short of remarkable - loving, even one gets the sense that great pains have been taken to preserve the voice behind this lush, ontological masterwork. “Cruelty and mercy are one and the same.” This way of reframing dualities within a binary system - and pummeling that system - is the soul of this thrillingly transgressive coming-of-age story by the Taiwanese writer Qiu Miaojin. “One day it dawned on me as if I were writing my own name for the first time,” the narrator of “Notes of a Crocodile” declares in the early pages. ![]() ![]() ![]() NOTES OF A CROCODILE By Qiu Miaojin Translated by Bonnie Huie 304 pp. ![]()
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