It took me a while to dissect where my fascination with “off-real-world” novels — fantasies, sci-fi, and mainly web novels — began; by then, I already consumed too much of them. I marveled at how within the blink of an eye the hero solves universally daunting challenges with his superpower, envied how the protagonists in cultivation fiction transcend life and death through practicing “Qi”, and was captivated by authors who crafted the entire fictional world so vividly that the line between what’s real and what’s fictional seems blurred. Naturally, I slid into Taoists’ and Aristotle’s meditations on metaphysics, and simultaneously became enamored with the beauty and flexibility of language, when I witnessed how those amateur writers elegantly crafted new words, rich in imageries and layered with multi-facet meanings, to construct their imagined realms.
I guess this early reading preference was what hindered me from enjoying 18th and 19th-century “foreign literature” read at my school — that’s what we called the early modern European literature in my primary school in Shanghai as if the West encompassed all that is “foreign” (and I did buy into that as a ten-year-old). I was reluctant to touch them: the awkward and stilted translatese in Mandarin translations of these classics repelled mMandarin translations of these classics repelled mee — literally translating literature from other languages into Mandarin falls flat, and the translated works lacked the linguistic fluidity and colloquialness that I encountered in the web novels. What’s more, they either just present the reality — already boring enough — in a realistic way, or in a harsher way, forcing readers to scrutinize real-world conflicts that are eased and avoided in those “off-real-world” works. Accompanied by our lit teacher’s test-oriented “reading comprehension” exercises that reduced these works into soulless texts, I hated “foreign literature”.
It wasn't until one afternoon in seventh grade when I walked into a bookstore and noticed a section labeled “La-Mei” that my taste changed. The exotic pronunciation of “La-Mei” reminded me of the names of characters in my childhood favorite fantasy story, and only after I was intrigued by this serendipitous connection, I realized that “La-Mei” is an abbreviation for “Latin America”. On the front row of the shelves, I saw a book titled “The Return”, translated into Mandarin as “The Return to the Dark Night”, which also sounds so much like those “off-real-world” sci-fi or fantasy novels. I thus bought it, anticipating some cultivation plots in the book, and eagerly started reading.
Nope. The book completely went beyond what I thought was allowed in literature: Bolano’s “The Return” is a hauntingly surreal short story collection revolving around death, violence, and prostitution. It is nothing about superpowers, cultivation, or transcending human flesh — it did talk about flesh, but what Bolano presents is the visceral and eerie experiences of a soul observing its own corpse being raped. Though Mandarin copies of Spanish works also possess their own translatese, Bolano’s stories were far too freaky and abnormal that sound almost “otherworldly” — like a darkened version of those sci-fi or fantasy novels. My bewilderment only deepened when I read critiques calling him the best Chilean novelist: how can those disturbing tales steeped in posthumous experiences and sex be celebrated as “highly serious literature”?
Strangely as it might seem, I liked to force myself to do something I felt reluctant about — one peculiar habit influenced by my reading of cultivation novels. Cultivators have to be toughened by actively pushing themselves into mental and physical hardship before gaining transcendental powers; oddly, I liked to mimic this process, as if I too could be “cultivated”. Consequently, I forced myself to delve deeper into Bolano — “Distant Star”, “By Night in Chile”, “Nazi Literature in the Americas”... Then, gradually and imperceptibly, something changed in what I saw in those eerie and bizarre stories.
I stopped to focus on the overt eeriness of his mesmerizing tales but rather tasted a subtle nostalgia woven throughout his books. Behind the macabreness of stories and their underlying melancholy, something deeper seemed to surface. Bolano likes to ask his protagonists to be detectives, and I found myself doing something similar: I started to decipher his writing, treating the interlinked books as threads and pieces of a perplexing puzzle. The centuries of colonialism and political upheaval that Latin America endured began to unfold before me after the “investigation”. I realized that Bolano’s unsettling surrealist stories were living continuums of Chile’s historical shame as a satellite, the desolation of people miring in poverty, and the confusion brought by rapid modernization that destructed the world view of “old countries”, while his characters’ eccentric and tragic experiences mirrored Bolano’s own years of persecution and near homeless. I finished piecing the jigsaw puzzle at the end of my eighth grade, just as my school’s history class was teaching the Chinese Cultural Revolution and China’s similar experiences in the 20th century — the vicissitudes and the tragic undertone were so similar during those decades. I finally felt as if I had glimpsed into something unspeakable and unarticulated — the weight of real-world history (some part of that remaining literally unsayable due to governmental censorship). In comparison, “off-real-world” fictions seem to have an unbearable lightness. That was when those 'off-real-world' novels began to lose their weight for me.
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