Love in the new century

The characters of this novel seek a different life, so some leave their jobs at the cotton factory and turn into sex workers at the hot springs resort, while one of them voluntarily goes to prison seeking peace, and a third goes to her hometown discovering strange caves and tunnels, while a fourth chooses a refuge in a rural province where Chinese herbs are used in traditional medicine. These characters are intertwined in multiple emotional and physical relationships, as each one seems to be a mirror of the other, with each story beginning where the previous one stopped, in a fluid temporal structure. In this novel, which reached the longlist of the Booker International Prize in 2019, "Ts'an Shuyi" writes about the meaning of life in relation to love, sex, hometown, and work, and about the fading boundary between life and death, and between wakefulness and sleep, in a foggy and tumultuous plot filled with sensory descriptions and vivid metaphors, with echoes of magical realism reverberating throughout.