The Backstreets is an astonishing novel by a preeminent
contemporary Uyghur author who was disappeared by the Chinese
state. It follows an unnamed Uyghur man who comes to the
impenetrable Chinese capital of Xinjiang after finding a temporary
job in a government office. Seeking to escape the pain and poverty
of the countryside, he finds only cold stares and rejection. He
wanders the streets, accompanied by the bitter fog of winter
pollution, reciting a monologue of numbers and odors, lust and
loathing, memories and madness. Perhat Tursun's novel is a work of
untrammeled literary creativity. His evocative prose recalls a vast
array of canonical world writers-contemporary Chinese authors such
as Mo Yan; the modernist images and rhythms of Camus, Dostoevsky,
and Kafka; the serious yet absurdist dissection of the logic of
racism in Ellison's Invisible Man-while drawing deeply on Uyghur
literary traditions and Sufi poetics and combining all these
disparate influences into a style that is distinctly Perhat
Tursun's own. The Backstreets is a stark fable about urban
isolation and social violence, dehumanization and the racialization
of ethnicity. Yet its protagonist's vivid recollections of maternal
tenderness and first love reveal how memory and imagination offer
profound forms of resilience. A translator's introduction situates
the novel in the political atmosphere that led to the disappearance
of both the author and his work.
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