Owlish

A Novel

De: Dorothy Tse, Natascha Bruce - translator

Narrado por: Greg Chun

A professor falls in love with a mechanical ballerina in a mordant and uncanny fable of contemporary Hong Kong

With your face covered, sneaking into a city you thought you knew, are you still yourself? Or have you crossed to another world, where the streets are unpredictable and the people strangers, where you might at any moment run into some unknown dream version of yourself?

In a city called Nevers, there lives a professor of literature called Q. He has a dull marriage and a lackluster career, but also a scrumptious collection of antique dolls locked away in his cupboard. And soon Q lands his crowning acquisition: a music box ballerina named Aliss who has tantalizingly sprung to life. Guided by his mysterious friend Owlish and inspired by an inexplicably familiar painting, Q embarks on an all-consuming love affair with Aliss, oblivious to the protests spreading across the university that have left his classrooms all but empty.

The mountainous city of Nevers is itself a mercurial character with concrete flesh, glimmering new construction, and “colonial flair.” Having fled there as a child refugee, Q thought he knew the faces of the city and its people, but Nevers is alive with secrets and shape-shifting geographies. The winner of a 2021 PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant, Owlish is a fantastically eerie debut novel that is also a bold exploration of life under oppressive regimes.

©2020 Dorothy Tse. (P)2023 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved. Translation © 2023 by Natascha Bruce.

Reseñas de la Crítica

“This layered audiobook could be experienced as one man's midlife crisis.… Greg Chun's subtle performance encourages the listener to look beyond the dullard protagonist to what's happening around him.… This fantastical allegory is Tse's pointed commentary on her homeland of Hong Kong. Chun's deft portrayal of the broad characters doesn't detract from Tse's condemnation of her society. This textured production can be viewed as a story of one man's mistake or one nation's decline.”—AudioFile Magazine

“Tse’s prose curls around Q like a vine, dropping him in landscapes that are equal parts Bosch and Freud, lush and deranged. Imagine an after-hours cut of Disney’s ‘Fantasia’; Alexander Portnoy on acid; a Losing Your Virginity theme park brought to you by Mephistopheles. . . . His vision of freedom remains private and acquisitive, whereas Tse suggests that real freedom—political, imaginative, and erotic—does not subjugate others; real freedom is democratic, a public and collective project.”—Katy Waldman, The New Yorker

“A wonderfully imaginative fable that resonates with political critique and protest.”—Kirkus Reviews