Details:
- author: Dorothy Tse
- full title: Owlish
- narrator: Jennifer Leong
- genre: literary fiction
- topics: #surreal, #fairytale, #politics, #hongkong
- publisher: Fitzcarraldo Editions Audio
- publish date: 23 Feb 2023
- timing: 6:59:00
My Rating of the Audiobook:
- content: 💙💙💙.5
- narration: 💙💙💙💙💙
Love is blind, as the saying goes. Although, in the case of Professor Q, it would be more accurate to say that love had rearranged his vision.
Excerpt from the Book:
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As the area first exploited by the colonizers, set up as their great international trading hub, Valeria Island was still home to most of the blue-eyed, golden-haired, fresh-faced foreigners in Nevers. All the finest, most longstanding restaurants were there, and so too was a distinctive, age-old atmosphere of arrogance, luxury and indolence. Towards the end of their stroll, the group passed a stretch of luxury villas built into the seized mid-mountain territory, aggressively fortified with black iron gates. As they proceeded back down into the city centre, they heard fluttery strains of jazz music and found both sides of the alley taken up by swaying, half-drunk foreigners. Joking and whispering to one another in Southern, the group brushed past the foreigners as if they themselves were nothing but a band of happy tourists, with no connection whatsoever to the city. Professor Q was the only one who seemed mysteriously perturbed. His ears were humming like organ pipes, and the red lips of the foreigner women rose to dance before his eyes, while their breasts undulated in the dim evening light.
My Thoughts:
Owlish is quite a weird (audio)book. It is a surreal fairytale about a professor of literature named Q. His marriage and career aren’t perfect. Quite the opposite.
Professor Q has a collection of dolls and one day, he gets a new specimen for his collection. He is given a large music box with a ballerina doll inside. After some time, he starts an affair with this life-sized doll. The story takes place on a cultureless island called Nevers.
The story contains elements of ETA Hoffman’s, The Sandman. In this short story, a young man falls in love with a mechanical doll. But Owlish is not only a retelling of this story. It is also a political allegory. Nevers, where this story takes place, is a contemporary Hong Kong.
While I usually really like surreal stories, this was (only) ok. But the reason for this may be because I failed to understand the story in detail as I didn’t know enough about the past events in Hong Kong’s history. So, I recommend reading about the history of Hong Kong before you read this. It helps to understand the political aspect of the story.
About the Author:
Dorothy Tse Hiu-hung (謝曉虹) is the author of four short story collections in Chinese, including So Black (《好黑》, 2005) and A Dictionary of Two Cities (《雙城辭典》, 2013). Translations of her short fiction have appeared in The Guardian, Paper Republic, The Margins (AAWW) and Anomaly. Her English-language collection Snow and Shadow (2014, trans. Nicky Harman), was longlisted for the University of Rochester’s 2015 Best Translated Book Award, and collects short stories from her earlier Chinese books as well as previously unpublished works.
A recipient of the Hong Kong Biennial Award for Chinese Literature and Taiwan’s Unitas New Fiction Writers’ Award, Tse also attended The University of Iowa's International Writing Program in 2011. She is a co-founder of the Hong Kong literary magazine Fleurs des lettres, and currently teaches literature and writing at Hong Kong Baptist University.
About the Narrator:
Jennifer Leong was born in Hong Kong and grew up bilingual. She moved to the UK when she was quite young to attend an international boarding school in Wales.
She has over 5 years of experience working in radio, stage and screen. Recent projects include ‘The Disappearance of Mr Chan’ for BBC Radio 4; ‘Years and Years’ for BBC One and ‘Chimerica’ for Channel 4.
