Elsewhere: 'Wonderful writing' Sarah Hall

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A short story collection can be a great vehicle for showcasing different styles and forms, and so it is with Yan Ge’s Elsewhere, the English-language debut from an award-winning Chinese writer whose work has been published in a number of Irish literary journals and anthologies. Born in Sichuan, Ge lived in Ireland for a number of years but is currently based in Norwich, where she completed an MFA at the University of East Anglia and was the recipient of the UEA International Award 2018/2019. Other accolades to date include the Mao Dun Literature Prize and being named by People’s Literature magazine as one of 20 future literature masters in China. I have been a fan of Ge’s writing since reading How I Fell in Love with the Well-Documented Life of Alex Whelan a story of death and obsession published in Being Various: New Irish Short Stories in 2019. And Elsewhere more than lived up to my expectations. And what do we say when many years later people ask us about the big earthquake in 2008★” Vertical said. A gripping, stunning work, worldly and otherworldly. Rich with philosophical depths, comedy, feeling and playfulness, Elsewhere is a wondrous book of books. It is like new light in an old, searching world.” —Madeleine Thein, author of Do Not Say We Have Nothing

I love this where an Asian writes her book in English over English translated Asian books, it shows a more authentic and unique side of the author which is hard to achieved when the book is being translated by someone else that is not the original author. How do you know this is all real and happening? How can you be sure you haven't already died in the earthquake and are just living in the afterlife?'

In this Spotlight:

I’ve heard about you,” one of them, a man in his forties, said. “You’re the kid who writes fiction.” This collection of stories is so assured, and delivered with such aplomb, that it’s hard to believe it’s a debut — and, as it turns out, that’s because it isn’t. Although Elsewhereis Yan Ge’s first book written in English, she is a seasoned novelist in China, where she has been publishing fiction for more than twenty years. Let me, first and foremost, gather my thoughts because it has been so long since I read an eclectic and multifaceted pieces of writing. In twenty years, Yan Ge has authored thirteen books written in Chinese, working across an impressive range of genres and subjects. Now, Yan Ge transposes her dynamic storytelling onto another linguistic landscape. The result is a collection humming with her trademark wit and style—and with the electricity of a seasoned artist flexing her virtuosity with a new medium.

The atmosphere of Strange Beasts of China is delightful. Through the narrator’s futile quest to catalog beasts, Yan captures the fluidness of city life, the way urban space defies definition even for people hellbent on making sense of it." This collection, to be published on July 11th, 2023 tells different stories, in different voices, with a common thread of ‘otherness’ throughout each piece. While the title of the collection is “Elsewhere”, the feeling of being outside looking in on characters who are outside of their community, their time and place, and even themselves is a consistent theme. Each story was driven from one specific perspective, and that character moved through their own story like they didn’t quite fit. This off-balance characterization left me feeling off balanced as well. He stood up and walked into the Little House. The light was still on. Sister Du was curled up on a booth seat, snoring. I watched through the window as Old Stone went behind the bar, grabbed a Tsingtao, and returned. I took the bottle, walked outside, and sat down at the table with Vertical, her boyfriend Chilly, and Six Times. A woman with a basket approached, wondering if any of us would be interested in purchasing her goods. She lifted up the lid, revealing the little turtles inside. They were luminous, as white as pearls. I heard earlier on TV,” I said, “that the number of casualties is now sixty-two thousand, three hundred and fifty-seven.”

Table of Contents

My favourite is the story is “How I Fell in Love with the Well-Documented Life of Alex Whelan” which is a fun ride for me and my second favourite is “Free Wandering” where it is close to a magical realism experimental piece that surprises me at the end. As a result of this cosmopolitanism, the stories in Elsewhere are jangly and eclectic, set in wildly different time periods and filled with dissonances. That shit-and-literature theme recurs, in various incarnations, throughout. Elsewhere’s characters seem constantly in abdominal discomfort; someone vomits in five of the nine stories. The act of eating meat takes on a horrifying resonance, in part because characters in two separate stories are presented with dishes made from human flesh. And all of these rats here, they don’t even bother to pay,” Sister Du said. “★‘Put it on the tab’ they say—but nobody ever opened a tab!”

Jangly and eclectic... These stories map out the distance between the head and the gut —the way language can fail to convey the deepest, most visceral facts of life." — The Guardian Yan Ge explores human connections and disruptions in this ethereal collection… Here and elsewhere, Yan combines dry and subtle humor with her evocative lyrical style. These stories brim with intelligence.” — Publisher's Weekly The second story, "Shooting an Elephant", is about a Chinese-born young woman's life as a newly wed in Ireland, dealing with the consequences of a recent miscarriage and trying to find herself in the predominantly white environment. An interesting glimpse into the emotional struggles she is subject to, and a revealing study of modern dejection, with the main character not dissimilar to those found in Sally Rooney or Naoise Dolan's works. He turned around to the table next to us and shouted, “Small Bamboo! Can you talk some sense into this girl★” When I sent this [collection] to my agent, it was called Nine Stories. He was like, ‘ Nine Stories is not going to be OK.’ I kept pitching titles to him, and kept getting rejected. At one point I said, ‘Why don’t we just call it Elsewhere?’ This was me giving up,” Yan says. “He said, ‘Oh, I like that!’ I was like, ‘What?’”Positives: The feeling of disconnect was appealing. The feeling of being ‘not quite right” or “not quite there” is one that I sometimes feel in my own life, and I see others move through that mindset as well, so reading stories about disconnected people was interesting and reaffirming, that the natural state for people is to not have a natural state.

Yan Ge explores human connections and disruptions in this ethereal collection…Yan combines dry and subtle humor with her evocative lyrical style. These stories brim with intelligence.” —Publisher’s Weekly The short story form is by its nature made to focus on those on the fringes of society, or so says Frank O'Connor. I love that while reading this book, a lot of the characters in the stories are writers and it feels like I am reading the stories from different writers and why they write under the different circumstances they are facing that can be as human or as ghostly or as ancient or as modern as they can be. But none of these matter to us,” Six Times continued. “When poets come into the room we simply chomp on the fictional dish you’ve created. We eat up the food and shit it out later. And the shit is poetry.” We then talked about The Plague and The Myth of Sisyphus, drinking beer and smoking cigarettes. Not far from us, Old Stone, Small Bamboo, Young Li, and Calm were playing mahjong on a square table. Calm wore a green cardigan on top of the red floral dress. She hurrahed, pushed down her tiles, and clapped. The three men handed over their money. The others were watching TV inside the Little House. The volume was loud, announcing that the government was installing a new water filtration system in the reservoir. “…We are fighting minutes and snatching seconds,” it said.Wish List: The very thing that I loved about the stories was the thing that I wish were different. I loved the theme but I got tired of feeling off balance and removed from a grounded perspective over and over again. I suspect though, that this was the point so it's my own personal hangup and not a comment on the excellence of the stories. I have also never read a collection of short stories on my e-reader. Typically, when I read short stories, I put a slip of paper at the end of the story so I have a ‘size-estimate’, and I didn’t realize before this read, how much I depended on that slip as a pacing device. I might have felt less off-balance if I’d been reading a physical book. But Elsewhere distinguishes itself not just by being in the author’s second language: it is an exceptionally varied collection. Settings for the stories range from contemporary Dublin to historic China, with one story (Travelling in the Summertime) set in the 11th century and another – the novella Hai that ends the book – featuring the politics around the succession of the fifth-century BC philosopher Confucius. The book is experimental too, with playful narratives nestling next to formal prose and autobiographical fiction. When Travelling in the Summer’ was the first of the stories I really liked. It had a good premise and an interesting cast of characters that all related to each other in interesting ways. Not only this, but it came to a satisfying but not overwrought conclusion. It was definitely more of a traditional story structurally than the others, and I think this is also why it stood out to me. It knew what it wanted to do, then executed it well. My favourite of the collection was definitely the final story, ‘Hai’. Really, for the same reasons as for above, but doubly so. Everything ‘When Travelling in the Summer’ did well, ‘Hai’ did even better, and spent more time doing it. The writing here was also the best of among all the stories (and it had been very good throughout), with some fantastic dialogue especially. I’ll be honest, if Yan Ge hadn’t put out this as a collection of short stories, but had instead put this out as a novella alone, I would have been just as happy. They continued arguing while the second round of food was brought out. This time: sliced beef in chili oil, stewed beef brisket in casserole, spiced calf ribs with Sichuan peppercorn, and beef offal soup. It was a warm late May afternoon. The air was stale and humid. We walked from the sunken square up the steps and arrived at a run-down pub. Above, three big white characters hung, which read: The Little House. A dot in the first character was missing. A large group of men and women—the poets—sat outside, drinking beer. Small Bamboo introduced me: “This is Pigeon.”