In Elsewhere’s first story, a young fiction writer named Pigeon falls in with a band of drunken poets after a disastrous earthquake. She tells them that she finds poetry difficult to understand. But it’s not about understanding, they tell her. Fiction, they say, is like describing a delicious meal without being able to eat it. But poetry? “We eat up the food and shit it out later,” one poet says. “And the shit is poetry.”
Yan Ge’s English debut is preoccupied with language, its failures, and its relationship to human emotions and the raw reality – the “food” – of life. A prolific Chinese writer, Yan began writing in English after moving to Ireland in 2015. Her stories’ protagonists, based in the UK, Ireland or China, are often similarly peripatetic; we follow them as they travel to Stockholm, New York City, Chiang Mai.
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.
Juxtaposed with this bodily disgust is an intense, heady investment in literary tradition. The plots of two stories hinge on, respectively, a poem by the great Tang dynasty poet Li Bai and George Orwell’s essay Shooting an Elephant. Others are soaked with references to the Zhuangzi, a Daoist masterpiece; one story, Free Wandering, is nearly unintelligible if you aren’t paying attention to the quotations from the ancient essay of the same name.
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 collection is populated with writers stymied by their inability to get out of their own heads and accept their bodies or feelings, whether that’s a lactating mother in Stockholm or a bulimic, philosophising daughter in No Time to Write. In other stories, the profoundest emotions transcend language: a Chinese woman falls in love with a man in Dublin at a group meet-up called Foreign Movies No Subtitles, which is exactly what it sounds like. The protagonist of Mother Tongue can barely talk about her mother’s cancer and her own grief, and eventually refuses to speak Chinese with her husband, a British man who happens to be fluent. When she finally does speak her native language, it’s the most poignant moment in the book.
A particular delight of this collection is its two stories set in a speculative historical China, one focusing on the 11th-century polymath Shen Kuo and another, the show-stopping novella Hai, detailing power struggles between disciples of Confucius in the fifth century BC. These are riveting excursions into worlds gleaming with vermilion gates and silk gowns, full of backroom affairs, political coups, death sentences and scheming wives. It’s thrilling to find yourself caught up in, say, a debate about the finer points of the Confucian concept of ren – there’s nothing fusty or abstract about it when the question is whether a local prince should or should not have chopped a political enemy to bits.
At its best, Yan’s writing has an appealing quickness and wit (her drunken poets are especially irresistible). Several stories, however, feel too crammed with ideas; they drop hints and significant details that never quite cohere, and all this signifying gives the prose a stilted abruptness. Rather than experiencing the monumental emotions in play – the grief and anger around deep family dysfunction or the deaths of mothers and grandmothers – we arrive at the characters’ feelings rationally and come away oddly unmoved.
But perhaps this illustrates the problem set out in Elsewhere’s first story. If fiction is like describing a delicious meal without being able to eat it, where does that leave Yan who, after all, articulates this very idea in a work of fiction? By the end, true communication seems nearly impossible. And yet her stories suggest that we can’t help trying to communicate anyway, and that the trying is literature.
• Elsewhere by Yan Ge is published by Faber (£12.99). To support The Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
