After China ... again

For the second time I am trying to plough through Brian Castro's novel After China.  And, like before, I'm toiling badly.  It's driving me nuts and if I didn't have to sit a university exam on Australian literature in a little over two weeks time I'd have abandoned the text and my efforts to read it.

I get the concept, you know?  I understand post-modernism's rejection of coherent narrative form.  I know about Jacques Derrida and undecidability (is that a word?) or indeterminability (probably another not word I've just conjured up).  I think I get - Hell, I may even live - the ambiguities, uncertainties, contradictions and tensions of diaspora.  I can see the intention and I really do get the idea that fragmentation and the mysteries on non-linear, multiplicities of perspective challenge conventional notions of writing and / or reading any text.

My problem is that I think this emperor has no clothes on  I don't see it as a complex, challenging work that explores identity, place, relationships, the persistence of the un-modern in the modern, life and death.  I just think it's self-serving, self-indulgent narcissistic obscurantism that's in need of a good editor and a complete re-write.

I wish the text didn't bring out such negative responses in me but the simple fact is that I think Brian Castro, an obviously competent writer, has served up a half-baked, ill-conceived mess of a book.  I have no idea what it's doing on a university syllabus.  Big mistake guys; big mistake.

But ... to allow for the possibility that one is wrong yet again and is merely manifesting one's inner conservative old duffer ... here is BC in conversation with the admirable Johanna Featherstone of the Red Room Company.