Book Review: Ge Fei - The Invisibility Cloak

 An easy little slice-of-life novel, with an understated style and a straightforward plot. Cui is a nerdy audiophile engineer who lives at his sister's house in Beijing while he deals with the emotional fallout from his divorce, trying to make a big enough sale to get out of her house while dodging her attempts to set him up with new girls. The desire of someone who feels trapped to escape by making one last big score is perfectly relatable, but if I could sum it up in a phrase, the novel is really about how tenuous your sense of place in the world can be; your relationships, your personal history, your job, where you live, everything. You thought you had a solid marriage and then surprise!; you thought you had a stable living environment and then your sister says take a hike; you thought you could count on your friend until friendship becomes a one-way street; you thought that you were a part of a certain kind of society but then "all that is solid melts into air", in the famous phrase.

To that end, there are constant reminders of how social mores shifted from Communist solidarity to capitalist individualism in the post-Xiaoping era, along the lines of "we used to be poor, but at least we were all poor together!", so this is one of those novels where a book jacket-type description like "explores the changes that wealth has brought to Chinese society" is perfectly appropriate. A Westerner might satirize this view as "under Communism you were guaranteed nothing, but at least you were guaranteed!", but many Chinese really do have nostalgia for those days, as weird as that might seem. Part of that might be due to the intellectual class that Fei spends some time skewering. There's plenty of intellectuals droning on about the proper evaluation of historical figures like the Dowager Empress; Fei obviously doesn't trust their abilities to lead the country, although it's not clear what he does trust. This is also a fun read from an audiophile perspective: poor Cui puts all this work into building top-of-the-line audio rigs for rich idiots who only listen to garbage instead of the pieces he likes, and I recommend listening to all the music mentioned in the book. Even if you don't think that a traditional Chinese opera titled "The Red Detachment of Women" is up your alley (and it is not always an easy listen), often Fei/Cui's selections are excellent.