The Borrowed by Jeremy Tiang

Abstract

Palo Oloixarac. Savage Theories. Trans. Roy Kesey. New York. Soho Press. 2017. 291 pages. In Savage Theories, Palo Oloixarac addresses the conflict of being both an individual with ideas and a social animal with libido. Theory and sexuality are woven together in the work, but only through an endless, brutal process, which the narrator depicts with uncompromising wit and arrogance. Oloixarac gives her narrator freedom to comment on anything by the tonal illusion of disinterestedly commenting on everything . Her style grants a feeling of resolution to each issue raised—be it an analysis of 1980s Argentine pop culture or the effects of early psychoanalysis on political philosophy. The reader feels learned and rushed along to the next exciting revelation . And they are exciting—Oloixarac explores hushed-away and ignored culture in broad daylight as well as that part of a person we would rather forget about, though it churns and wails. Situated in the dark corners of Argentine academia and counterculture, the narrator invests the reader in her fierce ambitions while relaying, entwining the intelligent passion of Kamtchowsky and the haughty genius of Pabst. If there is love in Savage Theories, it is first sensual, then intellectual. Emotion, in this world, is an oft-ignored chemical byproduct. And yet each character is full of yearning, more or less silent, which compels and completes them. But completion, or self-realization, is not their ultimate goal. Each character strives to enable or force others to see the world through their perspective; in order to realize this goal, Kamtchowsky employs her camera, Pabst relies on his blog, and the narrator turns herself over to her obsessively grand philosophical theory. The language of Savage Theories is dense but fluid. At times the erudite references and ideas, so casually intermingled, border on the solipsistic. It is then that the reader may grow frustrated; pulled along by the author’s artful current, one may find oneself finishing a section and surprised at how little has been understood. Occasional endnotes and footnotes do much to repair this experience, and the pleasure of puzzling over Oloixarac’s complexity is very real. While remarkably intelligent and uncompromising, Oloixarac’s artistic touch is her principal means of captivating readers. And, even this, she is not shy to assert. The narrator writes to her prey, “The seductive powers of syntax grow ever stronger by subjugating those gathered around the one who organizes the verbs,” and the reader blushes, compelled to continue reading. Carson Schatzman University of Oklahoma Chan Ho-Kei. The Borrowed. Trans. Jeremy Tiang. New York. Black Cat. 2017 (©2016). 490 pages. This is a remarkable book, truly brilliant, whose 490 pages is initially intimidating, but reading it is as pleasurable as bingewatching a miniseries or reading your way through another author’s novel series. Divided into six chapters, The Borrowed is really six discrete novellas with six different crime stories set in Hong Kong in six years beginning in 2013 and scattered backward to 1967. Each focuses on the relationship between mentor Kwan Chundok and his “student,” Sonny Lok. Kwan is a brilliant police detective with great powers of observation and deduction , while Sonny, sincere and honest, plays Watson to him. Kwan, of course, uses unconventional methods to trick out confessions , and the first story shows Lok has taken up the baton his mentor (on his deathbed) has been forced to drop. Some of the stories have a lot of action in them—shoot-outs, ransom drops, and bombings—while at least one is a masterpiece of the old-fashioned drawing room mysteries in which the suspects have been gathered to talk through the odd details of a crime until one of them confesses. Each story is a worthy detective story on its own, but together they make a mosaic of Hong Kong as it passes from being one of the jewels of the British Empire to political reintegration with China. The constabulary changes in the level of corruption. The bureaucracy and internal politics of the organization hinder the honest cop seeking justice, and gang leaders often have more influence than government officials. World Literature in Review 94 WLT MAY–AUGUST 2017 The Borrowed manages to combine the pleasures...