Continue to turn left: Love Map

Author: Xiao Er
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-01-01
Features: This is a "slice-of-life" novel that reveals the touch of women everywhere. The author, Xiao Er, claims to be the hostess of a Paris Left Bank artist salon and an admirer of Gertrude Stein, the American modernist writer and lesbian who told Hemingway, "You are a lost generation." However, this long Continue to the Left is a tribute by Xiao Er to Qian Zhongshu's long Fortress Besieged. Although the appearance of intellectuals in the new era differs historically from those in the 1930s and 1940s, the weaknesses inherent in Chinese intellectuals—such as detachment, persistence, arrogance, and weakness—are universal. Open this novel, and you will see a contemporary Jiangnan petite bourgeois and female lawyer, He Xiaozhi, experiencing the four seasons of spring, summer, autumn, and winter in the year of the new century. In the "petite bourgeois gallery" of cities, workplaces, families, love, and petite bourgeois life, her spiritual world, however, roars along, continuing to the left. Finally, in a dream, she arrives at her spiritual Left Bank—Tibet.