Xinjiang Has Produced Its James Joyce
One hundred years ago, James Joyce’s Ulysses collapsed Dublin (plus all of Western civilization) into a single day’s epic stroll. The radical, kaleidoscopic novel ended not with that famous final “Yes,” but with the coordinates of its lengthy composition: “Trieste-Zurich-Paris 1914–1921.” It was a record of endurance and exile (the odyssey as much Joyce’s as his hero, Bloom’s), and a way to put the reader’s own efforts into perspective. This shape-shifting beast of a book might have been hard to conquer, but imagine how tough it was to write.
That tagline might have found its match in the one appended to The Backstreets, the first book by the Uyghur writer Perhat Tursun to appear in English. A century removed from , this short novel is likewise a deeply interior, one-day affair, in which a nameless narrator stalks the fogbound city of Ürümchi. (According to , Tursun “devoured” Joyce, along with other modernists.) After the book’s shattering conclusion, Tursun shares its gestation and itinerary, in a way that extends the tour de force.
