It's a book that's like being at the dinner table with an unruly extended family; everyone is talking at once, monologuing at each other rather than to anyone. People skip over parts of the story, contradicting each other and themselves. They either assume you're in on the joke or they are making the joke because they know it will upset you. Nobody knows how to tell a story in the correct order or justify their point of view as anything but common sense. Several of the things that you're hearing sound like politically motivated talking points that you don't agree with, but they're so outlandish that you can't even begin to figure out how to debunk them and whenever you do take someone at their word and attempt to engage, you find yourself catapulted off into some direction you never realised was connected. A jazz like sense improvisation runs through the whole thing but the prose is not virtuosic. The narrative voice is flat, arch, ironic and insincere. It is filled with scare quotes and exclamation marks that make your own internal dialogue do a juvenile sarcastic voice as you read it. There are minimal references to anything that could locate the action in time or space. The most high tech item that is mentioned is a microscope, Which presumably places the story at some point after the 1600s, and there's such a thing as a coal worker, though what that actually means is never explained. There's a character called Old Man Meng and Can Xue is Chinese, so maybe the story is set somewhere in China. The writer who is a character in his own right is sometimes referred to as the stenographer, so perhaps the story exists after the invention of typewriters though he only ever writes with a fountain pen, but really this technical nitpicking about set and setting is not relevant. It will not help you understand whatever is happening in the novel, and it seems as though Can Xue isn't particularly interested in helping you understand it either. She has said in interviews that her stories are written for the psychological benefit of herself, and that if someone can get something from them, then they are her intended readers. The novel does have the ring of free association, a direct channel to the subconscious of another being, not least of all because so much of what is described hinges around sex. Whilst never being so direct as to describe the act itself without using scare quotes or an innuendo, It's continually taking place or at least suspected to be, or at least suspected to be longed for, or theorised to be the motivation behind this or that community action. What little of a narrative through line exists is to do with a purported sexual affair that may or may not have happened in a darkened granary and there are paragraphs of text philosophising the best way to do it, who to do it with, when to do it, who is best at it and whether you should be doing it at all.
It's a book that feels as though it could be written through a political metaphor, like The Master And Margarita, but that to get through the censor, the metaphor had to be deepened and extended over and over again, until the final artefact speaks more to the tangled associations of the subconscious that carried the metaphor than whatever political meaning was originally intended to be put forward, and why not? I don't understand Chinese politics particularly and I don't want to have to read another book to understand whatever this one is about. I found the whole thing messy, it made no sense and it gave me a headache, but that's exactly how I would expect things to be if I stepped inside somebody else's head.
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