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Shanghai Dancing
by Brian Castro
Praise for Shanghai Dancing:
"Brian Castro plays with past and present in this complex, teasing, polyrhythmic, carnivalesque dance through phantom Shanghai."
— J.M. Coetzee
"[A]n extraordinary polyglot mix of sources: Portuguese, Chinese, English, Jewish and Catholic, and a mysterious recessive black gene.... told in Castro’s characteristically baroque prose, dense with its passion for language and serious wordplay.
— The Age
Awards:
Winner, Victorian Premier’s Award for Fiction
Winner, Christina Stead Fiction Prize
Winner, NSW Premier’s Book of the Year
Description:
After forty years in Australia, António Castro packs a bag and walks out of his old life forever. The victim of a restlessness and rootlessness he calls “shanghai dancing,” António seeks to understand his anxiety by retracing the wanderings of his Chinese, Portuguese, and English families.
Arriving in Shanghai, where his families collided, António's world fragments: glittering prewar China, evangelical Liverpool, and 17th century Portugal fight for space with contemporary scenes of Asia Europe, and Australia. The stories of long-dead ancestors vie with those of new friends, family, and lovers.
Combining photographs and written images, author Brian Castro’s fictional autobiography asks if life’s meaning is to be found in the moment or in memory. This “work of major significance [that] challenges our expectations of storytelling” is the US debut of one of Australia’s most complex and celebrated literary figures.
Details:
$17.95 | 464pp | Paperback | ISBN 9781885030429