The Invisibility Cloak

Kind of an interesting ride through modern China. Lots of loose ends, but a good story overall. Worth a read.

This wonderful short novel, Ge Fei’s first translated to English, has just been published by NYRB as a Classics Original. The cover copy calls it a “comic novel” and it is...in the sense of the straight man in a comic duo undergoing relationship trouble, family trouble, and job trouble in a fast modernizing Beijing. Our hero—we only ever learn his surname, Cui (pronounced Ts-wei)—plays the straight man role to the end, never quite losing his nerve, though he comes close, while we watch helplessly.Cui is not completely destitute, except in terms of money, love, and friendship. He has skills. He can put together hi-fi sound systems that audiofiles want to buy. When forced to move from his sister’s unused apartment one winter, Cui develops a sound system that should qualify as “the best in the world,” for any discriminating buyer in China, in hopes that the profit will give him enough to buy a small courtyard for himself to live in.What elevates this novel is the ordinary man quality, the sense we have of a human fleck bobbing on a wind-tossed sea over which he has no control. The bad things that happen are outside of his control, and though he makes plans and efforts to extricate himself, there is a certain inexorable flow to his outcomes.This novel is not especially dark, though it has delicious elements of horror and mystery. We become genuinely terrified when a mysterious wealthy stranger offers to buy the "best sound system in the world," but who exudes a hard inflexibility and sense of ferocity when challenged...or when asked to pay. There is some evidence that he has done damage to those that oppose him.Who wears the invisibility cloak in this novel? Cui tells us that"In the 1990s, Mou Qishan, the celebrity tycoon, was a household name in Beijing. He liked calligraphy, climbing mountains, and hanging out with female movie stars—all an open secret. Other rumors, however, told of his eccentric and often unpredictable behavior. The wildest story I heard was that he could show up at any event unseen because he wore an invisibility cloak…"When Mou died, Cui bought a pair of hexagonal Autograph speakers from Mou’s estate. He used them to construct the “best sound system in the world.” It could be the invisibility cloak passed from person to person with ownership of the speakers.When Cui’s childhood friend Jiang Songping played a joke on Horsewhip Xu, an old man in his neighborhood, Cui had a personal revelation:"...the best attributes of anyone or anything usually reside on the surface, which is where, in fact, all of us live out our lives. Everyone has an inner life, but it’s best if we leave it alone. For as soon as you poke a hole through that paper window, most of what’s inside simply won’t hold up to scrutiny."What do we take from this? If you are wearing the invisibility cloak, you not only cannot be seen, there isn’t much worth seeing? It does seems as though once ownership of the Autograph speakers changed hands, the “freed man,” as it were, becomes once again visible, and able to express himself “on the surface,” without us having to look through “the hole in the paper window” to their inner thoughts.One of the more intriguing things Ge does in this novel is debunk the integrity of Jiang Songping, Cui’s best and only friend, and he does it using a pomegranate. Jiang Songping was a clever boy, but Cui’s mother could see right away he was going to be the kind of person who owned people. Jiang had a way of sounding authoritative, even when he spoke rubbish. All of us come under his spell to some degree when he states categorically that all pomegranates, no matter how big or how long they've grown, contain the exact same number of seeds, 365 to be exact. Our eyes pop a bit with this news, for who has ever actually counted pomegranate seeds, and who could dispute this entrancing fact? Later, we learn with the chagrin we share with Cui’s sister that, in fact, Jiang lied on this occasion, and perhaps on many others.One of the more poignant moments in the book was when Cui returned to the neighborhood where he grew up and discovered it much changed:"Human memory really is unreliable. I could clearly remember this alley being long, wide, submerged in green shade or sprinkled with white locust flowers, and nowhere near as cramped and seedy as it looked that day…As I sat on the stoop and surveyed the cluttered street under the setting sun, I felt vaguely alienated from everything."Not all change is good...but memory is unreliable.This is a delightful addition to the canon coming out of China today, having none of the syrupy schmaltz that earlier, more severely censored works demonstrated. Terrific translation by Canaan Morse, and many thanks to NYRB for picking this one out to share with us. Kudos to all on this one.

It begins with a perverse narrator a desperate loser who is somehow an everyman who caters to the whims of classical music junkies in Beijing. The opening is promising and the narrator original. The walkthrough Chinese culture enlightening and refreshing. It feels like China. The novel's greatest problem is its inability to extrapolate a point or deliver on its central conundrum's premise instead it becomes a strangely refreshingly cheerful romp into a surreal economic zone of the detritus of violence and negligence. In that sense it is less about ideas and more about relinquishing them. If the later sounds like a revelation then read on its worth it.

A well crafted story with lovely details for anyone who is a hi-fi lover, this book is a pacy read once the character is of the protagonist is established and you are rooting for him.

I have a very limited acquaintance with modern Chinese literature, but if this is a representative piece, I look forward to getting much deeper into it. The novella is very well turned, with the narrator's self-awareness and self-revelation simultaneously and subtly crystallizing on page 51 and the last half of the book elegantly unpacking the implications and consequences of his stance toward the world.Both narrator and narrative "float on the surface" of city life in modern China, dipping into urban malaise and noir, but not abiding there long. Moments of extreme behavior pop up in one or two sentences and then subside again, suggesting tumultuous and violent undercurrents in both psyche and society, but these are persistently pushed to the background like muted strings lending poignancy to an individual man's pursuit of a more-or-less fair compromise with life.I can't judge the translation except to say that it seems very well suited to the narrative and is not at all obtrusive, which surely must be the most important thing. If Ge Fei and Morse bring us more in this vein, I'll be eager to pick it up.

Published in Chinese in 2012 as "Pi Feng," "The Invisibility Cloak" is sort of noirish, though I don’t know why it is classified as a mystery. There is an apparent suicide, but neither the protagonist (far too diffident to be even an informal detective) nor the woman with whom the rich man lived has any idea of the motivation for it.The book does not reveal much about nouveau riche Beijing either, though that is the customer base for the 40-something Mr. Cui’s audiophile component business. He has been divorced by a beautiful wife and cheated out of his inheritance by a sister who forces him out of an apartment she owns. There is a happy ending (more reason to question that it is a “mystery” novel!). Unlike every other NYRB edition, there is no introduction or afterword to explicate Ge or this short (123-page) novel(la).NRYB says that the novel “is sure to appeal to readers of Haruki Murakami and other fabulists of contemporary irreality.” It doesn’t seem all that “fabulist to me either, or even a satire, though there are comic elements in Cui’s stubborn ethical conduct and the bad behavior of his sister and brother-in-law.

The Invisibility Cloak is an emotionally complex, profoundly reflective journey of a Chinese audiophile’s search for love, meaning, purpose and resolution. It’s remarkable how much Ge Fei packed into these 126 pages.

My first book by this author. Throughout the book I thought "poor Cui" but not in a sympathetic way. Not until the final paragraph did I feel any likeability for him as it seemed he'd finally experienced an epiphany! I may reread this selection again to retrace to determine if I missed key points regarding the main character

Nothing happens as expected! Quite good storytelling.

This book is a jewel that I will re-read often. It is a profoundly human take on our frailties and our periodical wish to be anonymous. It is funny, sad, and accessible without being easy. The writing is crisp and full of surprises.

very happy to read this book from china

There is one line that is my favorite. I will not spoil the story for you. The short story is worth reading.