Goodreads Monday is a weekly meme started by @Lauren’s Page Turners but is currently hosted by Emily @ Budget Tales Book Blog. This meme is quite easy to follow – just randomly pick a book from your to-be-read list and explain why you want to read it. It is that simple.

This week’s book:

The Last Lover by Can Xue

Blurb from Goodreads

Winner of the 2015 Best Translated Book Award for fiction, presented by Three Percent, a resource for international literature

 In Can Xue’s extraordinary book, we encounter a full assemblage of husbands, wives, and lovers. Entwined in complicated, often tortuous relationships, these characters step into each other’s fantasies, carrying on conversations that are “forever guessing games.” Their journeys reveal the deepest realms of human desire, figured in Can Xue’s vision of snakes and wasps, crows, cats, mice, earthquakes, and landslides. In dive bars and twisted city streets, on deserts and snowcapped mountains, the author creates an extreme world where every character “is driving death away with a singular performance.”

 Who is the last lover? The novel is bursting with vividly drawn characters. Among them are Joe, sales manager of a clothing company in an unnamed Western country, and his wife, Maria, who conducts mystical experiments with the household’s cats and rosebushes. Joe’s customer Reagan is having an affair with Ida, a worker at his rubber plantation, while clothing-store owner Vincent runs away from his wife in pursuit of a woman in black who disappears over and over again. By the novel’s end, we have accompanied these characters on a long march, a naive, helpless, and forsaken search for love, because there are just some things that can’t be stopped—or helped.

Why I Want To Read It

Happy Monday everyone! Rather, happy Tuesday everyone! How was your weekend? I hope you spent it resting and preparing for the tough workweek ahead. I know, Monday is nearly everyone’s least favorite day of the week. How I wish weekends were longer. Nevertheless, I hope you had a great start to the workweek, or at least you kicked the ground running. There are still four (three) days before the next weekend so I hope you conserve your energy for the rest of the week. Despite what I surmise is a slugging start to the week, I hope everyone started the work week on a high note. I hope everyone makes it through the week. More importantly, I hope everyone is doing well, in mind, body, and spirit, not only this week but for the rest of the year.

As has become customary, I am opening the workweek – and by extension, the blogging week – with a fresh Goodreads Monday update. It has been years since I started doing this bookish meme. I find it the perfect way to start the reading and book blogging week because I get to feature a book I am looking forward to. Anyway, to commence my 2025 reading journey, I have been reading works of East Asian writers. This is to make up for my not being able to hold a Japanese literature month last year and also because of my goal to read more translated works than works originally written in English this year. It also happens that March is Women’s History Month. In line with this, I am going to feature works of female East Asian writers in this month’s Goodreads Monday updates.

This week, I am featuring Can Xue’s The Last Lover. It was through an online bookseller that I first learned about the Chinese writer. Because of the lack of familiarity with Can Xue (残雪) and her oeuvre, I held off purchasing some of her works. However, my mind took note of her. A couple of years later, I would encounter her once again. During the lead-up to the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature awarding, she was among the most prominent names. Betting sites had her at number one. Apparently, Xue, born Deng Xiaohua, is quite a prominent name not only in Chinese literary circles but in the global scene as well. Her works have earned her several accolades across the world, including a nomination for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. Unfortunately, Xue was not announced as the awardee of the Nobel Prize. She would also top betting sites in 2024 but was once again snubbed by the Swedish Academy.

Anyway, this means that I have a lot of reasons to look forward to exploring her works. Another reason my interest in her is piqued is that she was called an avant-garde writer. I guess this can also be surmised from the blurbs surrounding her work. It seems that her works are heavy on the magical surrealist side. It is hardly surprising now how magical surrealism is a familiar element in the ambit of East Asian literature; Haruki Murakami is among the most popular and even Han Kang’s works possess strokes of this literary genre. I have been trying to obtain copies of Xue’s works but it was all for naught. Regardless, I will still try to find copies of her works. How about you fellow reader? How was your Monday? What books have you added to your reading list? Do drop it in the comment box. For now, happy Monday and, as always, happy reading!