RaveBook PostPeach Blossom Paradise is, ostensibly, a historical novel ... Still, the novel lacks some of the conventional trappings of the genre. Its voice is slippery and jagged. It musters neither outrage nor sympathy. And its examinations of its subjects—namely, progress, revolution, and the possibility of assembling an account of the past—lead to no obvious conclusions, no tidy morals ... the book’s uneven character and gently destabilizing elements, such as footnotes sprinkled throughout it by a fictional present-day commentator, show an experimentalist’s sensitivity to a reality that can feel unstuck, a time somehow discontinuous ... Peach Blossom Paradise is bloody, sad, invigorating, and inconclusive. It doesn’t tell you what to think about the engines of history; it suggests that an arithmetic that allows you to assess change as \'good\' or \'bad\' may be unreliable. The novel’s partial knowledge reproduces the feeling of being a subject of history. Which returns us to the matter of form: Ge Fei’s experimentation with breaking the certitudes of narrative have taught him to find beauty and pleasure in the experience of unknowing, being an eye open, capable of registering even the subtlest signs of change, yet unable to see, just yet, what they mean
