... outstanding ... Its characters, its stuttering plot, its surreal setting and An Yu’s ability to fold in the strangeness of the work into our own reality, make it unforgettable ... An Yu’s writing has, for evident reasons, been called Murakami-esque, yet it seems unfair when her voice feels so utterly original. It would be unfair to also compare this masterfully crafted work to a style defined by a man that created his own genre and as such was also, most often, defined by the men. Braised Pork is instead a unique, metaphysical and surreal tale of a woman that seeks answers in a world that has so often betrayed her with silence.
... an original and electric narrative—one that doesn’t fit neatly into any genre ... The isolation Jia Jia feels in widowhood clearly isn’t new, and is made palpable through Yu’s detached, dreamlike prose ... Another author might have chosen to follow a young widow on a journey of finding love after loss. But 28-year-old Yu, who was born and raised in Beijing, smartly decides not to. Instead, she uses 30-something Jia Jia as a way to explore the tensions of contemporary womanhood ... Yu’s language is sparse yet surreal ... Yu raises provocative questions about why we get fixated on those moments—and how they might relate to the company we crave.
Weird things keep happening in An Yu’s debut novel, Braised Pork ... Yu’s novel is part domestic noir and part esoteric folk myth. It’s also a story about a young woman finding her feet in modern metropolitan China. It all makes for a compelling, if perplexing, read ... Yu’s prose is plain, but her novel is plotted so unpredictably that it accomplishes an almost accidental brilliance – she writes as though she is constantly changing her mind ... The idea of a journey of self-discovery via Tibetan mysticism might raise a sceptic’s eyebrow, but Yu makes it meaningful ... he merit of this book is how fluently it moves between metropolitan Beijing – with its unhappy marriages, hazy polluted air and expensive property market – and a stranger, more hallucinogenic realm of Tibetan myth and folk culture ... There are clunky moments, but this is a sensitive portrait of alienated young womanhood as it is set free from the suffocating constraints of marriage and comes up for air.
... unlike Murakami’s whimsical, magical realist plots, Braised Pork’s central journey is interior: the incremental and circuitous process of a human mind trying to come to terms with itself. Reading, I thought not of Murakami but of Freud ... Reading along, you experience the feeling of slowly lowering your body into a dark pool, letting the water rise: now to your shoulders, now to your chin, now — ceasing to breathe — to the bridge of your nose ... This is a haunting, coolly written novel: deeply psychological but utterly lacking in theory or jargon. Yu’s sentences are unadorned, neither lyrical nor terse. Many are awkward, but this didn’t detract from the book’s appeal for me; if anything, I appreciated the rare refusal to mimic the looping sentences of lyrical prose stylists ... Though Braised Pork is not particularly special on the sentence level, individual scenes and descriptions have an impact that seems to bypass language and go straight to feeling ... The novel is also intensely atmospheric. Certain settings remain in my head like filmic images ... Though Yu does a wonderful job conveying the social paradoxes of contemporary Beijing, a trip to Tibet to follow the trail of the fish symbol is oddly shorn of political or social reality...The place feels like a backdrop for Jia Jia’s personal quest, serving merely to provide a sense of difference, and it all comes off as the equivalent of a white backpacker going on a journey of self-discovery to a country their nation colonized.
...[a] rich and strange debut ... a bizarre psychological odyssey, billed by the publisher as likely to appeal to fans of Haruki Murakami, and as in Murakami’s novels, the characters’ happy-go-lucky shrugging in the face of wall-to-wall surreality only heightens the weirdness ... Poised between silliness and high seriousness, contrasting narrative wildness with cool prose, the novel ignores the conventional advice 'tell a dream, lose a reader'. An Yu doesn’t entirely avoid the pitfalls of her approach, not least because there’s a sense that she’s using the in-built drama and pathos of death to overcompensate for how the story’s focus on dreams can make it feel as though it unfolds in an impenetrable private language. But, at its best, this is a debut that gets under your skin rather than leaving you cold.
The book’s semi-surreal 'world of water' — with its lonely late-night bars, its anthropomorphic creatures — rarely deviates from the tropes of magical realism, but the first-time novelist, who is Chinese but writes in English, puts her own touches on the genre with quiet observations about contemporary Beijing. It’s the city Yu was born and raised in, and you can tell; the pages throb with the isolation of life in a metropolis ... Yu’s prose is crisp and never tedious, with bursts of startling imagery amid the otherwise restrained style ... The book is most enthralling when it juxtaposes the ancient and the aggressively modern...carefully weaving the disjointed, contradictory parts of Chinese society, like how sacred deities can be reduced to serving a New Age notion of karma ... Unfortunately, Yu introduces several topics only to abandon them before they reach the level of real insight ... Jia Jia’s awakening is less a process of personal development than the result of a plot twist ... As she flails within that liminal space between a traumatic past and a future reinvention, one wonders if such a swift reveal can ever fully subvert the myths upon which not just individuals, but nations, are built.
Braised Pork produces its own kind of mind trip ... it’s written with a shimmering lightness ... Ms. An also tucks a touching love story into the strange proceedings, which supplies enough incentive to keep Jia Jia—and the reader—equally invested in boring old reality.
Woven through the plain, direct prose of Beijing life and Jia Jia’s innermost thoughts are scenes in a ‘world of water’. Jia Jia finds herself submerged in darkness, the fish-man her only company, and each experience leaves her more puzzled than the last. These journeys, while beautifully written and evocative, are not what resonate with readers of Braised Pork. Rather, it is how this simple image of a mysterious fish-man forges relationships old and new, and how it bolsters Jia Jia’s sense of self ... what An Yu importantly brings to life is not only Jia Jia’s interior but, also, her societal context ... Aspects of the novel, at times, feel disjointed. Things are neither told in the order we expect nor do we get, many times, explanations for the questions we have. Jia Jia can be frustrating as a protagonist too, her life of privilege often making her blind to the cares and concerns of others ... Certain plot threads aren’t as neatly woven as we’d hope, though this may or may not be a detractor depending on your perspective. Characters come and go, as if mirroring Jia Jia’s blase attitudes. But the culmination of the novel, which I cannot spoil for you today, is all too rewarding. And even if we ourselves will never experience the world of water, much of Jia Jia’s journey will ring true. We all battle restrictions in one way or another, some of which the world places on us; but the most difficult ones remain those we place on ourselves.
The fish-man plotline might not fully submerge the reader in the narrative, but the lush atmosphere and fast-paced story make up for it. Also, Jia Jia’s vulnerability makes her easy to root for as she begins to find her footing in the world ... Proof positive that rebirths are entirely possible—even in one lifetime.
... poignant ... An draws Jia Jia with great affection and sympathy as the character grapples with the elusive meaning of her dreams and powerful emotional experiences. Readers will be moved by An’s mature meditation on the often inexplicable forces that shape the trajectory of an individual life.
