One autumn morning, Jia Jia walks into the bathroom of her lavish Beijing apartment to find her husband dead. Like something out of a dream, next to the tub Jia Jia discovers a pencil sketch of a strange watery figure, an image that swims into Jia Jia’s mind and won’t leave. The mysterious drawing launches Jia Jia on an odyssey across contemporary Beijing, as her path crosses some of the people who call the city home, including a jaded bartender who may be able to offer her the kind of love she had long thought impossible.
... 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.
