Shanghai Dancing

by Brian Castro

After 40 years in Australia, Antonio Castro packs a bag and walks out of his old life forever. The victim of a restlessness he calls -Shanghai Dancing, - Antonio seeks to understand the source of his condition in his family's wanderings. Reversing his parents' own migration, Antonio heads back to their native Shanghai, where his world begins to fragment as his ancestry starts to flood into his present, and emissaries of glittering pre-war China, evangelical Liverpool and seventeenth-century Portugal merge into contemporary backdrops across Asia, Europe and Australia. A -fictional autobiography, - Shanghai Dancing is a dazzling meditation on identity, language and disorientation that combines photographs and written images in the style of W.G. Sebald. The Age has described the book as -an extraordinary polyglot mix of sources: Portuguese, Chinese, English, Jewish and Catholic, and a mysterious recessive black gene... told in Castro's characteristically baroque prose, dense with its passion for language and serious wordplay.- The winner of some of Australia's top literary prizes, Shanghai Dancing has been praised by its judges as -a work of major significance [that] challenges our expectations of storytelling... It is impressive as history, as fiction, as a book which stretches the literary form and which speaks to the universality of the human experience.- Shanghai Dancing marks the U.S. debut of a major Australian literary figure.

Genres: 21st Century, Fiction

Paperback

First published June 1, 2003

About the author

Brian Castro was born in Hong Kong in 1950 of Portuguese, Chinese and English parents. He was sent to boarding school in Australia in 1961 (1962, Oakhill College, Castle Hill / 1963-67, St Joseph's College, Hunter's Hill.). He attended the University of Sydney from 1968-71 and won the Sydney University short story competition in 1970. He gained his BA Dip.Ed. in 1972 and his MA in 1976 from Sydney University.

He was joint winner of the Australian/Vogel literary award for his first novel Birds of Passage (1983), which has been translated into French and Chinese. This was followed by Pomeroy (1990), Double-Wolf (1991), winner of The Age Fiction Prize, the Victorian Premier's Innovatory Writing Award and the Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction, and subsequently After China (1992), which again won the Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction at the 1993 Victorian Premier's Awards. This was also subsequently translated into French and Chinese. His fifth novel, Drift, was published in July 1994. His sixth novel Stepper won the 1997 National Book Council 'Banjo' Prize for fiction. In 1999 he published a collection of essays, Looking For Estrellita (University of Queensland Press). In 2003 Giramondo published his 'fictional autobiography', Shanghai Dancing, which won the Vance Palmer Prize at the 2003 Victorian Premier's Awards, the Christina Stead Prize at the 2004 NSW Premier’s Awards and was named the NSW Premier’s Book of the Year. His most recent novel, The Garden Book, published by Giramondo in 2005, was shortlisted for the 2006 Miles Franklin Literary Award and won the Queensland Premier's Prize for Fiction.

Brian Castro has worked in Australia, France and Hong Kong as a teacher and writer, and for several years was a literary reviewer for Asiaweek magazine. He wrote the text for The Lingerie Catalogue, a collaborative project with photomonteur Peter Lyssiotis. Castro also contributed the text Stones for Al-Kitab for a limited edition work by Peter Lyssiotis entitled A Gardener At Midnight, produced in 2004.

Brian Castro currently divides his time between Adelaide and Melbourne.

Two of his novels, Pomeroy and Stepper (Stepper, oder Die Kunst der Spionage) have been published in German by Klett Cotta. His novel After China (L’Architecte Chinois), was published by Editions de L’Aube in France in 2003.

(from http://www.lythrumpress.com.au/castro...)

Reviews

[Patrick Holland · Rating 5 out of 5]

For mine, this and his 'The Bath Fugues' are the two greatest novels written by an Australian.

[Clifford · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sprawling. Dense. Lyrical. I would imagine that many readers will give up on this book, and even I found it to be a bit of a slog, although very rewarding. Focussed on the current generation, it's really a multi-generational family saga, roving from China to Hong Kong and Macau, to Australia, to Japan, to Brazil. Beautifully written. Stick with it, readers.

[Alan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted to like this more than I did. Castro's poetic and labyrinthine prose is frequently beautiful but it somehow adds up to less than the sum of its parts. He slips in and out of geography and history at will, one moment in Shanghai, then Macau, then Liverpool, then Australia; from the present day to the 17th century to a WW2 POW camp in Shanghai. Characters drift similarly in and out of the narrative as Castro tells the semi-fictionalised story of his ancestry and interweaves it with photographs, some real and some not, to serve his central idea - the unreliability of memory and the way that all the stories we tell ourselves - even the most personal - are in some senses fictive. All of which is admirable, but Castro often lacks the writing chops of, say, a Faulkner or a McCarthy to pull off this kind of baroque, poetic writing. The writing too often seems to float rather than soar, which, given that the narrative is so subsumed to the style, really diminishes this ambitious novel. 3/5

[Maggie Chen · Rating 5 out of 5]

So so underrated. Castro's ability to transport a reader, to make you see and feel the spaces the writing occupies, and to compel you without any traditional sense of plot, is unparalleled.

[Brandon L · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a Did Not Finish for me, after reading half-way through. At around 250 pages, I had to give in and admit that I did not really care what happened to the alcoholic sad sack narrator.

I was first exposed to this book by the Millions Review, which described it as a great book about memory and being, illustrative of other Western authors but set firmly in the Pacific, a very different milieu. I was excited to read about this interplay, especially since Brian Castro has seemingly won every literary award Australia has to offer.

The writing is admittedly beautiful, but what it describes is all so ugly: grime, trash, drunks, syphilitics, leaky roofs, ugly plastic, all piled on top of one another. And the polyphonic family, with so many relatives, both blood and informal, they all rammed together in my head. We bounce back and forth between uncles, aunts, fathers, sons. But none it is distinct, it's all hazy, and when I don't like our main character, I ceased to care. I've read and enjoyed other memory novels, but this one was so sprawling as to seem more like a stunt. I admired the writing, I just wish it was put to better use.

[wrench · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a shit head

One time I went to an author q and a with Brian Castro and someone asked if he felt that he sacrificed character development by not creating plot and he cackled and said I hope so.

Me too

[Lee Kofman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very hard work to read. Very rewarding. This novel is really a poem.

[Graham Senders · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is odd. Reading this on and off over the past 3 months or so was enjoyable. This was reading for the sake of reading. Art for art's sake, if you like.
But I gave up on the story line early on. Going cold at this, I was asking myself was this a repetition of a story with variations, was it a repetition without variations? Who were these people? How many half sisters were there and where did they come from?
Yes, I know the family tree was up the front of the book. But I never came to terms as to who was related to whom and who should have been and who shouldn't have been. And when were the events happening anyway.
The ending suggested to me that I was on the right track to enjoy each sequence for itself and not to look too deeply into how things connected or how much the narrator Antonio actually understood or cared about that himself.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brilliant. Sometimes too much so for it’s own good. Castro has a Joycean facility with words, puns, sentences, metaphors, neologisms, structures and syntax. We weave through whorehouses and prep schools and jazz clubs, from Macau to Shanghai to Australia, the plotline darting about and looping back, looking impishly at itself in the mirror. Does Castro subvert meaning to form too often? Probably, at least for my liking. Did he have a feverish blast writing this book? Almost certainly. Does it deserve a prominent place among the global canon? Yes, on par with Pynchon and all the other trickster geniuses.

[Michael Flick · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wish I could have liked this book more. It's the best W. G. Sebald book I've ever read that wasn't written by W. B. Sebald. It suffers in that regard compared to Sebald's "Austerlitz," also a fictional autobiography, but one with moral and emotional weight. There's not much of either here. This book also brings to mind Gabriel García Márquez's "One Hundred Years of Solitude," which also traces a family through many generations. Castro's book is heavy on realism but, alas, doesn't have much that's magical.

Castro describes his writing in this book as "sedimented; neither simple nor straight-forward." I found it mannered. Sure there's a whole lot of word play, puns, neologisms, and such, but none of that really seems to serve the story--it's all just a side-show, the author showing off.

Flânerie in memory is fine, but it can be so much more. Read Sebald's "Austerlitz" to find out how much more it can be.

[Susan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I would have loved this book had it been easier to read. Or if I had been an English major and knew how to read flowery writing. The premise and the setting were exactly what I love to read: pre-war Shanghai and 20th century Hong Kong with a healthy dose of suspense. Alas I felt like I had to put too much time into figuring out what was going on. I'm still not sure I really 'got' it'.

[Julie]

http://www.themillions.com/2012/02/da...

[Kai · Rating 4 out of 5]

Think of Cloud Atlas directed by Wong Kar Wai... dreaming while conscious and floating through a series of worlds rarely written about. This is modern World Lit at its best.