The Strike

by Harvey Thomlinson

As a stylist, Thomlinson aims high, with goals that recall modernists such as James Joyce and Virginia writers concerned with the complex juxtaposition of interior thought and external reality. The novel's pyrotechnic language serves primarily as a window into the minds of his characters. -- LA Review of Books Ground breaking and important…should become one of the most analyzed techniques in literary fiction.-- Experimental Writing This unconventional text while reminiscent of the Dadaists word games, experimental poetry, and William Burroughs's work using cut-ups is, in the end, a unique entity unto itself...-- Ray Fracalossy The Strike vividly explores a season of crisis in the lives of Old Yu and Little Xu, two outsiders in an ice-bound Chinese border town riven by an illegal strike. Caught up in the upheaval, guilt-ridden Old Yu embarks on a reckless journey to find the rebellious woman he betrayed, before it's too late. Meanwhile, lonely young drifter Little Xu enters into a dangerous relationship with a stranger on the run. The Strike stands out as a novel that is both experimental and dealing realistically with real world events in an engaged way. The new use of syntax the novel pioneers is a method the author, a translator, uses to shake up the synapses of readers in a way that can deliver new perspectives on the nature of reality. Linguists and psychologists, literary critics and readers will find this to be a stunning new revelation of possibility.

200 pages, Paperback

Published January 23, 2018

About the author

Harvey is a Hong Kong based writer and contributor to more than seven China travel guides. Harvey has also translated Chinese novelists like Murong Xuecun.

Reviews

[Jacob · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've never read anything like this before. I discovered Harvey Thomlinson through his work translating MuRong XueCun (Thomlinson translated Leave Me Alone: A Novel of Chengdu, which I am obsessed with). Listening to a podcast with Thomlinson, I heard about this novel and the experimental syntax he uses. At first, my brain automatically broke many of Thomlinson's sentences in two, or tried to find the temporal relation between two disparate parts of a sentence, but over the course of reading, especially when able to read aloud, I became more able to let the new syntax wash over me. It was a pleasurable experience, and felt very much like a poem-novel. Similar in some ways to On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, but this isn't poetry really. I think the best way to describe what happens throughout most of the novel is that Thomlinson threads together things that sometimes make literal/figurative sense when put beside one another in a sentence, sometimes incorporating what seem like random connections in a way that feels sort of familiar to the randomness of a human brain skipping from thought to thought, memory to memory.

The story is roughly just a story of a cold, northern Chinese town and some of the people in it. There was some intrigue and multiple characters that really stuck out to me. There isn't, as far as I could tell, much resolution to eponymous 'strike', but that wasn't the point, I guess.