Reading Chen Qiufan's Waste Tide (荒潮, 陈楸帆): Part 2

[Tomsima]

On 5/28/2020 at 2:56 PM, Luxi said:

I had the impression of reading the script for a TV series,  it just didn't feel like literature to me.

As soon as I read this I realised just how much the book feels like its being written in the hope it'll get picked up for a movie deal. I noted earlier that it feels like the author just splices together famous scenes from movies, as if he's thinking 'this is just what the director ordered', feels quite forced for sure.

[Tomsima]

Chapter 13:

 

Nothing really to add thats not already been said to be honest - lots of fluff and unecessary asides. A pointless motorbike scene (but its a Ducati if you're into that..) and then clumsy backstory padding for CKZ. To stick with the theme of boring cultural 刻板印象 we also get the classic "你是中國人，你不信上帝，是死是活對你來說有什麼區別！"

 

I really loved, "彷彿摻進了打造者靈魂的碎屑", in fact that little section was great. I get the feeling this is what the book should have originally been about, a story built around a dichotomy between the organic and mechanical. Instead it got ruined by lazy writing, almost like the author wrote a great early draft, then just padded it out until it was a publishable book length. Unfortunately the end result is more padding than the potentially fantastic exposition that sits beneath if and when you can pick it out.

 

No real technical words here, so pretty easy vocab wise:

 

櫥窗, display (in a shop window)

核磁共振成象, MRI

嗑藥, to do drugs (Guangdong dialect?)

鉛球, shot put (athletics event)

葬身火海, died in fire

獻上, offer up (to the gods)

夾心, filling (in food, eg biscuit filling)

倏忽, suddenly; quickly

遞減, decrease progressively (or successively); decrease by degrees

腐殖土, humus (topsoil of decayed vegetation)

五金店, hardware store (surprised I didnt know this – is this used widely on the mainland and I just never noticed?)

連帽衫, hoodie

粿條, Kway Teow, a type of rice noodle

厝邊, 閩南方言。指鄰居

出鞘, (of a sword etc) to unsheath

頹靡, deterioration “頹靡之態” in a state of deterioration

平視, look straight ahead

心旌, uneasiness (in this context, I was presuming, dictionaries seem more set on ‘excitedly nervous’)

[roddy]

五金店 is the common term, I think. Can't think what else a hardware store would be called, although that's possibly just me.

 

[Tomsima]

Chapter 14

 

On 4/29/2020 at 4:43 PM, roddy said:

"顿时明白了一切" - which is more than can be said for me.

 

Honestly so glad you wrote this, I reread this sentence a few times trying to figure out what I was missing. In the end I came to the conclusion that we're just not meant to 'get it' right now (Scott is too clever even for the reader it seems). I also couldn't figure out what 像是一名戢勝了風車的騎士般 was meant to mean - does 風車 have some meaning I dont know about? Scott the champion of the windmill?

 

Vocab

 

倭黑猩猩, bonobo

榭, pavilion or house on a terrace

虛設, be nominal; set up in name only

瞪羚, gazelle

唯物主意, materialism

分崩離析, disintegrate

石英, quartz

插翅難飛, lit. even given wings, you couldn't fly (idiom); fig. impossible to escape

急殺, be worried but helpless

捨近求遠, reject what is near at hand and seek what is far away, it describes making things more complicated (although I wasn’t entirely clear whether this should be understood as positive or negative in the context it was used?)

鱟, horseshoe crab (Limulidae)

複眼, compound eye (of insects)

夜光螺, Sea snail (although comes up in dictionaries as ‘green snail’?)

價值不菲, of considerable value

好生, {dialect} quite; exceedingly

潛臺詞, unspoken words (in a play left to the understanding of the audience or reader), the implied

猶疑, vacillate between two things (indecisive)

重獲希望, regain hope

[imron]

On 5/31/2020 at 7:26 AM, Tomsima said:

像是一名戢勝了風車的騎士般

I haven’t read the book, but I guess it’s a reference to Don Quixote 

[Tomsima]

Fantastic, makes sense now. The preceding paragraph ends 仿佛前面发生的一切仅仅是场没有目的的追逐游戏。So here it would indeed seem to be a reference to Don Quixote fighting with windmills, the idiom for which is apparently 'fighting with imaginary enemies'. Here it would be 'fighting for no reason' I guess.

 

I haven't read Don Quixote before...another for the list it seems

[imron]

3 hours ago, Tomsima said:

Here it would be 'fighting for no reason' I guess

Or if you wanted to keep the don quixote theme - “tilting at windmills”