Brian Castro's Fiction: The Seductive Play of Language
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Brian Castro's Fiction: The Seductive Play of Language By Bernade ...

Chapter :  Introduction
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This agenda resonates with Castro’s imaginative project. Importantly, Ley stresses that inevitably such difficult books ‘place demands on the reader in excess of most forms of entertainment. They require not just reading, but rereading. Their aesthetic is one of complexity, indeterminacy, slow philosophical reflection. As such, they run counter to the contemporary idea of entertainment, offering instead more esoteric and cerebral pleasures’ (36).

However, let us not lose sight here of the pure pleasure of Castro’s prose. His writing is always a balance between ‘desire and intellect’—a balance the courtesans from the T’ang Dynasty promote in After China. Consider the aesthetic beauty of the following pieces from that novel. The first is from the perspective of the architect as a ten-year-old boy:

The day he cut school feigning illness and walked ten blocks home with his fighting cricket and vowed to let it go free if he made it without incident and when he arrived home opened the straw trap and saw it sail onto someone’s rooftop and then he felt really sick, and life was glutinous and nauseating and he spent the rest of the day in bed, violently ill over the trauma of escaping from places and the inevitable return to them forced upon him. One day, he said to himself, he would lie beneath a roof with no pillars, in a room of his own without his aunts turning and snuffling and releasing odours of camphor, and he would sail into the sunlight, his brain encased in cotton wool, in the numbness of the centuries his father unfolded to him at night from a secret book, the book of Lao-tzu, hidden beneath the straw mattress, sailing out of that room where bicycle lamps careened white and silent across the ceiling and looking out he would see the spirits of ancient philosophers forming and reforming in the luminous clouds of insects around the street lamp below. (69)

The following excerpt is part of the concluding paragraph where Castro, through his intermingling of past perfect, past subjunctive and future tenses, creates a lyrically moving moment as he contemplates the writer’s absence through death: