migratory brown birds

Author's name: Guy Fi

Ge Fei (1964-) is a Chinese writer considered among the most important experimental writers and founders of the "avant-garde literature" movement, which emerged in the 1980s after the end of the Cultural Revolution in China. He has been dubbed "the Borges of China." Translator Yara Al-Masry introduces him to the Arab reader in her first translation, through five stories worthy of study, characterized by a high degree of experimentalism and a focus on time, an element that is the foundation of storytelling. The writer Guy Vey is concerned with time in these short stories, linked to the human being himself, without abstraction. The human being is besieged by himself, his dreams, and the events of his life, his spatial dimension and his memory, and his writing as a manifestation of creative time, which, although it is a language construct, reveals what we want and love in literature. This is what the writer says in one of his interviews: “We usually talk about the three spatial dimensions, in addition to one temporal dimension, so there are four dimensions. There was an idea in my mind for a long time, which is that the dimension that most likely gives us meaning is the temporal dimension. By that I don’t mean that the spatial dimension is unimportant. Of course, it is important, because we are in a constant state of triumph over nature, in a constant state of inventing things, and in a constant state of prolonging our existence. So, within such limits, all these efforts are temporal changes, even though these changes in the past served something, like the meaning of humanity, for example.”