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Katherine Tegen Books
June 2007
On Sale: June 1, 2007
464 pages
ISBN: 1885030428
EAN: 9781885030429
Paperback
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Fiction
Shanghai Dancing marks the U.S. debut of the major
Australian literary figure, Brian Castro. A "fictional
autobiography," Shanghai Dancing is a dazzling meditation on
identity, language and disorientation by a writer who has
been compared to W.G. Sebald. The book follows narrator
Antonio Castro from Australia to his Hong Kong birthplace.
The trip occasions an exploration of family myths and
secrets that encompass Jewish, Portuguese, Chinese and
English forebears and that extends from religious
persecution in the Inquisition to the frenzied decadence
that preceded Japan's invasion of Shanghai to the 1999
handover of Hong Kong to contemporary Australia. One of
Castro's forefathers is burned at the stake; another
smuggles the bones of Christian martyrs from Japan. His
grandparents include a red-haired, green-eyed Jewess, a
Chinese surgeon with a fetish for bound feet, and a
Lilipudlian missionary. In Shanghai Dancing, Castro employs
a sophisticated, sensual prose as well as maps, photographs,
documents and letters to explore the evanescence of a
shifting, polyglot world. Awarded some of Australia's most
prestigious literary prizes, the book has been called,
"impressive as history, as fiction, as a book which
stretches the literary form and which speaks to the
universality of the human experience."
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