I knew nothing about Bukowski when I picked up this title from the gigantic English shelf at the new Shanghai Library East Hall. The cover looked artsy, but it also had a certain disorienting quality that I always find appealing.

The story draws together various people living on the margins of society, the kind of characters you might encounter late at night in a 24-hour McDonald’s in Shanghai. Their conversations unfold through constant collisions among dysfunctional lives. There is also just the right amount of adult scenes and crude humor throughout.

It reminded me of The Man Without Talent by the late Tsuge Yoshiharu, but with a distinctly Western touch. After this book, Charles Bukowski is now firmly on my reading list.

This is the second book by Elena Ferrante that I have read. As with the first Neapolitan novel, I was constantly impressed by the author’s ability to capture and portray emotions in all their subtlety.

Throughout the book, the rivalry and attachment between Elena and Lila continue to unfold. Their bond is never simply friendship or competition; it is always both, and often something more complicated than either. I was also intrigued by the book’s constant awareness of language: when people speak standard Italian, when they fall back into dialect, and what those choices reveal.

This felt familiar to me in a Chinese context as well. The tension between Mandarin and Shanghainese (and various kinds of Shanghainese) can carry outsized social meanings: education, class, intimacy, or belonging. Ferrante’s Naples is of course very specific, but this sensitivity to language made the book resonate beyond its setting.

I borrowed this book from the children’s section of Shanghai Library because its Goodreads rating was above 4. I thought a teen adventure comic might easily fall into cliché, but still, it seemed like something my 11-year-old might enjoy.

A week later, he told me he had already read the book five times and was still reading it. Intrigued by his enthusiasm, I took the chance to read it myself.

The art is excellent. The story appears simple at first (though, on second thought, not quite that simple). More importantly, the message it tries to convey is nuanced, deep, and urgent, especially in an age when people still kill one another in the name of patriotism.

I particularly enjoyed the afterword:

“History, altogether, is a tool, and tools are neutral until they’re wielded. When you listen to a story, think about who is telling it. When you listen to a history, think about who it serves.”

Only at the end of the book did I realize that one of the authors is Palestinian. 

可能是因为翻译的缘故，这本书读起来有些疏离，但是它的预言性和寓言性对经历了2020年初的国人来说，不言而喻。为了防止谈到不正确的记忆，就录一些书中的句子吧：

全程发了高烧，至少这是里厄大夫那天早晨挥之不去的印象。

“那么，这种病的名称是什么呢？” “我还不能告诉您，况且，您知道了也没好处。”

“这些措施必须由省里做出决定。再说了，您怎么就知道有传染的危险呢？”

会议后第二天，高烧病症又跨进一步，甚至见报了，但只是轻描淡写，蜻蜓点水似的报道一下。

白纸小布告，匆匆张贴在城里最不显眼的角落，从内容上很难看出当局正视这种形势。

只见电文上写道：“宣布鼠疫流行。全城封闭。”

在纯文学阅读已经濒亡的年代，读的这个版本是2020年5月第一版，2020年6月第二次印刷。

Eurocentric discourse is complex, contradictory, historically unstable. But in a
kind of composite portrait, Eurocentrism as a mode of thought might be seen as
engaging in a number of mutually reinforcing intellectual tendencies or operations:
1. Eurocentric discourse projects a linear historical trajectory leading from
classical Greece (constructed as “pure,” “Western,” and “democratic”) to
imperial Rome and then to the metropolitan capitals of Europe and the US.
It renders history as a sequence of empires: Pax Romana, Pax Hispanica, Pax
Britannica, Pax Americana. In all cases, Europe, alone and unaided, is seen
as the “motor” for progressive historical change: it invents class society,
feudalism, capitalism, the industrial revolution.
2. Eurocentrism attributes to the “West” an inherent progress toward democratic
institutions (Torquemada, Mussolini, and Hitler must be seen as
aberrations within this logic of historical amnesia and selective legitimation).
3. Eurocentrism elides non-European democratic traditions, while obscuring
the manipulations embedded in Western formal democracy and masking the
West’s part in subverting democracies abroad.
4. Eurocentrism minimizes the West’s oppressive practices by regarding them
as contingent, accidental, exceptional. Colonialism, slave-trading, and
imperialism me not seen as fundamental catalysts of the West’s disproportionate
power.
5. Eurocentrism appropriates the cultural and material production of nonEuropeans
while denying both their achievements and its own appropriation,
thus consolidating its sense of self and glorifying its own cultural anthropophagy.
The West, as Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett puts it, “separates
forms from their performers, converts those forms into influences, brings
those influences into the center, leaves the living sources on the margin, and
pats itself on the back for being so cosmopolitan.”

In sum, Eurocentrism sanItlzes Western history while patrolllzmg and even
demonizing the non-West; it thinks of itself in terms of its noblest achievements
– science, progress, humanism – but of the non-West in terms of its deficiencies,
real or imagined.

p. 245

陈:在这个流量的时代，人突然站在流量的桥头，然后流量可能再过一阵，又会退去的时候，人会有震荡吗?
罗:那肯定会有。
陈:你怕被忘了吗?
罗:我觉得被忘了是一个必然，还是爱比克泰德所说的“对于不可控的事情，我们保持乐观;对于可控的事情，我们保持谨慎”。可控的事情，就是你现在有一些小小的影响，你别滥用，别得意忘形。对于不可控的事情，你抱着乐观的心，接受一个开放性的选项。
陈:你最希望被记住的，如果说只有一个身份能被记住，是什么?
罗:老师。