Notes of a Crocodile by Qiu Miaojin was another international WhatsApp book club pick and I was the only one who liked it!
It’s a short book, and a bit weird, but still relevant thirty years later as reactionary ideologues exploit anxieties over gender and sexuality to consolidate power. It follows the trajectory of Lazi, a character who would be classified as a “disaster lesbian” in my corners of the Internet, as she and her queer circle of friends try to survive university in Taipei and find their place in the world. Lazi’s chapters alternate with those about crocodiles who fit in to society by wearing human suits, an extended metaphor for closeted homosexuals.
That’s not the best summary—somehow I’ve made it sound more melodramatic than it actually is. But several book club members said that it felt very much like a YA book to them, so maybe there’s more melodrama in the story than I realized while reading. A better summary would be that it’s like the Taiwanese version of Kris. It’s full of surreal imagery, never really going anywhere, just people trying to come to grips with themselves. I think this description from translator Bonnie Huie in an interview very perfectly captures its essence:
Notes of a Crocodile is not about how “it gets better”; it’s about living in permanent wartime. A vicious cycle begins when you lose the ability to feel, then the ability to tolerate discomfort. Qiu handed down a book of memories that preserves these essences so that you can use them like smelling salts.
Notes of a Crocodile first came out in 1994, but no English translation was available until Huie’s was published in 2017. (As far as I can tell, at least. I did not devote hours of detective work to this little book report.) I’m not qualified to comment on her translation, of course, but she’s done us all a favor by rendering these smelling salts in English. Good to have on hand when it feels like, thirty years later, we’re still living in permanent wartime.
