The Seventh Day

“I roamed on the borderline between life and death.” Yang Fei is late for his cremation. His soul won’t be laid to rest until he appears for his appointment with the incinerator. Hua’s (Boy in the Twilight) eighth book follows 41-year-old Yang Fei’s week of wandering in the afterworld in a powerful testament to alienation that stretches beyond the land of the living. Yang Fei drifts through the afterworld and pieces together how he lost his life and what he lost with it. He visits his ex-wife, who died by suicide after a scandal. He encounters a young woman called Mouse Girl, who killed herself after her boyfriend gave her a fake iPhone and did not answer her angry, melancholic blog tirades. He sees his birth mother, from whom he was separated just after his birth. He searches hardest for his father, a man who raised him alone, forsaking friends, lovers, and the opportunity for a much different life. Hua’s prose has a lilting, elegiac quality that is both soothing and distant, but his characters, quite like apparitions, never fully materialize. (Jan.)