Customer Reviews

Shanghai Dancing

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I have read a lot of novels over the years and consequently become somewhat disillusioned with the great mass of contemporary "brand" writers. So it is with great pleasure that I enter Shanghai Dancing into the classic literary canon - nudging Gravity's Rainbow and Joyce's Ulyses for space.

Castro calls this a fictional autobiography but it is also the biography of Shanghai, Hong Kong and Macau in the turbulent times between the 1930's and the 1960's. The subject is life itself and when I finished this book I felt as though I had lived there in those times - exhausted yet exhilarated and, in some inexplicable way, wiser.

Like all great novels Shanghai Dancing needs re-reading every six months - more and more layers are uncovered.

It is a book that creates an effect in the reader similar to its beautiful character Cindy who,in the great ballroom, dances "the tango noli me tangere whose end is to seduce and kill..". It is a very seductive book - but, though it takes us face to face with death it left me with an increased understanding and love of life.

Shanghai Dancing makes you go back for more, and more.

Castro's latest book is not easy to read. The complex stream of consciousness style does not lend to facile parsing. This is enhanced by the narrative jumping forth between various times. One thread is set in the present, as the main character goes back to Shanghai, to relive en passant some of the ambience experienced by his father and ancestors. This is used as a jumping off point into a telling of their lives. Perhaps deliberately to increase the ambiguity (or confusion) in the reader, the main character has the same surname and much of the same background as the author.

So you can read this at several levels. One way is to appreciate the myriad cultural entanglements depicted. On the male side, the family descends from Portuguese Jews who converted to Catholicism. Though the extent of this conversion is itself subject to differing interpretations. We see this European background racially and ethnically mixed with the local Chinese, of Shanghai, Hong Kong and Macao. Mostly in the early 20th century, up to the end of World War 2. Glimpses of lost Asian communities under colonial rule.

A recurring theme is this intermingling and fusion of cultures, on the literal boundaries of the Asian mainland.

On a minor note, we also see some impressions of Australia from the main character, who enters the country as an Asian kid, during a time when the White Australia policy was still in force. (Though the book never mentions the latter.) The descriptions of Australia starkly contrast with those of China. Adding to the book's tale of blending of cultures.

The story also goes into the hardships of Shanghai during the Japanese occupation. The squalor, hunger and diseases of a long war, overlaid on a city that already had much poverty. To Australian or American readers, brought up on their forebears' memories of the war, it can be a grim reminder that things were worse in China.

Inevitably, the book invites comparisons to J G Ballard's Empire of the Sun. Stylistically, Castro's is a more intricate offering.