Notes of a Crocodile (1994)

I'd never heard of this book before, but bought it based on NYRB classics, translated fiction, queer misfits, and I don't think I've read any authors from Taiwan before. Plus this cover is just fantastic. Still, I had very little in the way of expectations going in.

Now I am struggling to find a way to talk about it. Central to the story is the narrator, known to us only by the nickname Lazi, and her on-again off-again love with Shui Ling. Told from excerpts from ten notebooks Lazi wrote over a period encompassing what seems to be the last few years of high school (except she is no longer living at home?) through what seems to be a prestigious college -- as she struggles to figure out life and love (mostly love) with the help of a few other queer kids who all seem to be cut off from any larger, established LGBTQIA+ community and so are figuring things out in a vacuum with mostly only their self-doubts, fleeting obsessions, and the judgements of society at large to guid them. The fragmented run-on sentence above is somewhat indicative of the fragmented nature of the text, which sometimes shifts backwards and forwards in time and also sideways to a crocodile analogy in a way that is sometimes bewildering but no more so than it would be to live that way. Most of the characters involved seem to be academically gifted, analytical, obscure-reference making types instantly familiar to anyone who's ever been on a college campus. I couldn't help but love them all and fiercely wish for them to be scooped up by queer elders to share with them joy and radical acceptance.

Have already acquired her other novel. ( )

While I appreciate the what was being done in this book, and it did what it set out to, I struggled to find hardly anything I liked it. I didn't rate it as low as I was going to, because even though I didn't like it myself it was so inertly representative of what being that age, and struggling with everything this books covers, that I felt it was only fair. However it is a real reminder that all of that was really horrible and to read about someone else going through didn't make it more poignant.

I'm sure that is an audience out there for this book. I am just not it. ( )

im like not going to explain myself im just going to say that i really really liked this book. the Strangeness..... idk if u can do this on this site but message me if you're actually interested in knowing the rationale behind my rating. ( )

This book provides a very introspective look into the life of a college student who seems to suffer from depression and a lot of guilt over her sexuality. She struggles over her love for a woman who is very unreliable and is tormented by this. In the way of the very young, she can often come across as whiny or melodramatic. Still, this was an interesting look at how homosexual students in Taiwan in the late 80s dealt with societal pressures. ( )

Notes of a Crocodile describes the college years of a young gay Taiwanese woman, her various lovers and friends during the later 1980s and early 1990s in Taipei. Like most coming-of-age novels it describes the heartbreak of youth, the gaining of experience through the harsh blows of the world, the exaltations and despairs of first love, the gradual coming together of a sense of self, of a sense of destiny. And like most coming out novels it describes the sense of isolation from society as the first realisations of same sex desire dawn, the sense of an already fragile, fledgling egohood rendered even more precarious by the knowledge of an otherness, the knowledge that one is becoming an unwilling transgressor against society.

Read the full review on The Lectern ( )