The Backstreets: A Novel from Xinjiang

The Backstreets is an astonishing novel by a preeminent contemporary Uyghur author who was disappeared by the Chinese state. It follows an unnamed Uyghur man who comes to the impenetrable Chinese capital of Xinjiang after finding a temporary job in a government office. Seeking to escape the pain & poverty of the countryside, he finds only cold stares & rejection. He wanders the streets, accompanied by the bitter fog of winter pollution, reciting a monologue of numbers & odors, lust & loathing, memories & madness.

Perhat Tursun’s novel is a work of untrammeled literary creativity. His evocative prose recalls a vast array of canonical world writers―contemporary Chinese authors such as Mo Yan; the modernist images & rhythms of Camus, Dostoevsky, & Kafka; the serious yet absurdist dissection of the logic of racism in Ellison’s Invisible Man―while drawing deeply on Uyghur literary traditions & Sufi poetics & combining all these disparate influences into a style that is distinctly Perhat Tursun’s own. The Backstreets is a stark fable about urban isolation & social violence, dehumanization, & the racialization of ethnicity. Yet its protagonist’s vivid recollections of maternal tenderness & first love reveal how memory & imagination offer profound forms of resilience. A translator’s introduction situates the novel in the political atmosphere that led to the disappearance of both the author & his work.