Awards

• Winner of Tucholsky Prize, PEN Sweden 2022

Overview

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 and poverty of the countryside, he finds only cold stares and rejection. He wanders the streets, accompanied by the bitter fog of winter pollution, reciting a monologue of numbers and odors, lust and loathing, memories and 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 and rhythms of Camus, Dostoevsky, and Kafka; the serious yet absurdist dissection of the logic of racism in Ellison's Invisible Man-while drawing deeply on Uyghur literary traditions and Sufi poetics and combining all these disparate influences into a style that is distinctly Tursun's own. The Backstreets is a stark fable about urban isolation and social violence, dehumanization and the racialization of ethnicity. Yet its protagonist's vivid recollections of maternal tenderness and first love reveal how memory and 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 and his work.

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9780231202916

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Reviews

The publication of Perhat Tursun's The Backstreets, together with Darren Byler's illuminating introductions, is a landmark event in English-language world literature. Tursun's narration of the life of an Uyghur office worker in UErumchi is unforgettable and quietly mindblowing. The style, mood, and scope are evocative of Camus (or maybe of an alternative Camus who wrote from an Algerian perspective), while still feeling utterly distinctive and unprecedented. A triumph. -- Elif Batuman, author of <i>The Idiot</i> Wryly intelligent, acutely receptive to the sounds and smells of the life around him, but also half crazy, convinced that the universe is bombarding him with messages in a code he cannot read, and-finally-subjected to the casual contempt of his Han Chinese masters, Perhat Tursun's young hero gives us a darkly poetic record of a struggle to make sense of a world of oppression. A brave and heartrending book. -- JM Coetzee If there ever is a work of literature that captures the existential condition of presently intensifying settler colonization of an indigenous city, it is Perhat Tursun's short, masterful novel The Backstreets. This beautifully translated novel should be on the reading list for every conscientious person mindful of the injustice of contemporary colonialism and for everyone who loves a good read. -- Shu-mei Shih, University of California, Los Angeles

The publication of Perhat Tursun's The Backstreets, together with Darren Byler's illuminating introductions, is a landmark event in English-language world literature. Tursun's narration of the life of an Uyghur office worker in UErumchi is unforgettable and quietly mindblowing. The style, mood, and scope are evocative of Camus (or maybe of an alternative Camus who wrote from an Algerian perspective), while still feeling utterly distinctive and unprecedented. A triumph. -- Elif Batuman, author of <i>The Idiot</i> Wryly intelligent, acutely receptive to the sounds and smells of the life around him, but also half crazy, convinced that the universe is bombarding him with messages in a code he cannot read, and-finally-subjected to the casual contempt of his Han Chinese masters, Perhat Tursun's young hero gives us a darkly poetic record of a struggle to make sense of a world of oppression. A brave and heartrending book. -- J. M. Coetzee The tragedy of the Uyghurs deserves nothing less than this absolutely brilliant and penetrating book. It is a moral imperative for readers to understand what is happening to this besieged population, and Tursun's prose is worthy of Kafka's. -- Gary Shteyngart, author of <i>Super Sad True Love Story: A Novel</i> If there ever is a work of literature that captures the existential condition of presently intensifying settler colonization of an indigenous city, it is Perhat Tursun's short, masterful novel The Backstreets. This beautifully translated novel should be on the reading list for every conscientious person and adopted for world literature classes on high school, college, and graduate levels. -- Shu-mei Shih, University of California, Los Angeles

The publication of Perhat Tursun's The Backstreets, together with Darren Byler's illuminating introductions, is a landmark event in English-language world literature. Tursun's narration of the life of an Uyghur office worker in UErumchi is unforgettable and quietly mindblowing. The style, mood, and scope are evocative of Camus (or maybe of an alternative Camus who wrote from an Algerian perspective), while still feeling utterly distinctive and unprecedented. A triumph. -- Elif Batuman, author of <i>The Idiot</i>

Author Information

Perhat Tursun is a leading Uyghur writer, poet, and social critic from the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. He has published many short stories and poems as well as three novels, including the controversial 1999 novel The Art of Suicide, decried as anti-Islamic. In 2018, he was detained by the Chinese authorities and was reportedly given a sixteen-year prison sentence. Darren Byler is assistant professor of international studies at Simon Fraser University and author of Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City (2022). His anonymous cotranslator, who disappeared in 2017, is presumed to be in the reeducation camp system in northwest China.

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