Böcker av Ouyang Yu

I want to say that Ouyang Yu plays with language, but he doesn't: what he does is recognise that language plays with us. This digressive, almost hallucinatory narrative unites Ouyang Yu's abiding obsessions: identity, history, cultural hypocrisy, race, the nature of storytelling. How do we approach a story as loose as life - one that will honour the messiness of life lived in what cannot help being both its first and final draft? All the Rivers Run South is about the work of addressing oneself to history, to a history that cannot be told in one way (something which might also be said of Ouyang Yu's own work). It recalls something Javier Marías said about fiction that in it, material truer than history is made available to us. The author creates history, giving us life as it is lived, and the struggle to make sense of that - as personal history, as geopolitical history - while remaining open to serendipity and to the death, figurative as well as literal, of the author, constituting history's only guaranteed warrant. Ouyang Yu provides comfort for the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable. All the Rivers Run South is a salve and salvo for anyone who has ever thought, with Calderón, that "man's greatest crime is to be born." - Declan FryDuring the past thirty years the award winning writer Ouyang Yu has created the most challenging and innovative body of work this country has ever seen. The powerful energy of his genius, the rich stream of ideas and innovation in his poetry and novels, and in his essays and translations is evident in everything he writes, and never more so than in his enthralling new novel, All the Rivers Run South. For those interested in the exchange of ideas between Chinese and Australian culture, familiarity with Ouyang's work is essential. - Alex Miller

'Journal entries, poems, fragments, meditations. Allusions to and critical engagement with philosophers and writers - Chinese, European and Australian - this is what makes Ouyang Yu's Thought is Free a thinker's work, not a "thoughter's" who only has thoughts. Delightfully readable!' - Professor Prem Poddar, Vice-Chancellor of Darjeeling Hills University'This book is a treasure for those who are already familiar with Ouyang Yu's work spanning more than three decades. And if you are not familiar with his work, this is a welcome opportunity to get acquainted with his work and what shapes his writing and thinking. The book contains the thoughts of a writer who is one of the most nationally and internationally recognised Australian-Chinese writers of poetry and fiction in a hybrid narrative of inspirations, citations. It asks questions and provides tentative answers to what makes a writer tick, not least the commitment to writing and its accompanying delights and frustrations, and how they are shaped by living in a particular space at a particular time. A space simultaneously structured by nation/s, but also formed by the writer's own investment in place, even hesitant sense of community and belonging. It is wonderfully idiosyncratic as such books are, similar in my catalogue of reading to Fernando Pessoa's Disquietude, even if that was for a different place in a different time. Ouyang Yu's take is distinctly personal and bears the hallmark of his preoccupations as a writer, as an Australian-Chinese, and as a very human being who is, as we all should be at this moment of time, at peace and war with the world and its dis/orders.' - Lars Jensen, Roskilde University'Yu Ouyang's jaunty jottings are incredibly alive and bright and first-rate. This challenging book defies any intellectual effort to grasp thought.' - Bénédicte Letellier, University of Reunion Island'Enticing transpoeticnonfiction tag notwithstanding, Ouyang Yu's Thought is Free is a daring exercise at and assertion of authorial creative freedom by a born-poet and cross-cultural agent provocateur that not only resists discipline and genre categorisation, but unflinchingly defies the readers' power to pass judgements or expect translation of unknown Chinese words or references. Yet the depth of his reflections and the breadth of his transcultural erudition summon the reader to keep on board an intriguing trip down sour memory lane with a mature migrant poet that is "beyond prizes" and makes no qualms about giving Australia its due dose of bashing. Not that he shows much patience for celebrated Western thinkers whose universalist claims he defiantly contests as "preposterous". All in all, a nutritious crop of thoughtful fragments strung together into a book difficult to digest but worthy of plentiful "red underlining" awards from its readers.' - Aurora García Fernández

'Ouyang Yu's Foreign Matter rages against the vacuity of suburban life, alert to every racist slight, with a linguistic playfulness that shuffles and bounces through English language via the "e;gibberish keyings of an irrelevant computer"e;. Here Australia is often depicted as an unabashed identity-less dystopia, a volatile yet bland melting-pot of adopted and imported cultures, a "e;prisonful"e; of freedom. From Melbourne's bay of "e;muddy fury"e;, to uneventful suburbs and mown lawns, displaced characters flicker through anger and resignation, cynicism or bemusement, or even psychological breakdown - as sharply depicted in the sequence "e;Lines Written at the Melbourne Mental"e; that plays on the word 'home'. These prickly observations untangle the enduring uneasiness that's felt in both past and present countries, inhabiting a house "e;made of time"e; more than of space. Relentlessly critical, Ouyang's jagged nuanced poems shred any boundaries, fuelled by their clear-eyed "e;foreign matter"e; that is both catalyst and lament.' - Gig Ryan

Ouyang Yu has been one of Australia's most prolific producers of poetry, translations and edited collections for the last three decades. He has also been nominated, in April 2019, as one of the top ten poets for 2018 in China as a xianfeng shiren (avant-garde poet) because he has been writing poetry that defies publication all along, in both China and Australia, in both Chinese and English. This collection gathers much of this experimental work, with some of the poems collected in this book dating as far back as late 1982.Ouyang Yu is still alive, and writing. This is his most posthum(or)ous work.