num_pages: 242
description: Set in the post-martial-law era of late 1980s Taipei Notes of a Crocodile depicts the coming-of-age of a group of queer misfits discovering love friendship and artistic affinity while hardly studying at Taiwan's most prestigious university. Told through the eyes of an anonymous lesbian narrator nicknamed Lazi Qiu Miaojin's cult classic novel is a postmodern pastiche of diaries vignettes mash notes aphorisms exegesis and satire by an incisive prose stylist and countercultural icon.Afflicted by her fatalistic attraction to Shui Ling an older woman Lazi turns for support to a circle of friends that includes a rich kid turned criminal and his troubled self-destructive gay lover as well as a bored mischievous overachiever and her alluring slacker artist girlfriend.Illustrating a process of liberation from the strictures of gender through radical self-inquiry Notes of a Crocodile is a poignant masterpiece of social defiance by a singular voice in contemporary Chinese literature.
language: English
title: Notes of a Crocodile
publisher: NYRB Classics