‘The Library of Legends’ is a story about hope

Four years ago, my brother introduced me to the world of “Fox Spirit Matchmaker,” a Chinese anime about star-crossed immortal and mortal companions, reincarnation and a young fox spirit and human Taoist tasked with helping lovers reconnect and remember each other in a next life.

With a very limited knowledge of Chinese language and literature and without new English subtitled episodes to binge, our haphazard quest to find another book or anime that resembles the magic of that show has often been unsuccessful.

But Janie Chang’s newest xuanhuan novel “The Library of Legends” fulfills that niche we’ve been privately seeking as Chinese Americans.

“The Library of Legends”
By Janie Chang
400 pp. William Morrow Paperbacks. $16.99.
May 12, 2020.

Chang’s “The Library of Legends” is like if Neil Gaiman’s “Stardust” and “American Gods” were steeped in Chinese mythology and folklore, rather than Western or Norse ones, and then mixed with a bit of largely forgotten Chinese wartime history.

In Chang’s richly immersive book, China’s spirits, gods and guardians quietly coincide with humans on earth, answering people’s prayers. Their brilliant, hopeful and sometimes tragic stories were inscribed and collected as part of the Jingtai Encyclopedia in 147 volumes known as the “Library of Legends.” (I’d like to think the love stories of “Fox Spirit Matchmaker” were documented in this fictional “Library of Legends.”)

A group of 123 nomadic university students, professors and staff, including literature students Hu Lian and Liu Shaoming (the family surname comes first in Chinese), are tasked with studying, protecting, transporting and preserving these tomes of ancient Chinese history as they flee Japanese invasion, airstrikes and bombs in 1937, Nanking, to continue their studies in the much less coastal city of Chengtu. This historical fantasy was partly inspired by Chang’s father and uncle’s own journey across China as “refugees in their own country, walking more than a thousand miles to safety with their university” during the Second Sino-Japanese War.

Chang’s book contains the horrors of war — like infant daughters abandoned by their parents or children who grew up too soon — but it also contains hope and magic, preserved in the stories in “The Library of Legends. ”

Lian’s tasked with studying the “Tales of Celestial Deities,” which contains the legend of Willow Star and the Prince. As the story goes, a star of a maidservant who fell in love with a human prince agrees to a Faustian bargain to reunite with each of the prince’s reincarnations on earth. The only catch: The prince can never remember anything from his past lives and she can never tell him. Still, each lifetime is another chance to defy the impossible odds. If the prince can ever romantically love the star, the two ill-fated lovers will be reunited for eternity in heaven. It hasn’t happened yet. But during her heroic journey to preserve literature, Lian realizes that she’s met the reincarnated prince in her handsome and wealthy classmate Shaoming, and the star in his maidservant Sparrow.

In “The Library of Legends,” Chang deftly weaves hope and horror, magical realism with research, and fiction with politics, creating a fantastical love story set in a backdrop of war.

Disclaimer: I received a free eARC of “The Library of Legends” from NetGalley and William Morrow Paperbacks in exchange for this honest review.

Shubhangi Swarup’s ‘Latitudes of Longing’ shows how everything is connected

At one point in Shubhangi Swarup’s novel “Latitudes of Longing,” Thapa asks his friend Plato how stories are written.

“Change,” Plato answers. “Something needs to happen. Without it, a story is dead.”

“Latitudes of Longing”
By Shubhangi Swarup
320 pp. One World. $27.
May 19, 2020.

“Latitudes of Longing,” a sweeping and poetic debut, is about change — like how a supercontinent broke off into many tinier islands and continents, how the moon gave birth to the stars, how a mother abandoned her son, and how a man who studies trees married a woman who talked to them.

The latter story is how this novel begins. Newlyweds Girija Prasad Varma and Chanda Devi are the man and woman of this tale. Girija Prasad is a scientist who landed a post as a researcher on the Andaman Islands, a formerly British, now Indian settlement; Chanda is a clairvoyant, who talks to the platonic ghosts and ghosts of goats on their new island home.

The Varmas’ tale is told in “Islands,” the first part in Swarup’s four-part novel. Their tale is the “Pangaea” (Girija Prasad spends his life studying the phenomenon) of this book — the longest and earliest story from which the other interconnected and shorter stories break apart from.

The first piece to break off of Girija Prasad Varma and Chanda Devi’s island is Mary, a Karen woman from a faultline in Myanmar. She works as the Varmas’ maid, raising their one and only daughter, Devi. However, Mary leaves the Indian islands to return to Sagaing after her son’s friend Thapa visits to tell her that her estranged son, Plato, has been imprisoned for organizing protests. Mary and Plato’s story of reconciliation, love, sacrifice and redemption is told in “Faultline,” the second segment of Swarup’s book.

Years after Thapa arranges for Plato and Mary’s reunion, Thapa returns to his home in the valley of Thamel. This is where he, a man nearing 60, meets Bagmati, a bar dancer young enough to be his granddaughter. In “Valley” — a reverse retelling of “One Thousand and One Arabian Nights” — a girl with nothing to live for threatens a man with her personal execution if he cannot tell her a story, something that brings her out of her life in a valley of despair. That’s why Thapa, a smuggler by trade, seeks his friend Plato for advice. And that’s how the son of the sun and the daughter of a rain goddess came to live in a snow desert.

“Snow Desert” is “Latitudes of Longing’s” final destination, the fourth tale in this collection. Changthang, the snow desert in Tibet, is a where octogenarians Tashi Yeshe and Ghazala Mumtax Abdul Sheikh Begum fall in love. It’s also where Girija Rana meets the ghost of his grandfather, a man who was once married to a woman who could see ghosts.

In these four stories framed by their geographical names and elements, Swarup beautifully explains why the moon waxes and wanes, why one man became a vegetarian, and how all stories are formed, one on top of another.

Disclaimer: I received a free eARC of “Latitudes of Longing” from NetGalley and One World in exchange for this honest review.