Between Chinese-style communism and rampant Islamism, Uighur writer Perhat Tursun's Western-influenced prose did not save him from a so-called re-education camp. His American translator publishes "The Backstreets," an original novel with universal relevance. Review of a unique life path, which is linked to the tragic fate of Xinjiang.
An Uigure wanders the streets of Ürümqi, covered in a fog of polluted air, in search of an unlikely rental apartment. He is obsessed with numbers and their interpretation, with smells that remind him of his childhood, or with the women in the capital of the Uyghur Autonomous Region of Xinjiang in northwest China.
In this scenery the novel "The Backstreets" develops, which is to appear in English translation in September 2022 and which Novastan could see. There, Perhat Tursun, a Uyghur author now imprisoned in Chinese re-education camps, describes the daily life of this unnamed Uyghur man. "The Backstreets" seems to be influenced on the one hand by Franz Kafka and his grueling administrative labyrinth, and on the other hand by Albert Camus, in the absurdity and irrationality of his situation. read more