Elephant Herd

by Guixing Zhang, Carlos Rojas (translator)

Elephant Herd is a vivid and captivating novel by the Taiwan-based Malaysian Chinese (Mahua) writer Zhang Guixing, whose distinctive style evokes the jungles of Southeast Asia. It is an atmospheric account of a Malaysian Chinese young man’s journey upriver deep into the Sarawak rainforest of northwest Borneo in search of his uncle, the leader of a Communist guerilla group. Venturing through the jungle, the protagonist—largely referred to only as “the boy”—enters a verdant and vertiginous world of wild creatures and political peril.

Jumping backward and forward in time, Elephant Herd intermingles fractured, fragmentary episodes with lush, immersive descriptions of the natural world. Its main narrative begins in the 1970s and proceeds to explore the repercussions of Sarawak’s midcentury Communist insurgency. Focusing on the boy, his extended family, and his Indigenous classmate and travel companion, Zhang examines the complex relations among ethnic Chinese, local Malays, and Indigenous peoples. The novel teems with crocodiles, turtles, elephants, and countless other species of flora and fauna; as the boy’s journey progresses, the human and nonhuman worlds begin to blur together and even camouflage themselves as each other. Elegantly translated by Carlos Rojas, Elephant Herd is a hypnotic and compelling work by a major Sinophone writer.

248 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

Reviews

[Kate O'Shea · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm afraid, unlike everyone else who has read this book, that I didn't enjoy it at all. I got hopelessly confused about where the boy was or where he was going and the title of the book is misleading. The actual mythical elephant herd that the boy searches for only appear a few times and I didn't understand the significance even then.

Not for me.

Thankyou to Netgalley and Columbia University Press for the advance review copy.

[endrju]

The boy was six years old. He was sitting under a jackfruit tree watching his distraught grandfather inside the animal shed. The lake behind the shed was covered in duckweed and was filled with camouflaged scalliongreen rain frogs. waterbirds. dragonflies. butterflies. In front of the shed there was a well full of black, shiny water. Heavy. Heavy as metal. The tall jackfruit tree had a thick canopy, and its inky shadow enveloped the shed, the well, and half of the pond. Spiders. millipedes. scorpions. crabs. lizards appeared and disappeared in the haze. On cloudy days, the boy would sit under the tree, and if he held out his hand, in place of his fingers he would instead see his grandfather’s tiny eyes like a pair of fluorescent mushrooms.

The novel reads like a particularly phantasmagorical Apichatpong Weeresethakul movie, especially in the first part. The boundaries between plants, animals, people, language (there's a part where a gecko becomes part of a Chinese character, I wonder how that works in the original) are all turned upside down, and everybody is somebody. They all eat and are eaten, feed on each other, live and die together in the forest. Really stunning work for most of the novel. However, I didn't really care about the politics, even though I'm very invested in them. I missed all the nuances, but that's my fault, since I know next to nothing about the communist struggle in the region in the 1970s, except that Indonesia carried out a genocide against the defeated communist insurgents. Had I known more, I think these parts would have worked much better, but I'm glad I read the novel as it is.

[emily]

DNF at 33% . Maybe wrong book, wrong time. Or maybe I just thought the tone and writing rather - mind-numbing. In any case, not the one for me.

[Jax · Rating 3 out of 5]

This novel is a translation of a 1998 work of political fiction written by Chinese Malaysian Zhang Guixing, who was born in North Borneo but now lives in Taiwan. The story takes place during the Sarawak insurgency, a communist-led guerrilla war against the Malaysian government that lasted from 1962 to 1990. Protagonist Shi Shicai lost his brothers to this war and is searching for his uncle to avenge their deaths. Much of his time is spent in the Bornean rainforest populated by exotic, dangerous and, at times, mythical creatures that lend a magical realism component to the work. The story floats between present to past, reality and something else, which taxes the attention and understanding until one adjusts to it. It is only then that the beauty of this work begins to emerge. For the Western reader, the author’s style can present a challenge. But, for those who enjoy Modern Chinese literature and are looking for a book that addresses diasporic viewpoints, this can be an option.

Thank you to Columbia University Press and NetGalley for providing this eARC.

[Quinn Chen · Rating 4 out of 5]

beautiful, strange
so vibrant but written without grace

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

From the early 1960s until 1990, small insurgent bands of Maoist guerillas fought to change Malaya’s government. Living and operating in Borneo’s remote rainforests, most guerilla outfits consisted of Malaysians of Chinese descent, a minority population, whose low status was probably only increased by the unpopular revolutionary violence. Elephant Herd is a Malaysian Heart of Darkness beginning in 1973, with the protagonist, Shi Shicai, a six-year-old Malaysian Chinese living in Borneo’s rainforest.

Shicai’s home is primitive—wood, corrugated tin—and surrounded by insects, birds, domesticated and undomesticated animals (predator and prey), and, in the nearby waters, fish and crocodiles. The author, Zhang Guixing, himself a Malaysian Chinese, captures the density of inhabitation by these creatures, their sounds, and smells—nature’s perils for life in a rainforest. After Shicai’s grandfather disappears and his grandmother’s corpse discovered floating in one of the family’s well, he decides to seek out his uncle, Yu Jiatong, the Marxist/Maoist revolutionary of the family. All four of Shicai’s older brothers died in service to their uncle’s ideological furor.

Shicai’s family once had intellectual pretenses, including a home library stocked with books of Chinese and Western literature and Marxist political analysis. Their father’s addiction to opium ended whatever chances they may have had for a better life. His addiction was supported by cheating at cards, and when his cheating was discovered, he was beaten lame and lost his mind so that his addiction transferred from smoking opium to eating paper—his library. Only Shicai is left to preserve the library, to try to pass on his education to the local youth.

After a long and dangerous trek through the rainforest, Shicai finally finds his uncle, Yu Jiatong, who has been in hiding for years, wanted by the government for insurgency. During the months Shicai spends with Jiatong, Jiatong confesses that, although he has spent ten years leading revolutionary forces, within the first few months of guerilla activities he realized the guerillas would never win. During one battle against Borneo’s anti-revolutionary forces, while his comrades were being killed, he hid with a woman co-revolutionary, then raped her while shots fired around them. He kept up his revolutionary pretenses, however, tracking down and killing elephants to finance his operations and—in conjunction with a former comrade (who may have tried to kill him for bounty money) with whom he established a crocodile farm developed as a tourist attraction—selling items made from crocodile skin and meat. Rather than fresh livestock for the locals to eat, the livestock is used to feed the crocodiles, whose by-products are sold to further finance Jiatong’s unwinnable war. Jiatong seems to be waiting for someone—quite possibly his nephew, Shicai—to kill him: He is as addicted to power as his uncle was to opium.

In the end, Shicai realizes that both sides of his family have, for decades, been complicit in crimes against the state and its natural environment, both knowingly and unknowingly contributing to the erasure of their world and culture.

For more of my reviews, please see https://www.thebookbeat.com/backroom/...

[Jasmine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Elephant Herd felt very much like a fever dream in the fact the novel flip flops between past and present through the lens of Shi Shicai a decidedly unreliable narrator who is travelling the rainforest in search of his communist Uncle & mythical elephants and explores a complex variety of historical dynamics between the Indigenous Iban community, and the settling Malay Chinese during the strange era of the Sarawak communist uprising and it's overall impact on communities and families during a decidedly complex time in Borneo.

I wouldn't say this was particularly my cup of tea namely because I'm not a massive fan of books that have aspects of the men writing women meme instilled...but it was an intriguing read beyond that in the whole referencing to historical dynamics of conflict during the middle to late 20th century.

Thank you for the e-arc Columbia University Press and NetGalley it's certainly given some food for thought if nothing else...

[Erin · Rating 3 out of 5]

A boy, searching for his missing uncle, journeys into the rainforest on a surreal trip where past and present begin to blend together. Reality becomes mixed with memories and hallucinatory episodes, as we learn more about his family’s tragedies and the failed rebellion that brought devastation to their community. This was not an easy book to read. The main character’s family suffers such extreme loss and cruelty- it can feel unrelenting. The way past and present exist almost on top of each other creates this sense of a cycle of trauma that the characters can’t break free from. But even though I found it a difficult read, I’m glad I read it for the writing style and the depiction of a part of history I knew nothing about.

Thanks to netgalley for a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

[Clementine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very interesting novel and beautifully translated. For the first quarter or so I thought I could really love this - the spectral elephant herd, the lush descriptions of the rainforest fauna of Borneo - but I was less interested in the river journey and political situation, which at times was described in an artless expository way. But the weirdness, elements of magical realism, and achronological storytelling appealed to me, and it was a worthwhile read though not perfect for me.

[Sofia · Rating 2 out of 5]

Lush and rich in it's narrative, so much so that I got rather lost in the rainforest, in the leaves and the sounds and the animals and the people and the ghosts of both. Loosing track of where I was was made more so because of the visits to the past and the present. Time is not linear here. Plus the animals and the ghost thereof are sometimes animals but other times stand in for people, different groups, all 'making a life' in the rainforest and the river...................

[Debbie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful lyrical writing almost poetic. A simple story of life for a small boy and travels with family through the rainforest. It felt like being lost in the forest with the story teller. Gorgeous and a challenging life. Thank you to the author. Thank you to #netgalley and the publisher for an ARC.

[Citron Pineapple · Rating 5 out of 5]

Must read. One of his best works of all time

[JXR · Rating 4 out of 5]

interesting book with a very cool nature theme within it and some fun camo motifs. 4 stars. would recomend.