Reading a Little Deeper

Recently I finished reading Cixin Liu’s Death’s End. In the hardcore science fiction genre, it stands as a peak of human imagination (for imagination itself is intelligence). It’s also the conclusion of the series. The central plot is that an alien civilization tries to conquer Earth. Humanity spends centuries preparing a weapon to face them. But what they end up making isn’t a weapon at all—it’s a message about the very existence of the Solar System. That message, in turn, reveals knowledge about the aliens who had arrived, and thus the threat is ended. But then humans notice something strange in space—like a scrap of paper floating. It can’t even be touched, it’s moving so fast. A transparent object. In fact, it’s the weapon of an enemy beyond human imagining. Its two-dimensional surface begins to pull everything around it into itself: spaceships, people, then gradually even planets and galaxies. Vivid descriptions follow, in which Earth and the Sun themselves collapse into two-dimensional objects. Our oceans turn transparent, because their blue color is visible only in three dimensions.

While reading such a book, filled with such complex descriptions, I couldn’t help but think: a book like this exists only because it has a primary audience and a community around it. That community is the reason such a book could come into being. This distinction is something our people don’t often grasp.

After finishing Death’s End, the novel I wanted to read next was Solenoid—and I began it right away. The truth is, no other book came to mind that could give me the same kind of stimulation. Solenoid surpasses all genres, mixing them all together. Look at the dream sequences in the middle of the novel—what do they mean? It’s a commentary on literature and the very art of creation itself. But it is the reader’s job to make sense of it. That’s why you don’t often see people around you who have actually read it. The ordinary reader lacks the training for that—but that doesn’t mean the book is inaccessible to them.

So the question arises again: is it deep? Yes. Is Death’s End deep? Yes. Are they profound? No, is the answer.

I also recently finished reading The Suicide Museum by Ariel Dorfman. In it, the protagonist (who shares the author’s name) is paid by a mysterious man to investigate the cause of Allende’s death—and to write a novel about it. From past experience, the author already feels a fear of what he is stepping into. The narrative is very complex. Is the novel deep? Yes. Is it layered? Yes. Is it profound? No, that’s the answer. Yet it is one of today’s most celebrated novels.

Ulysses is deep. One Hundred Years of Solitude is profound. Moby-Dick is profound. The Sound and the Fury is deep.

Of course, novels can be read without making such divisions. The reader is the one who experiences. Everything comes down to their choice. Reading may be a private act, but how a book is read also depends on society and its collective thinking capacity. The very divisions I’ve just outlined come from that.

The Suicide Museum will not mean the same to us as it does to a Chilean reader. But a Malayali will immediately understand when told that the EMS government model later served as a reference for Allende’s government. Such resonances are what made Latin American novels famous here. One only needs the awareness to grasp it.