I enjoyed this book about a young widow's grieving and self-rediscovery, though the pacing was a bit slow.

This book was beautifully surreal and dream like at times, I just loved it! A must read for fans of Murakami.

This is an interesting new voice in fiction and hard to believe it's a debut novel. Jia Jia discovers her husband dead in the bathtub one morning and no explanation is given. The rest of the book has the young widow searching for her way in life and attempting to piece together the puzzle of the "fish man" that her husband had described to her in a dream and that she experienced one morning. She gets involved with a local bartender whose family believes him being with a widow is unlucky, and she travels to Tibet where her husband had been before. The writing is lyrical and lovely, but I just found the pacing a little slow at times. Clearly she is a talented writer!

Braised Pork follows Wu Jia Jia on her journey to come to terms with her husband's death and uncover the truth of the fish-man picture he left behind. As she delves deeper into the mystery she finds that both her past and her present have links to the deep, dark world of water.

This is a beautiful story that weaves the busy world of modern day Beijing with the surrealistic world of water to create a slow, dream-like narrative, with themes of death, grief, love and life.

For people who enjoy: light surrealism / magical realism, character-driven narratives, family stories, contemporary fiction.

This book took me by surprise. When I started reading it, I thought it was going to be the average contemporary novel about grief and self-discovery that I always enjoy reading, but then it shifted into magical realism as a means of allegory to something else, which I hadn't expected. At first, I felt confused and it took me some days to pick it back up, but when I did return to the story, it gripped me and didn't let me go until the end. This book won't be for everybody, but it will be loved by reader who like magical —an almost mythical— elements interwoven in a story that is both contemporary and literary.

Jia Jia's husband kills himself and leaves behind a drawing of a fish man. Now that's totally off so I needed to know what the meaning was behind it. I thought Jia Jia would learn of some sort of past of her husbands or that there would be a lot of adventure for her but not much happened. I do like how Jia Jia grew and we were able to see a lot of character development. I did enjoy this book however - the ending sadly disappointed me because I didn't get any of the answers I was looking for. I still don't entirely understand the fish man meaning so maybe I just didn't get it but it felt like too many plots were trying to be put into one ending. It kept me interested but left me disappointed.

Braised Pork is one of those books that's so atmospheric that you know there's a lot of symbolism on the page but instead of trying to analyze and understand it, you just want to immerse yourself in it. If Murakami were feminist, he would write like this. It's juicy if you want it to be but it's also just a stunning reading experience if you don't want to think too hard about it all.

Podcast review forthcoming on June 1 at www.feministbookclub.com/podcast

I found this quick and readable but unfortunately feel like I didn't quite "get" it. There were a lot of ideas that felt a bit half-formed; either they weren't fully realized or I was unable to connect the dots. I did enjoy the commentary on ownership and gender roles: the main character has to come to terms with the fact that she was completely reliant upon her late husband and feels that she doesn't actually "own" anything he left her. I also didn't end up feeling very attached to the characters, so it was difficult to become very invested in the storyline.

content warnings: death of a loved one, attempted suicide

I had no idea what I was getting into when I started reading Braised Pork by An Yu. I knew it was a short read of about 240 pages and was a debut novel which had some mixed reviews but NetGalley and Grove Press shared this book with me (in exchange for a fair and honest review) and I was curious.

The story is of Jia Jia. It starts off when she finds her husband dead in the bathtub. There’s no cause for the death and by his side she finds a crude drawing of a ‘fish man’ - half fish, half man. This sets off a journey for her. Though her husband is well off, he didn’t leave much for her so she begins a journey of finding herself, coming to terms with the people in her life - new and old.

I can see why the reviews are conflicting. The first 3/5ths of the book, I loved. I loved the fantastical element of the story where she was immersed in this “world of water” which I think is the author's way to symbolize depression and I LOVED the way she did that. Be warned that this book doesn’t have a charted out plot per se, but personally, I loved the way the story flowed - I didn’t know where it was going but I didn’t question it as much because the prose was simple but poetic, the characters and their relationships were intriguing.

But then we got to a point in the book where I had to start questioning it a bit - ‘where was this story going?’. But the prose was still great, so I didn’t think of it too much. But in the end, I’d have to give this book only about 3.5 stars because of one thing alone - I do not like when one thing puts all the plot lines in perspective.

Other than that, I would definitely recommend this book. As I’ve said about 3-4 times in this review, the prose is beautiful and it felt like a great experience while I was reading it. It was just that one thing that irked me but it might not irk you, so go for it! :) I really look forward to reading more books from An Yu.

I was expecting this book to be a mystery, it took me some time to make sense of the story, Its sort of liquid, Jia Jai starts out looking for the meaning of a painting done by her husband before he died. But then it turns into a flowing story of Jia and her life in Beijing. Its a book that if you stick with it will be rewarded. But having preconceptions about this book won't help,

****4.0****

Jia Jia finds her husband dead in the bathtub.Suicide. And she finds a sketch of a fish-man , with a head of the man and body of the fish near the drowned man. Jia Jia remembers about her husband's dream that he had on his solo trip to Tibet.
Jia Jia was an artist, but when she meets her husband and he feels that its better for her to take care of the house, she quits. Now after his death she can barely manage her own grief or her expenses. She retorts to drinking at a near by bar and meets Bartender Leo. They get close but Jia Jia is aloof, in her own world. She needs answers. Answers on her future, expenses, past and most of all on Fish-Man.

“How can you really know someone?' she said finally. 'Even if I take my heart out, dissect it into pieces, and explain each piece in detail to you - in the end, I would still have to stuff the whole damn thing back into my own chest”

She travels the same path that her husband travelled to try find out what happened. She is chased by the "World of Water" which she believes has the answers. But the death of her husband connects her to so many things that she had ignored in the past. Her Grandmother, Aunt, Father and work relation, everything starts to come back to her.

I think the husband was too controlling. Making her stop her art and she couldn't turn to her family because she had unresolved issues with them. All the outings she had was with her husband and his friends. She didn't socialize on her own and didn't dare to cross him. But his death made things different. She was again herself and slowly she made peace with her life.

“Sometimes, the easiest way to lose somebody for ever is to keep them around.”

I liked the book very much. I loved the magical realism in it. If you think clearly, this is more about a woman trying to find herself after her marriage ended, trying to deal with things that were dealt or oppressed by the husband.
Wonderful Narration for a debut Novel.
Thank you Netgalley & Grove Atlantic for the book in exchange of a honest review!

Happy reading!!

Maybe 3.5 stars? I enjoyed it but didn’t wow me in any way. A very unique read... full review to come soon!
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I've been thinking about this book for a bit, trying to figure out where this book fell flat for me. While reading some other reviews, it really hit home—Jia Jia, and the other characters, are all missing something. I found it hard to connect with Jia Jia or any of the other secondary characters. Her actions, while interesting, seemed aimless. I could never really tell how she felt, or why she made certain decisions. They seemed to manifest out of thin air. She seems, to me, to be a vessel for this fantastical plot. I never got a good sense of her as a person, or why she might be doing any of the things she does.

I had thought for a long time about what this story is. On its surface, from the plot, you can figure out that it is a story of grief, love, and family. Yet, when I actually think about the characters, and what Jia Jia felt or what drove her, nothing comes to mind. I have come away with no deeper understanding of these ideas, or Jia Jia's motive in anything, after reading this book. While the plot offers some idea, the characters do nothing to further the basic themes that are brought up. Where is the grief? Where is the love and closeness Jia Jia desires? The fantastical plot can dazzle and shimmer in front of our eyes, but when there is nothing truly driving it, a story falls flat.

I was disappointed in this one, as it has so much potential. The plot itself is very strong, and I enjoyed Yu's writing, so I would be curious to read what she comes up with next. It is clear that she is very talented at putting together a novel, so I hope her future endeavors will be more satisfying for me.

I am still very curious about Yu's inspiration. While reading, I recognized elements of Chinese mythology and folktales that I had learned about in university—especially the image of Jia Jia inhabiting a world inside of a painting. I would be curious to learn more about the specifics of her inspiration and research.

Thank you to Grove Press and Netgalley for providing me with an advanced digital copy in exchange for an honest review.

An Yu's novel invites you into Jia Jia's world and brings you along for the unravelling of it. Jia Jia, a former artist, finds her husband dead in the bath and is left not only to grieve but to try and discover why her husband took his own life. There are tinges of Murakami style, worlds colliding and mysterious circumstances making the protagonist question reality and everything she once thought true.

Braised Pork starts off strong and hooks you in to find out what happened to her husband and what it means for Jia Jia. it also questions the social construct of the asian wife role and the freedom to pursue passions. As with any book that hints at mystery and a possible alternate universe, you have to allow yourself to be encapsulated by Jia Jia's water fish man world. A promising start from a talent young writer.

An Yu has created mythical sad world. A woman finds her husband dead in the bathtub next to a drawing of a fish with a man's head. As she is an artist, she attempts to recreate the Fishman. She follows in her husband's footsteps from his last trip to Tibet, hoping to find some answers to the mystery of the death. Obsessed with water to said mythical proportions, our main character is quite vivid.

Copy provided by the publisher and NetGalley

First published in Great Britain in 2020; published by Grove Press on April 14, 2020

Braised Pork tells the story of a woman who is struggling to cope with the demands of a changing life. Wu Jia Jia’s husband, Chen Hang, killed himself while kneeling over their bathtub, leaving her with an expensive apartment and little money with which to maintain it. She wants to sell the Beijing apartment, but rumors of her husband’s suicide have made buyers view the apartment as a place of misfortune.

Jia Jia thinks about moving in with her father, but is shocked to learn that he remarried while she was grieving her husband’s loss. Her other option, living with her grandmother and aunt, is difficult because they have settled into a way of life that makes her feel like an outsider. Finding a new husband might solve her problems, but the parents of the only man she has dated — the bartender at the tavern where she spends her evenings — believe it would be bad luck for their son to marry a widow.

Jia Jia attended art school and has some talent, but Chen Hang thought it would be inappropriate for her to sell her paintings. Now that he is gone, she contemplates a sketch he made of a fish with a man’s head. She obsessively paints her own version of the fish man but can never visualize the face that belongs on the fish’s body. In the meantime, she has been commissioned to paint a scene with Buddha on the wall of a friend’s home.

All of this is background for the true story, which involves visions or dreams or shared experiences in which Jia Jia and others encounter the fish man in a world made of water — a world that, in their view, represents true reality. Jia Jia feels compelled to take a trip to Tibet, where she finds a crude sculpture of the fish man in a small village and later discovers a connection between an old villager and her own family.

The recurring appearance of the fish man is something that might be found in a fable, but most of Braised Pork is grounded in a more recognizable reality. Exactly what the fish man represents or symbolizes — whether the fish man even exists, or is the product of mental illness — is ambiguous. In at least one case, the belief that we live in a world made of water seems to drive someone mad, perhaps because that person believes the world of water took everything from her. That person’s husband comes to believe that there are “two kinds of people: those who need boundaries, and those who will die from them.” Whether the body can be separated from the rest of human experience is one of the philosophical questions that An Yu poses to her readers.

I’m not sure quite what to make of the fish man. Despite its central importance to the story, I was drawn more to the life that Jia Jia is trying to make after the death of her husband — her uncertain relationship with the bartender, her reconnection with her father, her decision to start making art again. Jia Jia has an appealing resilience. Whether she has experienced visions that open a gateway to a different concept of reality or is suffering from a mental illness, her determination to place the best interpretation on her encounter with the water world, and to take something positive from its darkness, offers a ray of light in an otherwise dark story.

RECOMMENDED

Braised Pork by An Yu seems to exist in a floaty interstitial world between English and Chinese. I knew that the novel was written in English, An Yu's second language, before I began reading, but something about the language itself, and how the story delivers itself word by word and sentence by sentence on the page, made me keep thinking as I read that the language sounded like a Chinese novel in translation. Unlike famous non-native-speaker-author Joseph Conrad, who seemed determined to write sentences of such complexity that no native speaker would have been able to imagine writing them, An Yu's English is flat and unadorned: subject, verb, object. I would find myself thinking as I read along that the style reminded me of Mo Yan's style in English translation. The language is disarmingly simple--literally disarming, in my case, in that it disarmed me, and kept me from falling into the fictional dream.. And as I read along I kept having these somewhat obtrusive thoughts about how the language seemed translated when it wasn't, I also began to think that some of the words I was reading had indeed been badly translated, no matter what I'd heard, and that due to bad translation some parts of the story had become unintentionally surreal. It read as if the translator had kept choosing concrete words and literal translations for what in the original was metaphorical. The English felt unusually arranged. Its beats distracted me, and directed me over and over again to think about the words on the page, rather than their meaning. I can't say if this is a reaction that any other reader will have to this story but it made my experience of the novel something akin to found art, where arrangements of words allowed me to create my own interpretations, in the interstitial space that exists between word and meaning. I enjoyed reading the novel, but I'm not sure my experience was the intended one.

I found the premise of Braised Pork to be really intriguing, but then the story didn't quite deliver. I felt like, for the first 75% of the book, I was holding my breath, tense with the build-up An was showing. The pacing and the prose were both good, and it was exciting to embark on this adventure, this quest, with Jia Jia. But ultimately, the ending of the story was unsatisfying, and felt like it belonged to a different story, one that was introduced and resolved in the last quarter of the book. None of the questions that were raised in the blurb or the beginning of the novel- what happened to Chen Hang? What is his connection to the image of the fish-man?- are addressed. Maybe that's for the best, as ultimately this is Jia Jia's story, and her life is said to begin only with Chen Hang's death, but with the resolution, it still doesn't feel much like Jia Jia's story at all.

To say this novel is like no other would be an understatement. Even now, I am hard-pressed to describe it definitively as one thing or another.

The Pros: What worked for me

The writing style was absolutely beautiful. I liked the way the story would slip into this mystical water world and I wanted to learn more about this alternate reality. 

The plot of the story itself is a mystery because every time you think it is about one thing, something else gets revealed and the story goes in that direction.

The Cons: What I didn't like

I found Jia Jia's character to be abrasive, not just to others around her but to the reader. It was hard to get a read on her when she was constantly shifting and changing in her mindset and it wasn't always apparent when this was happening as there wasn't always a trigger.
I also struggled to understand what this water world was all about. Was it a real place or was it in her imagination? Did it have some basis in some Tibetan folklore? I just needed some more clarity here and it was missing for me.

This story was very unique, unlike anything I've ever encountered before. But this same characteristic about it makes me unsure on my feelings toward it. I think this novel had a very interesting message to convey - but it got lost in translation. There was just too much that I didn't really feel like I understood about the story, and I needed that background in order to fully appreciate it. For those reasons, I'm giving this a 2.5/5 stars.

The first paragraph of this book's description had me absolutely sold: "One autumn morning, Jia Jia walks into the bathroom of her lavish Beijing apartment to find her husband dead. One minute she was breakfasting with him and packing for an upcoming trip, the next, she finds him motionless in their half-full bathtub. Like something out of a dream, next to the tub Jia Jia discovers a pencil sketch of a strange watery figure, an image that swims into Jia Jia’s mind and won’t leave."

And I was not disappointed with the book I had the pleasure of reviewing. An Yu's story and prose is transporting and consuming and has me impatient to read her next book. If you've been looking for a book to escape to and get lost in, this one is for you.

This book is really unique to any other book I’ve read. I was oddly captivated by it and didn’t want to stop reading it even though the magical realism part of the story didn’t exactly sit well with my brain. Still I couldn’t wait to finish it and see what the mystery was about the fish man. I would definitely read more by this author.