Salt Fish Girl has this incredible, in many ways relatable, blending of a gross, pervasive sickness/smell with a sensitive, handsy queerness that vibrantly articulates something very truthful, I felt, about the experience of being a child dyke. I was sold “It was a murkier sort of solitude, silent with the wet sleep of the unformed world,” writes Lai. From the first lines I knew I would like it–lines on the first page about loneliness and primordial sludge made me pause with wonder. I was prepared to love the book, it had been recommended to me by a friend, and, as I said I’d already enjoyed another of Lai’s novels. Nu Wa & her story, generally in nineteenth century China, and her experience falling in love with the salt fish girl who works at the market and Miranda, who’s growing up in the technocapitalist Pacific Northwest from 2042 onwards, and who has the pungent smell of the durian fruit constantly emanating from her whole being and whose family is trying to find a cure. It floats out of time frames, bodies and characters but the main focal points are two protagonists. Published in 2002, the novel tells a dual or even quadruple story at once. Both novels in fact share certain preoccupations with gross bodily queerness as well as dystopian capitalist futures and clones. In other words it was really great, even better than The Tiger Flu (2018) in my opinion, which I read last year and enjoyed immensely too. Rich with Chinese mythology and cultural lore, this remarkable novel is about gender, love, honour, intrigue, and fighting against the dark forces of biotechnology.Salt Fish Girl by Larissa Lai is a gooey treat of a book, full of nauseating smells, intoxicating feelings and so much juicy/murky/enticing fluid. Could Miranda be infected by the Dreaming Disease that makes the past leak into the present?įramed by a playful sense of magic realism, Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl reveals a future where corporations govern cities, factory workers are cybernetically engineered, middle-class labour is a video game, and the power of capital surges in our very veins.

Miranda is haunted by traces of her mother’s glamorous cabaret career, the strange smell of durian fruit that lingers about her, and odd tokens reminiscent of Nu Wa. Told in the beguiling voice of a narrator who is fish, snake, girl, and woman- all of whom must struggle against adversity for survival- the novel is set alternately in nineteenth-century China and in a futuristic Pacific Northwest.Īt turns whimsical and wry, Salt Fish Girl intertwines the story of Nu Wa, the shape-shifter from Old China, and that of Miranda, a troubled young girl lving in the walled city of Serendipity circa 2044. Salt Fish Girl is the mesmerizing tale of an ageless female character who changes shape and form through time and place. Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic