Let’s regain control of our breathing and try, for a few hundred pages, to project ourselves elsewhere. In another time, another world, at the heart of another invasion.
In December 1941, nine days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Japanese army landed in Borneo, in Southeast Asia, an island whose territory is now shared between Brunei, Malaysia and Indonesia. It faces an ethnic and cultural mosaic of Malays, Javanese, Bougis and Chinese (and even Japanese), in addition to a hundred indigenous tribes.
In Krokop, a small village in the northwest of the island on the edge of the jungle, nicknamed the “Bouk Bouk”, a former haunt of pirates and gold diggers, a Chinese community will try somehow to resist the invader.
It is in this lost corner that we will meet, in nearly 600 flamboyant pages, a gallery of human or supernatural, unforgettable and colorful characters. They have seen others and have already repelled many invaders: the armless man Kwan A-hung, son of Kwan the Red Face and father of Peh-youn, the apnea champion Plat-Pif, the manager of café Lobo Brioche or the old Mapopo witch with her eyebrows shaped like shrimp antennae.
Stilt houses, trees inhabited by monkeys, spirits and bats, black magic, Malay-style vampires, countless beheadings, love, sex and thanatos. It is the wild and variegated world in which we plunge The crossing of the boars, the first novel translated into French by Zhang Guixing — but his sixth to date — a Sino-Malaysian writer with a feverish imagination who has lived in Taiwan since the age of 20. Born in 1956 in Sarawak, a northern province in the Malaysian part of Borneo, he belongs to the Chinese ethnic minority and took 17 years to write this enchanting and hair-raising novel.
The story spans twenty years before and after the incursion of the Japanese army, which serves as its pivot. And the cruelty of the “Monsters”, as the Japanese invaders are called there, quickly turns into legend: pregnant women disembowelled, children massacred with knives, young girls raped. To escape, the villagers – including the children – use high doses of opium, which they smoke without stopping. Also a way for the author to bring into the story a whole section of local folklore, including strange flying heads.
A serial producer of strong images, Zhang Guixing puts all his wild imagination into this hallucinatory journey to the heart of the darkness of his native island. And if horror is there, beauty is never far either. Wisps of smoke in the sky at dusk reminiscent of a school of carp. A penguin correcting the trajectory of his bike with one of his feet, his son on the rack.
The haunting pages are countless. They animate this great novel with a maddening vivacity, which overflows with mastery and erudition. We can compare him to Gabriel García Márquez, even to Salman Rushdie, for the abundance and a certain magical realism. Under the pen of Zhang Guixing, dream, madness and opiate trance intertwine to compose the portrait of a not so distant era when colonialism and racism also ruled.
Special mention to the translator particularly inspired by The crossing of the boars, Pierre-Mong Lim, who was inspired by Caribbean Creole – starting with the word “bouk”, from Haiti. A real tour de force.