Book Review: You are Eating an Orange. You are Naked by Sheung-King

 

You are Eating an Orange. You are Naked by Toronto-based Sheung-King is more than a sad story of getting out of love. Actually, to be fully honest, the love story is less challenging and especially for millennials has a known patern: a long distance relationship set in different locations around the world. 

´The world is an oyster they say´ and this international couple - he, a young Cantonese translator, living in Canada, she, a beautiful Japanese living in Asia, a kind of influencer - has dates in Taiwan or in Hong Kong or in Prague. But there is something that does not work in fact, and they sound and seem different, living at different paces. They fill the silences with stories, stories he is telling her; their interpretation of the stories is the proof of their incompatibility, even when it comes to the speed of telling the story they are on different wave lengths. She escapes any attempt of settling down, he is so much in love with her.

´I am waiting. I am in love´. What about being then and there at the same time?

But there are more references than the folktales: She is reading Kundera, the Unbereable Lightness of Being which for me is one of the most revealing story of end of love. There are references to Murakami, the popular Japanese author who is inspired, among others, by Beatles´ songs. There are frequent references to ´Orientalism´, especially that condescendent part of perceiving the ´otherness´ in purely exotic terms, as it does not have the right to exist in itself. The end of the story chapter, which happens to sound like the end of the love story in general ´Kafka´s guide to love´ is a fine outline of the limits of love and its transposition in foreign places. There are also edgy ´artistic´ interpretations of Buddha as a luxury decoration item by a German artist who was inspired after visiting Bali.

The story is a first person account, with the man observing her - unnamed - and their relationship fading away. But it sounds that sometimes, brought in a foreign soil, our relationship with the world is distorted as well. We may be loved and love, but we are out of the words for living the love. 

As I had access to the book in audiobook format - with an inspired, unforgettable rendition by actor Kenny Wong - but in a printed/digital format I would have had access to a throughout list of references and possible annotations regarding some of the sources mentioned in the book.

You are Eating an Orange. You are Naked is one of those reads that makes you aware of so many nuances and intellectual details of our everyday life and perceptions. Love is a pretext to get to know the world through different eyes. May be a literary reference for this point of view too...

Rating: 4 stars