New review by Lars Jensen of 'All the Rivers Run South' (9/8/2024)

By Ouyang Yu

What is novel about novels if they are conditioned by confining structures? What is the relationship between novelists and their ideas and the professional idea mongering of academics? How does one account for China's apparently endless history, story telling and ideas and by comparison, Australia's shallow, materialist and hence meagre history. Apart, of course, from its Indigenous history that lives and tells its story outside?

I could write four paragraphs more about the questions, Ouyang Yu's, "All the Rivers Run South". It bursts with ideas, stories and their telling, ahistorical history interspersed with actual history. It does not care for those distinctions. Nor does it care for editors and their streamlining preoccupations, though it also recognises that an author of ideas needs reining in and that occasionally editing can be a feast of shared frustrations.

This is an experimental novel, not only because it states so, but because it defies conventional expectations of novels. It constantly bursts at the seams, or as the narrators would have it, fights against, and occasionally, rails against constraints imposed. In this process it speaks to a range of normativities that invites us to ask why conventions from novel composition to societal ones operate the way they do. And who and what do these normativities protect - and who do they really protect.

Read Ouyang's novel as I did on a long train journey from the European north to its south, or an Australian train, if you can find one. The meandering nature of the novel with its curves and stops and starts and shifts invites reading on the (long) move. And on your journey you will have an infinite number of questions to think about and probably be confronted by. The vagrant migrant mind and its relationship both to Australia's Chinese history and its inability/resistance to deal with this, because ultimately it confronts settler colonial Australia with the history and reproduction - the legacy - of its racialised history.

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