This is the anthology of Sun Wei’s five novellas: “Eagle Keeper”, “Half Wolf”, “The Expedition at the Blue Lake Manor”, “How Lonely Can Human Be”, and “I Walked into the Norwegian Wood….” They’re all narrated in the first-person account, and with the different “I”s Sun Wei unravels the loneliness that dominates us modern human beings. 

The narrators of the first two stories are both Kavin Liu, a middle-aged Shanghainese. His life is the dilemma of a modern white-collar, torn by the desire of pursuing inner freedom and the reality of routine urban life. The kind of people like him cannot bear the repetitiveness and superficiality of that lifestyle; yet, when they bump in their dreamland, the freedom is too pure for Liu to bear. His only way to live there is to modernize – or to contaminate – the innocent land until it became another free-less Shanghai. 

The latter three stories are told by a female writer who participates in various European writers’ programmes. Writers’ programmes, on the positive side, gather talented writers from the globe and separate them from the outer world to conceive great stories, but on the negative side, it forces the writers – an overly sensitive and introvert group – to meet and communicate with each other. They seem to live happily together with many interesting experiences, but what truly companies every one of them is the lingering solitude. 

Sun Wei’s writings have an outstanding personal style. Her narrators tell the story with full passion and vivid language, usually with a lively, fashionable and jocular tone. When describing or expressing emotions, she is also capable of switching to rich, lyrical and expressive lines. That change in style and rhythm creates the dramatic tension between the humorous narration and the sentimental theme, which offers the readers an enjoyable yet upsetting reading experience.