The Exilic Style

Ruyan Meng’s second novel, The Morgue Keeper, follows the exhausted, ultraresilient Qing Yuan, a morgue attendant in Mao’s China who runs afoul of the vengeful state while investigating the mysterious death of an unidentified woman known only as “number 19.” The book is harrowing in the strict etymological sense, not in the cloudy uprooted sense with which the word is often deployed: it left me feeling like I’d been scraped over by a plough’s tines. Cut into, yes, and a bit sore, yes, but also more open, more fertile of mind. Last thing I read that left me so earnestly non-metaphorically nauseous (and happy for it) was Andrei Platonov’s Foundation Pit (in Robert Chandler, Elizabeth Chandler, and Olga Meerson’s fabulous 2009 translation for New York Review Books).