Fox Spirit on a Distant Cloud
by Lee Murray
The only drawback I find with this book is that too few people will probably get to read it. And that’s a shame because it is beautiful and deserves wide appreciation. It has been honoured as Winner of the NZSA Laura Solomon Cuba Press Prize in 2023 and now merits popular acclaim.
Lee Murray takes the Chinese tradition of the húli jīng, the nine-tailed fox spirit, as the linking trope to tell nine tales of women brought half a world away from the Middle Kingdom to this antipodean land in years past. Just as the fox is not endemic, so the women find themselves alien to New Zealand, condemned to lives of cultural isolation.
The tales are inspired - provoked may be a more fitting word - by the lives of people and happenings that occurred in this country.
The first, a very moving story told in exquisite prose, reveals the sadness of one who longs for a career in music, but she’s a girl, just a girl, so years sorting fruit and vegetables in the family’s Auckland shop is her lifelong gender-prescribed lot.
Even in New Gold Mountain, your father’s empire belongs to your brother, of course. It is the way things are, the way things are destined to be.
From this one, the fox spirit inhabits further women whose stories are increasingly unhappy. But while this is so, the quality of the writing makes them beautiful.
So you grow up in China, speaking the silk-slipper tongue of your father’s ancestors, your strangeness pinched and nipped and contained so you might become a golden filial daughter.
Beautiful, yes, in relation to the prose. The women’s experiences are in sharp contrast – loneliness, violence, hopelessness, all too often leading to extreme action. Reading of them, one weeps for the reality of their lives, which makes Lee Murray’s remembrance more poignant – the prose which is of high poetic precision partially making up for the brutality.
…at last you [the fox] understand your purpose. You will bear witness. You will give these women voice and nourish them with hope. You will sing their spirits to the mountains and shout their stories from the tips of the red turrets. You will give them flesh and make them real.
The short chapter pieces alternate fox-girl-fox-daughter-fox-woman-fox-wife and so on. My advice is to read this 130-page book pairing a fox view followed by the human persona, with gaps between the pairings rather than in one sitting. That way the humanity of the stories will be accentuated and time allowed for later thought. And the whole experience will last longer.
by Lee Murray
The only drawback I find with this book is that too few people will probably get to read it. And that’s a shame because it is beautiful and deserves wide appreciation. It has been honoured as Winner of the NZSA Laura Solomon Cuba Press Prize in 2023 and now merits popular acclaim.
Lee Murray takes the Chinese tradition of the húli jīng, the nine-tailed fox spirit, as the linking trope to tell nine tales of women brought half a world away from the Middle Kingdom to this antipodean land in years past. Just as the fox is not endemic, so the women find themselves alien to New Zealand, condemned to lives of cultural isolation.
The tales are inspired - provoked may be a more fitting word - by the lives of people and happenings that occurred in this country.
The first, a very moving story told in exquisite prose, reveals the sadness of one who longs for a career in music, but she’s a girl, just a girl, so years sorting fruit and vegetables in the family’s Auckland shop is her lifelong gender-prescribed lot.
Even in New Gold Mountain, your father’s empire belongs to your brother, of course. It is the way things are, the way things are destined to be.
From this one, the fox spirit inhabits further women whose stories are increasingly unhappy. But while this is so, the quality of the writing makes them beautiful.
So you grow up in China, speaking the silk-slipper tongue of your father’s ancestors, your strangeness pinched and nipped and contained so you might become a golden filial daughter.
Beautiful, yes, in relation to the prose. The women’s experiences are in sharp contrast – loneliness, violence, hopelessness, all too often leading to extreme action. Reading of them, one weeps for the reality of their lives, which makes Lee Murray’s remembrance more poignant – the prose which is of high poetic precision partially making up for the brutality.
…at last you [the fox] understand your purpose. You will bear witness. You will give these women voice and nourish them with hope. You will sing their spirits to the mountains and shout their stories from the tips of the red turrets. You will give them flesh and make them real.
The short chapter pieces alternate fox-girl-fox-daughter-fox-woman-fox-wife and so on. My advice is to read this 130-page book pairing a fox view followed by the human persona, with gaps between the pairings rather than in one sitting. That way the humanity of the stories will be accentuated and time allowed for later thought. And the whole experience will last longer.
Review by Bronwyn Elsmore
Title: Fox Spirit on a Distant Cloud
Author: Lee Murray
Publisher: The Cuba Press, New Zealand
ISBN: 978-1-98-859577-1
RRP: $28
Available: print book. From the publisher, or via Bateman distributors.
Also as an e-book (ePub) https://thecubapress.nz/shop/fox-spirit-on-a-distant-cloud/
Information on the author's website: https://www.leemurray.info/foxspiritonadistantcloud
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