Notes of a Crocodile is a truthful novel. Qiu Maojin lays things bare; the campus of National Taiwan University (NTU), the agonising love of the narrator Lazi, and even the eponymous crocodile, lie naked and twitching. The melodrama of the text; the unsent letters, frantic journaling, violence, alcoholism and inaction only adds to this sense of nakedness. The truthfulness of the novel never emerges from a certain exactness of prose or obsessive detail, but rather from how Maojin forms a series of impressions, constructing people who are full of life; who move and behave as selves.
The novel is surreal, it is a metaphor only if you wish it to be. The structure of the novel is what drew me to it; it is epistolary in every sense of the word: half the diaries of Lazi, a lesbian uni student in Taiwan, and half the confessions and musings of a crocodile in a skin suit. Lazi and the crocodile appear to live in parallel versions of Taiwan, concealing their identity and coming to terms with themselves. Lazi experiences life, particularly university, through her queerness. She moves to NTU, and becomes stuck in a sense. Like the crocodile, she puts on a skin suit, to hide the fact that she is between forgetting and finding herself. She falls deeply in love, with Shiu Ling and then Xiao Fang, she clings to them and pushes herself away.
In these moments of profound desire, spiritual and sexual, the reader is distanced from Lazi. We become entangled with desire, we lose her at precisely the moment as she loses herself. Maojin writes longingly, exploring an attachment to love conceptually. Lazi continually desires the act of desire, and it is expressed beautifully. Perhaps this is why both ‘Lazi’ and ‘Crocodile’ have become terms for lesbians in Taiwan.
The playfulness of the crocodile cuts through the book, infusing desire and alienation with queer joy. The vignettes of reptilian life are light and witty, in which the crocodile looks for friends and lovers, staying out of sight by making sure not to order too many cream puffs: cream puffs, of course, are a known favourite food of crocodiles. The crocodile attends a masquerade ball, and Maojin captures the feeling of a baby gay at a club and around their people for the first time.
Maojin writes that “all that is neither masculine nor feminine becomes sexless and is cast into the freezing-cold waters outside the line of demarcation”, and Notes of a Crocodile both resides in and explores this space. The sapphism of Notes of a Crocodile, its form and content, dissolves a heterosexual standard of prose. She writes fluidly, strangely, and with longing. The components of the novel — diaries and vignettes, woman and crocodile — are caught between coming together and falling apart: they dance with each other.
Notes of a Crocodile is not a perfect novel, at times Maojin’s prose flounders and winds in on itself, but it is excellent at exploring and revealing this demarcated zone, in which sapphic desire is at times negotiated with heterosexual society, and at others is completely and truly free.
