Just Now

Just Now is the first novel by the writer Liu An, published in July 2020 by Jiangsu Phoenix Literature and Art Publishing House and produced by Dook Culture. Its promotional copy calls it an "anti-novel": the book has no protagonist running throughout, no suspense driving the plot, and no structure of beginning, development, climax, and ending; in their place are countless sentences and fragments beginning with the two words "just now." The book is divided into three chapters. Chapter One, "Poems of the Instant," unfolds, in a multitude of parallel short sentences, the moments happening in the world: the last sip of red wine in a glass is finished, a cat walks silently across the carpet, fog stops at the edge of the forest, continental plates drift slowly, the earth rotates quietly in the universe. Chapter Two, "Leaping Short Sentences," has a more clipped rhythm, a stronger sense of structure and action, and sentences that leap and snap more sharply. Chapter Three, "Tiger," turns to an anthropomorphized tiger, writing of its actions, gazes, and thoughts, and from there leads into meditation on language, existence, and expression. The book places the grand and the minute, the real and the fictional, classical figures and ordinary street life side by side in the same moment; readers can open it at any page and treat it as a collection of short poems linked by a single theme, or as a literary experiment in "how else a novel can be written." Yu Hua calls it "a distribution center of images, and also a set of variations on images"; Su Tong describes it as "kaleidoscopic, microscopic, fragmentary, rich"; Mai Jia considers it "an extreme form of avant-garde fiction." After publication, its unusual form sparked polarized discussion among readers.