A slim Peirene Press novella about art, discipline, perception, and oddly, the metaphysics of black ink.

Based on the life and legend of Bada Shanren, the seventeenth-century Chinese painter and calligrapher born into the Ming imperial family, the book follows a life shaped by exile, disguise, aesthetic devotion, and the obsessive search for the right mark.

This is one for readers who like quiet, compressed literary fiction: art as philosophy, biography as fable, the novella as a little sealed room where everything has been placed deliberately. Very much in the Peirene mode — elegant, spare, translated, slightly austere, with the faint air of someone arranging pebbles whilst everyone rushes around pretending to be important.

Good for readers of translated fiction, artists, calligraphy/ink painting people, quiet historical fiction, and anyone who likes books where the stakes are technically “a brushstroke” but also, unfortunately, the whole problem of existence.

Peirene Press paperback. Translated from the German by Jamie Bulloch. Originally published as Meer der Tusche in 2003; English translation copyright 2012; this copy is a 2014 reprint. Used paperback in good readable condition, with light general shelf wear visible.