HIStory 3 - Trapped, the novelisation

There's this literary term called the pathetic fallacy, which is defined as (quick google) as "the attribution of human feelings and responses to inanimate things or animals, especially in art and literature". Modern Chinese narratives have a lot of this - well, classical Chinese uses a ton of allusions and references, and my theory is that modern narrative that use the pathetic fallacy is the less fraught, and more assessible version of that stylistic technique.

That's my amateur view anyway: I'm definitely not trained in Chinese narratology, especially that found in modern Chinese fiction. But it's a reason I stopped reading popular Chinese novels. Nirvana in Fire being an outliner in this respect.

Which is a long way of saying that whenever the narrative in the Trap novel trips me up, it's in these moments. Am also not keen on descriptions of people as cute little animals, which happens not infrequently.


On the other hand, there's loads that made me laugh like a loon, speculate or try to figure out. ( spoilery )