Contaminated by literature and compelled by the impossibility of translating one another, two young lovers fall in love against their better judgment in Sienna Liu’s polyvocal book-length essay Specimen.
Through meetings and missives from Cape Town to Beijing to Paris to London, the lovers lie, fight, observe and analyze, write and re-write themselves for one another, only to find that their carefully constructed narrative has obtained a life of its own which overshadows and usurps their relationship. Weaving together years of diaries, notes, text messages, and memory, Specimen is an exploration of diaspora, nostalgia, writing, the creation of oneself through another, and time itself.
Praise for Specimen:
"Koi t-shirtsy, poetry-swooned, meta-anecdotal over a lover named E, Sienna Liu’s 'four-dimensional rose' Specimen is a blend of atmospheric nostalgia and bilingual love. Deprived of 'sultry impatience,' the essay, self-aware of its own making and quite unlike Anna Karenina, unequivocally moves through the vignettes of remorse like rainwater through a half-smoked cigarette. Love is hard to measure especially with the yardsticks of words, but Liu does it with effortless, erudite ease that one might wonder if she’s trapping a lightning bug of theory-based, archived memory within the pages of this essay, illuminating the translucency, emotionality, and philosophy of their elusive flutter. It’s such a sharp book that if you put it down you may risk feeling stupid."
—Vi Khi Nao, author of The Italy Letters
"Specimen is a mise en abyme of love itself: he has a murderous problem with reality, while she cannot be translated by him. I was happy and intrigued to find the spirit of Henry James' The Beast in the Jungle like a pulsating animal in Liu’s book. I fell in love with this book."
—Marie Darrieussecq, author of Pig Tales and Sleepless
"Sienna Liu’s Specimen is a hauntingly lyrical exploration of a single relationship in the author’s life, a 'philosophical lover' long since not spoken to. Liu weaves moments together in an emotional, somewhat surreal mosaic—memories connected not chronologically, but poetically. This book captures a long, winding train of thought, brimming with questions and searching for answers. Anyone who has ever grown apart from anyone will find solace in the book’s expert effort to make sense of another. Liu’s voice is reflective, captivating, funny at times and intensely honest at others. Do yourself a favor and pick up this book, read it, and then read it again and again and again."
—Maggie Olszewski, author of Laika
"I smiled with my whole body—sometimes with tears, sometimes with laughter—the whole time I was reading Specimen. Liu turns sentences into little emotional whirlwinds. She flays friendships open for what they really are: our greatest unwritten love affairs. An ode on fire to youth."
—Simon Wu, author of Dancing on My Own
"Built out of the sharply-wrought fragments of a broken relationship Specimen proves to be as much a book about making sense of a complicated entanglement as it is about the intellectual and emotional development of its author. Like a detective, Liu strings together minute pieces of evidence—a tender text exchange, a dreamed Parisian scene, a Bolaño quote—to imbue what we so often mistake for the casualties of everyday life with purpose and meaning. Specimen shifts our understanding of what it's like to come of age in the 21st century."
—Dylan Fisher, author of The Loneliest Band in France
