Open Letter translation......Think subconscious, subterranean (literally and figuratively), and subversive! Think lyrical dreamscapes! Think brilliant! This is an absolutely outstanding collection of short stories. Can Xue's writing is breathtaking! Her writing makes me think of Kafka.....of Rushdie.....and David Foster Wallace. This is a collection of stories into which the reader must give themselves over and ride the tide of language, imagery, and power. Not for folks who need clear-cut plot......otherwise, a must read, perhaps multiple times, like a good poem. I would love to hear these stories read aloud! ( )

Can Xue may be China's "one possibility" of a Nobel (a terribly outdated thing Susan Sontag said, quoted on the cover -- now it has the unfortunate resonance of China's rejection of the Nobel as a tool of Western politics) but there is no evidence for it in this book. These stories are sometimes astonishingly inventive, in a continuous, unedited, stream of consciousness way, but they are so loosely written that I continually lose faith in her control of the sense, affect, direction, purpose, or meaning of the text.

A story called "An Affectionate Companion's Jottings," written from the point of view of a cat, is an adequate example. It's quite inventive and diverting to read about the cat's impressions of its depressed and occasionally suicidal owner. But Can Xue seems to think that surrealist and illogical details, which are sprinkled throughout her stories, are automatically generators of expressive sense. In this case, a "black man" visits the cat's owner, and stays some time without speaking. Aside from the unfortunate choice of a "black man" (any visitor would have done as well, and Western readers can't be expected to join in the author's simple equation of blackness with strangeness), the problem is that the visits are never explained. The rest of the story is more realistic; that detail is from another kind of writing, a mildly surrealist or magic-realist tradition. Can Xue apparently doesn't notice that the closure of the story of the cat and its owner is at odds with the openness of the unexplained visits of the "black man," and that that dissonance will appear to readers as an author's problem, not an author's gift.

I think Can Xue is at her best when she concentrates on either surrealism or realism, because she has no clear sense of how they mix. I like "Never at Peace," a story of an old man who behaves unaccountably. It is entirely in a realist vein. I also like "Vertical Motion," a crazily inventive story about a creature that lives in the soil. But the mixtures are all rum. "The Brilliant Purple China Rose" mingles a well-imagined relationship between a couple with a magical rose that blooms upside down; "The Roses at the Hospital" has more fantastical roses (this time with fetuses at their roots). The latter story seems especially carelessly composed: I see no evidence she went back and rethought anything. Each invention, it seems, was put to paper as it occurred to her. Tighter writing is what she needs. ( )