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432 pages, Kindle Edition
First published June 1, 2013
151 people are currently reading
3417 people want to read
About the author
Can Xue
90?books378?followers残雪
Can Xue (Chinese: 残雪; pinyin: Cán Xu?), née Deng Xiaohua (Chinese: 邓小华), is a Chinese avant-garde fiction writer, literary critic, and tailor. She was born May 30, 1953 in Changsha, Hunan, China. Her family was severely persecuted following her father being labeled an ultra-rightist in the Anti-rightist Movement of 1957. Her writing, which consists mostly of short fiction, breaks with the realism of earlier modern Chinese writers. She has also written novels, novellas, and literary criticisms of the work of Dante, Jorge Luis Borges, and Franz Kafka. Some of her fiction has been translated and published in English.
(from Wikipedia)
Can Xue (Chinese: 残雪; pinyin: Cán Xu?), née Deng Xiaohua (Chinese: 邓小华), is a Chinese avant-garde fiction writer, literary critic, and tailor. She was born May 30, 1953 in Changsha, Hunan, China. Her family was severely persecuted following her father being labeled an ultra-rightist in the Anti-rightist Movement of 1957. Her writing, which consists mostly of short fiction, breaks with the realism of earlier modern Chinese writers. She has also written novels, novellas, and literary criticisms of the work of Dante, Jorge Luis Borges, and Franz Kafka. Some of her fiction has been translated and published in English.
(from Wikipedia)
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 124 reviews
October 9, 2024
This book is as disjointed as a fever dream, with people appearing and disappearing at random, instant love everywhere and requiring a lot of attention to distill any kind of meaning from it
Mania is a wonderful illness. Without falling to this level we cannot know how deep our love is.
Baffling is maybe the word that most comes to mind while reflecting on . Somewhere a character says The surface is deep and that is certainly true. Don't be deceived by the 288 pages, this is a very dense reading experience.
We follow loosely a group of women and their lovers in an unnamed Chinese city. The women have freed themselves from factory labor and now work in a spa/brothel. What the social status of sex is exactly that factory workers are dreaming of that career, is unclear.
The focus on hedonism, making oneself happy, and all of the affairs between married men and women give me both a modern feel but also reminds me of . I feel the entire book is at this intersection between 19th century over the top romantic writing and avant garde modernism. The dreamlike atmosphere of the book also reminded me of and the fragmentation and vagueness of her work and by .
Memory and history take a prominent role, the below quotes are all from the start of the book:
But history will not disappear
Were you the person trying to reverse history's verdict?
It hasn’t become history, that requires suffering and waiting
History is fortunately destroyed
They haven’t become history yet, it requires suffering and waiting
her writing requires a lot of dedicated attention to follow, and in the end I don't think full comprehension is really the goal. There is a kind of spirit world in the rural hometown of one of the characters but also cellphone's and a McDonalds. There is a magically moving Pachinko parlor aka free port that seems to be a portal to the spirits of the dead.
Nest county seems to be offering a kind of connection with nature that’s deeper than the normal world, and offers finally a role to women other than prostitutes or destitute factory workers, with someone becoming a teacher.
We encounter a perspective wise not retreating detention centre, maybe an allusion to the author her history, that gave me Wes Anderson movie like feels.
There is just a lot going on that is hard to summarize, like as if the reader is dropped in a foreign country and can only comprehend between 30% and 60% of what's going on.
Even the characters themselves note this, not only does one note that My mind is in chaos but also Good, your not understanding is understanding seems a very apt quote in this context.
Love is persuasive between all the men and women, the obsessive, instant and heterosexual one that I associate with for instance by . Everyone knows each other, is in love with each other or is in love instantly, making the characters feel rather interchangeable. The dialogue is often clunky, overly blunt and not often fully aligning to the scene (my favourite sentence being: Her face was like an autumn cucumber). People casually changing in age and occupation and even species doesn't help in this regard.
When men and women mingle crimes are unavoidable is noted, but more often than not passion is not to be blame for incidents, but rather strange events just popping up in the narrative. There are many random nightly outings, parents universally absent or dead, ancestral homes lost or decrepit; which might be a metaphor for the bewilderment a rapidly modernizing country might bring to its subjects. Economic critique also comes back, for instance:
Is life just for business?
The poor were those without privacy
Seeking happiness outside oneself, with someone else instead of working at oneself seems an other interesting line of critique. Only loving someone when one is not with them is even taken to the extreme when someone just goes to jail to be able to uphold the idealized version of his lover. Also the marginalisation of ones in sanatoria, dealing with mental health issues, comes back: He is ill of course, but who of us isn’t?
Reading this book is like walking in a mist and constantly new things occur that don’t feel rooted from the prose before (Past events mean nothing, Everything that happens is bizarre and People as changeable as the weather the characters note as well). Like being in the matrix, incomprehensible, feverish, dreamlike, like a trip, almost hallucinatory.
In the end there must always be a way out a character notes, but the labyrinth Can Xue takes the reader to doesn't seem a clean cut or discernable key to interpret the journey. Deeply interesting and daunting, and not fully successful for me as a reader, 1.5 stars rounded up.
Mania is a wonderful illness. Without falling to this level we cannot know how deep our love is.
Baffling is maybe the word that most comes to mind while reflecting on . Somewhere a character says The surface is deep and that is certainly true. Don't be deceived by the 288 pages, this is a very dense reading experience.
We follow loosely a group of women and their lovers in an unnamed Chinese city. The women have freed themselves from factory labor and now work in a spa/brothel. What the social status of sex is exactly that factory workers are dreaming of that career, is unclear.
The focus on hedonism, making oneself happy, and all of the affairs between married men and women give me both a modern feel but also reminds me of . I feel the entire book is at this intersection between 19th century over the top romantic writing and avant garde modernism. The dreamlike atmosphere of the book also reminded me of and the fragmentation and vagueness of her work and by .
Memory and history take a prominent role, the below quotes are all from the start of the book:
But history will not disappear
Were you the person trying to reverse history's verdict?
It hasn’t become history, that requires suffering and waiting
History is fortunately destroyed
They haven’t become history yet, it requires suffering and waiting
her writing requires a lot of dedicated attention to follow, and in the end I don't think full comprehension is really the goal. There is a kind of spirit world in the rural hometown of one of the characters but also cellphone's and a McDonalds. There is a magically moving Pachinko parlor aka free port that seems to be a portal to the spirits of the dead.
Nest county seems to be offering a kind of connection with nature that’s deeper than the normal world, and offers finally a role to women other than prostitutes or destitute factory workers, with someone becoming a teacher.
We encounter a perspective wise not retreating detention centre, maybe an allusion to the author her history, that gave me Wes Anderson movie like feels.
There is just a lot going on that is hard to summarize, like as if the reader is dropped in a foreign country and can only comprehend between 30% and 60% of what's going on.
Even the characters themselves note this, not only does one note that My mind is in chaos but also Good, your not understanding is understanding seems a very apt quote in this context.
Love is persuasive between all the men and women, the obsessive, instant and heterosexual one that I associate with for instance by . Everyone knows each other, is in love with each other or is in love instantly, making the characters feel rather interchangeable. The dialogue is often clunky, overly blunt and not often fully aligning to the scene (my favourite sentence being: Her face was like an autumn cucumber). People casually changing in age and occupation and even species doesn't help in this regard.
When men and women mingle crimes are unavoidable is noted, but more often than not passion is not to be blame for incidents, but rather strange events just popping up in the narrative. There are many random nightly outings, parents universally absent or dead, ancestral homes lost or decrepit; which might be a metaphor for the bewilderment a rapidly modernizing country might bring to its subjects. Economic critique also comes back, for instance:
Is life just for business?
The poor were those without privacy
Seeking happiness outside oneself, with someone else instead of working at oneself seems an other interesting line of critique. Only loving someone when one is not with them is even taken to the extreme when someone just goes to jail to be able to uphold the idealized version of his lover. Also the marginalisation of ones in sanatoria, dealing with mental health issues, comes back: He is ill of course, but who of us isn’t?
Reading this book is like walking in a mist and constantly new things occur that don’t feel rooted from the prose before (Past events mean nothing, Everything that happens is bizarre and People as changeable as the weather the characters note as well). Like being in the matrix, incomprehensible, feverish, dreamlike, like a trip, almost hallucinatory.
In the end there must always be a way out a character notes, but the labyrinth Can Xue takes the reader to doesn't seem a clean cut or discernable key to interpret the journey. Deeply interesting and daunting, and not fully successful for me as a reader, 1.5 stars rounded up.
April 7, 2019
A surreal challenge of a book, Can Xue’s Love in the New Millennium, translated from the Chinese by Annelise Finegan Wasmoen, kept me entranced much longer than an average novel. The book is only 264 pages long (in Yale University Press’ edition that’s simply gorgeous) but I often couldn’t read more than 20–30 pages a day because if you miss a sentence, you might have no idea where you are anymore.
Had I been too busy lately, had I slept badly et cetera, this could have been a 2-star read, but the spring sun is finally out in Finland and I’m feeling great so I could approach Can Xue’s bizarre novel with renewed mental and physical strength, and greatly enjoyed the cerebral fun. If that makes sense.
I should note that I approach the novel from a very limited perspective as a Westerner with a negligible knowledge of Chinese culture, so I may have perceived the text as more difficult than it actually is for anyone with a better grounding in China and its culture. Funnily enough, I recently read the first book of Cao Xuegin’s 18th-century classic of Chinese literature The Story of the Stone or The Dream of the Red Chamber, and found it similar to Xue’s novel in terms of (1) a large-ish cast of characters between whom the perspective shifts often, (2) humor in everyday situations, and (3) magical realism.
The third similarity is in a huge role in Xue’s novel. Love in the New Millennium is closer to a dream narrative because of its surrealist nature. (It reminded me of Sjón’s , which I read recently. Coincidentally, there’s a reference to Iceland on the penultimate page of Love). But I would say it’s just about enough stable: it has a fixed cast of characters and locations.
In the spirit of the ancient Romance tradition (dating back at least to early Greek fiction like ), these locations could roughly be divided into city and country. City is where the novel starts, depicting the cruel working conditions in a factory from which some of the female characters escape to work in a brothel. (That’s a better choice at least in Xue’s wildly imaginative storyworld.) There is a lot of surveillance in the city: men often lurk in some crevices waiting for a chance to get to talk to women. Near the middle of the novel, we approach the natural environment mainly in the form of Nest County, a mystical, magical place where some of the characters find a piece of mind by listening to the sounds of the earth, and one becomes a geography teacher.
And it’s earth that seems to be one of the main elements of the book. In Nest County, Dr. Liu would “sometimes spent the night in the mountains, sleeping in the thick grass with an ear pressed to the ground” in search of some sort of new natural medicine: “He had always felt that there was an undeveloped new world within herbal medicine, a world that grew alongside the human body, with reciprocal, invisible connections between them.” Throughout the book, there are multiple references to caves, muddy earth, sewers, all things underground or terrestrial basically. Additionally, there are many references to “ancient city walls” from which “small animals”?appear in the outside world. In a nutshell, there seems to be a yearning toward some ancient interior (a nest?) as many of the characters are looking for their ultimate “hometown.” Places tend to have an ephemeral quality in the novel, often disappearing after visits or drastically changing in appearance so that they’re unrecognizable.
Love is a very heteronormative concept in Xue’s storyworld. I guess one could frown upon the old-fashioned (and very not 21st-century) idea of love in the book, but I’m rather awed by Xue’s strong and very peculiar aesthetic vision: the story has a very distinctive timelessness to it. Love seems to function as a dyadic and inescapable concept here: women yearn for men and vice versa but always find it hard to find a suitable partner. This yearning seems to tie in with fears of confinement, and closer to the end of the novel there is some sort of a liberating fire – liberation from love? Or a fire the liberates the character from the fear of confinement?
Outside there were explosions of thunder, then lightning ignited the giant pile of wastepaper at the doorway. A huge fire sealed off the door, expelling thick billows of smoke into the room. Everyone started coughing, A Si was also coughing. Suffocating, she tried to rush out, but these people would not let her go. … Suddenly a light shone in A Si’s mind, and she shouted, “This is the free port!”
I’m obviously pouring my own interpretations into the novel, but its indecipherable nature seems to call for it. Like Eileen Myles notes in the introduction, Love in the New Millennium is more of a vase that the reader fills by reading. And I like that in books. I typed this review in one go in 30 minutes or so, and it’s not often I’m this enthused to share as much about a book after finishing. I think it attests to the novel’s greatness. Thank you, MBI 2019, for introducing me to this fantastic author!
Had I been too busy lately, had I slept badly et cetera, this could have been a 2-star read, but the spring sun is finally out in Finland and I’m feeling great so I could approach Can Xue’s bizarre novel with renewed mental and physical strength, and greatly enjoyed the cerebral fun. If that makes sense.
I should note that I approach the novel from a very limited perspective as a Westerner with a negligible knowledge of Chinese culture, so I may have perceived the text as more difficult than it actually is for anyone with a better grounding in China and its culture. Funnily enough, I recently read the first book of Cao Xuegin’s 18th-century classic of Chinese literature The Story of the Stone or The Dream of the Red Chamber, and found it similar to Xue’s novel in terms of (1) a large-ish cast of characters between whom the perspective shifts often, (2) humor in everyday situations, and (3) magical realism.
The third similarity is in a huge role in Xue’s novel. Love in the New Millennium is closer to a dream narrative because of its surrealist nature. (It reminded me of Sjón’s , which I read recently. Coincidentally, there’s a reference to Iceland on the penultimate page of Love). But I would say it’s just about enough stable: it has a fixed cast of characters and locations.
In the spirit of the ancient Romance tradition (dating back at least to early Greek fiction like ), these locations could roughly be divided into city and country. City is where the novel starts, depicting the cruel working conditions in a factory from which some of the female characters escape to work in a brothel. (That’s a better choice at least in Xue’s wildly imaginative storyworld.) There is a lot of surveillance in the city: men often lurk in some crevices waiting for a chance to get to talk to women. Near the middle of the novel, we approach the natural environment mainly in the form of Nest County, a mystical, magical place where some of the characters find a piece of mind by listening to the sounds of the earth, and one becomes a geography teacher.
And it’s earth that seems to be one of the main elements of the book. In Nest County, Dr. Liu would “sometimes spent the night in the mountains, sleeping in the thick grass with an ear pressed to the ground” in search of some sort of new natural medicine: “He had always felt that there was an undeveloped new world within herbal medicine, a world that grew alongside the human body, with reciprocal, invisible connections between them.” Throughout the book, there are multiple references to caves, muddy earth, sewers, all things underground or terrestrial basically. Additionally, there are many references to “ancient city walls” from which “small animals”?appear in the outside world. In a nutshell, there seems to be a yearning toward some ancient interior (a nest?) as many of the characters are looking for their ultimate “hometown.” Places tend to have an ephemeral quality in the novel, often disappearing after visits or drastically changing in appearance so that they’re unrecognizable.
Love is a very heteronormative concept in Xue’s storyworld. I guess one could frown upon the old-fashioned (and very not 21st-century) idea of love in the book, but I’m rather awed by Xue’s strong and very peculiar aesthetic vision: the story has a very distinctive timelessness to it. Love seems to function as a dyadic and inescapable concept here: women yearn for men and vice versa but always find it hard to find a suitable partner. This yearning seems to tie in with fears of confinement, and closer to the end of the novel there is some sort of a liberating fire – liberation from love? Or a fire the liberates the character from the fear of confinement?
Outside there were explosions of thunder, then lightning ignited the giant pile of wastepaper at the doorway. A huge fire sealed off the door, expelling thick billows of smoke into the room. Everyone started coughing, A Si was also coughing. Suffocating, she tried to rush out, but these people would not let her go. … Suddenly a light shone in A Si’s mind, and she shouted, “This is the free port!”
I’m obviously pouring my own interpretations into the novel, but its indecipherable nature seems to call for it. Like Eileen Myles notes in the introduction, Love in the New Millennium is more of a vase that the reader fills by reading. And I like that in books. I typed this review in one go in 30 minutes or so, and it’s not often I’m this enthused to share as much about a book after finishing. I think it attests to the novel’s greatness. Thank you, MBI 2019, for introducing me to this fantastic author!
December 31, 2022
‘I - I’m confused...’
‘Correct, young man! Very good feedback. You respect my work!’
The Last Lover, translated by Annelise Finegan Wasmoen from the original by Can Xue (残雪;) won the US Best Translated Book Award for 2015, as well as being longlisted for the 2015 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.
Love in the New Millennium, from the same translator/author pair, has now been longlisted for the 2019 Man Booker International, the successor to the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.
I appreciated The Last Lover, but my review noted various features:
- "There is a linear progression to the novel of sorts - a form of dream quest - but characters appear, disappear and morph seemingly at random"
- "from modern literature the nearest I can come is Murakami's Wild Sheep Chase meets Ishiguro's Unconsoled, and from classical literature Calvino, Bruno Schulz, Borges, Dante and Kafka who the author acknowledges as influences"
- than Can Xue was not shy of acknowledging her own brilliance and her place in the literary landscape, and highly demanding of her readers. From a Q&A with her translator (
Credit is due to Annelise Finegan Wasmoen's excellent translation - and indeed Can Xue is also highly demanding of her translators. Her own words from another interview () referring to herself in the third person:
‘No, Sixiang, I don’t understand.’
‘Good!’ Long Sixiang clapped her hands. ‘Your not understanding is understanding!’
With her first clap the pigs went mad, their cries rising straight to the heavens.
and frequently in the book characters say they are 'confused', find things 'inexplicable', 'bizarre', 'unusual', find themselves frequently 'astonished' and remark how others 'behave strangely', to give but a few examples. Indeed this is a world where people retreat to dreams for sanity and clarity.
One key motif is The Lady of the Camellias (La Dame aux camélias) from La Traviata - an elderly character of that name who performs the part of Violetta in the opera - and one assumes the author is contrasting 19th and 21st century love affairs. Love in the New Millennium as envisaged in the pages of this novel is also surprisingly homogeneous - 100% heterosexual, with beautiful women pursued by rather disreputable men, and, in a way, serial monogamy, except changing partners on a daily basis seems to be fine so long as it is clear who is your lover.
Another key theme seems to be the effect of economic development - many of the characters deciding to upgrade from working in a factory to the greater freedom from working in a bath-cum-whorehouse, and most hankering for their home towns (which are mystically hard to find).
The beautifully produced book comes with an introduction from Eileen Myles, reprinted in the
which largely sings the book's praises but also admits:
Here's a typical passage that manages both - and note that there is no context in the novel (other than perhaps Xiao Yuan's loves for clocks) that makes this passage anymore comprehensible in situ:
The next day at noon [Xiao Yuan] was on the train heading northeast to Manchuria. On this trip the passenger in the facing bunk was a blind man. He told Xiao Yuan to call him Cricket. He said, “I hear you’ve brought quite a few timepieces. I can keep time more accurately than any clock. Listen: ticktock, ticktock . . . ”
He imitated a cricket’s chirp with marvelous accuracy, amusing Xiao Yuan so much she laughed out loud.
“I learned from an old cricket at my family’s hearth. As time went on, I turned into a timepiece. Joy can be found in this.”
One of his long, thin hands kept groping at his chest, the hand showing his apprehension.
“Do you need help?” Xiao Yuan felt she had to ask.
He did not answer. She heard muffled drumbeats, as if from a small drum. “This is my heart beating. I’ve always wanted to make someone hear my heartbeat, and now I’ve succeeded. I’m so glad, knowing that you heard.”
Yet his expression was not glad. He seemed to be waiting for something, gloomily.
“The time is two-ten and twenty seconds,” he said.
“Correct. She’s coming over,” Xiao Yuan said.
“奥丑辞?”
“That thing that has an appointment with you.”
“Ah yes, she’s coming!” He began to laugh. “What do you think of me as a timepiece?”
“You work too hard, Cricket! You belong at the hearth. If it were me, I would rather be one of those hermits or vagrants in the thick grass.”
The color of the sky grew darker. The locomotive whistled. They had already passed Shenyang.
Xiao Yuan finished getting ready to sleep. She saw Cricket still sitting motionless. The young man on the upper bunk put his head over the edge to look below, clearing his throat with affectation. Xiao Yuan realized he must have been following her conversation with the blind man. She felt a little uncomfortable, but since Cricket sat there, very dignified, she also felt inferior.
She gently lay down and said, as if into the air, “I like to travel. Making a journey is the same as clinging to one place. If you settle down in your hometown, it feels instead as though you are drifting along.”
“Xiao Yuan, Xiao Yuan, you must have such a big heart!” Cricket exclaimed sincerely.
She gradually fell asleep. In a hazy state she heard the sound of the small drum at even intervals accompanying the rustling sound, sha sha, of the rain. How pleasant! Then she heard a frightened scream.
It was the train attendant screaming because the passenger in the berth above Cricket had fallen, dead, to the floor. The blind man sat as motionless as before. He said, “He wanted me to help him free himself, but I could not. Oh Xiao Yuan, I really want to weep now!”
Needless to say we never find out anything more about the young man.
Two other helpful reviews - putting the for and against case for the novel
'For':
'Against':
2.5 stars - rounded up to 3 because Can Xue is in many ways infuriating but somehow always stimulating.
‘Correct, young man! Very good feedback. You respect my work!’
The Last Lover, translated by Annelise Finegan Wasmoen from the original by Can Xue (残雪;) won the US Best Translated Book Award for 2015, as well as being longlisted for the 2015 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.
Love in the New Millennium, from the same translator/author pair, has now been longlisted for the 2019 Man Booker International, the successor to the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.
I appreciated The Last Lover, but my review noted various features:
- "There is a linear progression to the novel of sorts - a form of dream quest - but characters appear, disappear and morph seemingly at random"
- "from modern literature the nearest I can come is Murakami's Wild Sheep Chase meets Ishiguro's Unconsoled, and from classical literature Calvino, Bruno Schulz, Borges, Dante and Kafka who the author acknowledges as influences"
- than Can Xue was not shy of acknowledging her own brilliance and her place in the literary landscape, and highly demanding of her readers. From a Q&A with her translator (
Annelise Finegan Wasmoen:In the same interview Can Xue also pointed another student of the translator's to this novel:
So, you’ve said that readers of your fiction need to be creative, and this reminded me of a review of The Last Lover, in which Larissa Pham described her experience of reading the novel: “It seems impossible that I could crawl so deep within this novel and have everything remain the same.” By the end, she writes that the book is “like a puzzling dream one returns to again and again.” Are the feelings that Pham describes similar to your experience of creativity?
Can Xue:
Yes. I think her reading is promising, even enterprising. She has boundless prospects as a reader. But I think she should have continued unearthing the depths of the novel, and not quit at the level of “a puzzling dream.” Most of my readers stop at the level of “dream reading,” which is still a conventional way of reading. I’ve learned that the kind of literature I write belongs in a category with Calvino, Borges, Dante, Kafka, and writers like them. My literary works are the same as theirs: every piece has a solution, a taut emotional logic
AFW Recently I had the opportunity to teach your novel The Last Lover in a world literature survey. I worried at first that the students would find the novel too difficult, but it turned out to fit in perfectly with the other books assigned: selections from Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Marriage Plot, Federico García Lorca’s surreal Poems in New York, Junichiro Tanizaki’s The Key. The students were fascinated by the story of Joe and his mania for reading, as well as the theme of the inner long march. One of the students asked me about the way the novel ends. She thought that the long march was a way of talking about a journey toward self-discovery or self-knowledge, but she didn’t understand why Lisa and Maria’s long march ends in a graveyard. What would you have told her?The combination of appreciation for the humour but incomprehension that Can Xue forecasts is one I share.
CX Your student is very smart! Her question is a question that the author asks herself. Today, in an age when the emotions of modern humans have developed to a comparatively advanced stage, the goal of perfect romantic love, with the soul and body as one, seems to grow more and more remote. This is because people place ever higher demands on their emotions. The two activities of love and art follow the same pattern. It’s exactly like the scene I just described: if the pull of love were fully expressed at its greatest peak, it would lead toward death, with the horse and rider together in a death-defying performance. The author raises a question, but she is not able to state the answer right away. Her answer will be found in the next piece of writing, because this solution is a new creation. If your student wants to find the answer to the question “what would happen if the long march continued?” she should read the third novel in the series—Love Stories in the New Millennium (the first was Five Spice Street) —because the answer is in that book.
I think that even though not every reader can completely understand this novel, the plot is unique and engaging, and the humor is one of the novel’s strengths
Credit is due to Annelise Finegan Wasmoen's excellent translation - and indeed Can Xue is also highly demanding of her translators. Her own words from another interview () referring to herself in the third person:
Can Xue's works are truly exceptional; I feel that the most important skill my translators can have is to read the original intensively, thereby having a thorough grasp of the deep underlying humor and general feel of the language in my works. How precisely they express something in their translations is closely connected with their power to feel and their ability to grasp logic, because these kinds of fictions have already surpassed the profundity of philosophy.Love in the New Millennium rather lacks the 'journey' of The Last Lover, which was something of a dream quest novel, and instead gives us a tangled tale of the loves and lovers of a rather confusing cast of characters - there hardly seems to be a male/female pair in the book who haven't been married, or lovers, or at least one infatuated with the other. It's hard for the readers to keep track - and indeed for the characters as well, with people frequently changing appearance or even age, sometimes before another's eyes, popping up unexpectedly and disappearing just as randomly, coming back from death, and all set against the physical backdrop of locations that behave much the same. The net effect is that the characters seem as baffled as the reader. A typical exchange reads:
My work belongs to an especially advanced kind of literature, far more ahead of its time than Kafka was to his readers in his day.
‘No, Sixiang, I don’t understand.’
‘Good!’ Long Sixiang clapped her hands. ‘Your not understanding is understanding!’
With her first clap the pigs went mad, their cries rising straight to the heavens.
and frequently in the book characters say they are 'confused', find things 'inexplicable', 'bizarre', 'unusual', find themselves frequently 'astonished' and remark how others 'behave strangely', to give but a few examples. Indeed this is a world where people retreat to dreams for sanity and clarity.
One key motif is The Lady of the Camellias (La Dame aux camélias) from La Traviata - an elderly character of that name who performs the part of Violetta in the opera - and one assumes the author is contrasting 19th and 21st century love affairs. Love in the New Millennium as envisaged in the pages of this novel is also surprisingly homogeneous - 100% heterosexual, with beautiful women pursued by rather disreputable men, and, in a way, serial monogamy, except changing partners on a daily basis seems to be fine so long as it is clear who is your lover.
Another key theme seems to be the effect of economic development - many of the characters deciding to upgrade from working in a factory to the greater freedom from working in a bath-cum-whorehouse, and most hankering for their home towns (which are mystically hard to find).
The beautifully produced book comes with an introduction from Eileen Myles, reprinted in the
which largely sings the book's praises but also admits:
It’s irresistible, the way one enters this laughable, shifting no-time where everyone inside is talking about like the weather. It’s also very boring, as a plotless book is. A circling, nonbuilding narrative gets tiring. What’s the pleasure, then? Humor and surprise. It’s a frankly poetic existence. Plus my reader’s sense of awe grew continually at the endless refillability of the thing. The book is a vase, it’s a form.and this is the novel's biggest weakness. It's so hard to get a foothold - I found myself not so much 'dream reading' (to use the author's phrase) as drifting off, realising I had read several pages and absorbed nothing, and yes, at times, it can indeed get a little tedious. But then one finds a plot thread to grab on to, a humorous episode or particular absurdity to enjoy, and ones interest is rekindled.
Here's a typical passage that manages both - and note that there is no context in the novel (other than perhaps Xiao Yuan's loves for clocks) that makes this passage anymore comprehensible in situ:
The next day at noon [Xiao Yuan] was on the train heading northeast to Manchuria. On this trip the passenger in the facing bunk was a blind man. He told Xiao Yuan to call him Cricket. He said, “I hear you’ve brought quite a few timepieces. I can keep time more accurately than any clock. Listen: ticktock, ticktock . . . ”
He imitated a cricket’s chirp with marvelous accuracy, amusing Xiao Yuan so much she laughed out loud.
“I learned from an old cricket at my family’s hearth. As time went on, I turned into a timepiece. Joy can be found in this.”
One of his long, thin hands kept groping at his chest, the hand showing his apprehension.
“Do you need help?” Xiao Yuan felt she had to ask.
He did not answer. She heard muffled drumbeats, as if from a small drum. “This is my heart beating. I’ve always wanted to make someone hear my heartbeat, and now I’ve succeeded. I’m so glad, knowing that you heard.”
Yet his expression was not glad. He seemed to be waiting for something, gloomily.
“The time is two-ten and twenty seconds,” he said.
“Correct. She’s coming over,” Xiao Yuan said.
“奥丑辞?”
“That thing that has an appointment with you.”
“Ah yes, she’s coming!” He began to laugh. “What do you think of me as a timepiece?”
“You work too hard, Cricket! You belong at the hearth. If it were me, I would rather be one of those hermits or vagrants in the thick grass.”
The color of the sky grew darker. The locomotive whistled. They had already passed Shenyang.
Xiao Yuan finished getting ready to sleep. She saw Cricket still sitting motionless. The young man on the upper bunk put his head over the edge to look below, clearing his throat with affectation. Xiao Yuan realized he must have been following her conversation with the blind man. She felt a little uncomfortable, but since Cricket sat there, very dignified, she also felt inferior.
She gently lay down and said, as if into the air, “I like to travel. Making a journey is the same as clinging to one place. If you settle down in your hometown, it feels instead as though you are drifting along.”
“Xiao Yuan, Xiao Yuan, you must have such a big heart!” Cricket exclaimed sincerely.
She gradually fell asleep. In a hazy state she heard the sound of the small drum at even intervals accompanying the rustling sound, sha sha, of the rain. How pleasant! Then she heard a frightened scream.
It was the train attendant screaming because the passenger in the berth above Cricket had fallen, dead, to the floor. The blind man sat as motionless as before. He said, “He wanted me to help him free himself, but I could not. Oh Xiao Yuan, I really want to weep now!”
Needless to say we never find out anything more about the young man.
Two other helpful reviews - putting the for and against case for the novel
'For':
'Against':
2.5 stars - rounded up to 3 because Can Xue is in many ways infuriating but somehow always stimulating.
May 2, 2022
This book is exactly what I would expect, yet could never have expected, from a modern mythological epic. All of the crucial elements of myth are present and replete with up-to-date motifs. Can Xue has suggested that the same is true of Kafka, which I think is fair enough. I'm reminded of something like The Ramayana or Journey to the West (I gather this book has a little in common with Dream of the Red Chamber, which I've never read.) I'm given the feeling that one could study this for decades and continue to mine greater and greater degrees of meaning. I'm sore tempted—as it is, I've read it once and have compiled several pages of notes charting the significance I've found in various of its motifs.
The insubstantial pachinko parlor which comprises the form of the "free port" (one of many), Pear Mountain with its wolves howling in the wilderness, The Lady of the Camillias and her screech-like singing, the toxic sting of the red scorpion in the sewers, the rhinoceros horn, the drinking of ink, death and resurrection amidst endless love affairs—at several points in the story we're told, of one character or another, that their "thoughts were in chaos." To my mind, this refers to none other than the reader, and, if approached with the proper care, could very well be the herald of a deeper understanding.
The insubstantial pachinko parlor which comprises the form of the "free port" (one of many), Pear Mountain with its wolves howling in the wilderness, The Lady of the Camillias and her screech-like singing, the toxic sting of the red scorpion in the sewers, the rhinoceros horn, the drinking of ink, death and resurrection amidst endless love affairs—at several points in the story we're told, of one character or another, that their "thoughts were in chaos." To my mind, this refers to none other than the reader, and, if approached with the proper care, could very well be the herald of a deeper understanding.
January 31, 2019
This book is published in English as Love in the New Millennium, but evidently its original Chinese title could be more accurately translated as New Millennium Love Stories. It’s a subtle difference, but I prefer the Chinese title. After all, this book doesn’t make any kind of comprehensive statement about modern-day love. Instead, it’s a collection of loosely linked, frequently baffling stories. The cover copy of the U.S. edition doesn’t fully convey the level of weird magical realism in this book. It’s full of surreal events, lacking a sense of causality or progress, all told in a deadpan way.
And if the title Love in the New Millennium primed you to expect a novel about how Tinder and emojis are affecting young people’s love lives, you’ll also be disappointed or confused. For one thing, the central characters are all aged 35 and up. For another, there is very little mention of cell phones or the Internet. In some ways, the world it depicts feels more 19th-century than 21st-century: most of the characters work either at factories or as prostitutes, and though they live in a large city, they are just one generation removed from being rural farmers. Can Xue* even alludes several times to 19th-century bourgeois fiction: a chapter is titled "" and there’s a whole plot thread about . (And the cotton-factory workers fear dying young of “cotton lung,” just like in !) I guess these parallels make sense: Europe industrialized in the 19th century and China is undergoing a massive industrialization right now. But it does remind you that the phrase “new millennium” likely has different connotations in the West than it does in China.
I found this book a real slog to get through, but I also recognize that I'm very far from the ideal reader for it. I’m not super familiar with Chinese literature and culture, and it’s hard for me to enjoy deadpan surrealism. (I think I prefer my magical realism if it contains more of a sense of wonder or delight.) Giving Can Xue the benefit of the doubt, I have heard that there are a lot of baffling things about daily life in modern China, so maybe that’s why she wrote an intentionally baffling book. And maybe she agrees with her character Long Sixiang, who says, in one of the many paradoxical aphorisms that are sprinkled throughout the book, “Good! Your not understanding is 耻苍诲别谤蝉迟补苍诲颈苍驳!”
*Per a Chinese-speaking friend, the author’s name should be pronounced something like “Tsan Shway.”
And if the title Love in the New Millennium primed you to expect a novel about how Tinder and emojis are affecting young people’s love lives, you’ll also be disappointed or confused. For one thing, the central characters are all aged 35 and up. For another, there is very little mention of cell phones or the Internet. In some ways, the world it depicts feels more 19th-century than 21st-century: most of the characters work either at factories or as prostitutes, and though they live in a large city, they are just one generation removed from being rural farmers. Can Xue* even alludes several times to 19th-century bourgeois fiction: a chapter is titled "" and there’s a whole plot thread about . (And the cotton-factory workers fear dying young of “cotton lung,” just like in !) I guess these parallels make sense: Europe industrialized in the 19th century and China is undergoing a massive industrialization right now. But it does remind you that the phrase “new millennium” likely has different connotations in the West than it does in China.
I found this book a real slog to get through, but I also recognize that I'm very far from the ideal reader for it. I’m not super familiar with Chinese literature and culture, and it’s hard for me to enjoy deadpan surrealism. (I think I prefer my magical realism if it contains more of a sense of wonder or delight.) Giving Can Xue the benefit of the doubt, I have heard that there are a lot of baffling things about daily life in modern China, so maybe that’s why she wrote an intentionally baffling book. And maybe she agrees with her character Long Sixiang, who says, in one of the many paradoxical aphorisms that are sprinkled throughout the book, “Good! Your not understanding is 耻苍诲别谤蝉迟补苍诲颈苍驳!”
*Per a Chinese-speaking friend, the author’s name should be pronounced something like “Tsan Shway.”
October 10, 2024
Ich musste das leider nach ca. 2/3 abbrechen, weil es mich nicht mehr interessiert hat, ein paar Monate hat es gedauert bis dahin zu kommen, dann kam noch ca 1 Jahr Anstaubphase am Stapel der unbeendeten Romane …
Falls sie heute den Nobelpreis gewinnt, werde ich es noch mal zur Hand nehmen.
Falls sie heute den Nobelpreis gewinnt, werde ich es noch mal zur Hand nehmen.
May 31, 2019
”How is that possible?”
“Things are always this way. Aren’t you getting used to it?”
Some time ago, I watched the third season of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks. I mention this because that TV series and this book left me with the same bewildered feeling. I have to say that I rather like the sense of confusion and incomprehension, although I can imagine many readers would be infuriated by it.
I almost didn’t read this book. I read some excerpts from interviews with the author and they both attracted me and put me off the idea. One of the author’s key statements seemed to be that readers are not worthy of reading her books (I can’t remember the exact wording but it was something like that which sounded fairly arrogant). This is a good tactic, I think, on the part of an author. The reader is left in a quandary: either you give the book a rave review or you prove your unworthiness as a reader.
This is not an easy book to read. It interleaves multiple tales of lovers, many of whom seem to have been partnered with several other people from other tales which can make it difficult to keep track of who is where and with whom, especially as time doesn’t flow linearly (well, I don’t think it does - it can be difficult to tell which direction it is heading!). But this multi-story narrative is only part of the complexity: any book which can, without any warning and without any follow on, suddenly include a passage that says
Xiao Yuan listened closely to the gentle narrative of the women who tended the mulberries as she relaxed and fell fast asleep. She woke up once, got out of bed, turned on the light, walked across to the wallpapered wall opposite, entered the wall, and went back to sleep standing inside it
or another that says
They were underground discussing the topography of the Gobi Desert among the racket made by the plants and animals. It must have been a marvellous event. Could the train to the capital have been heading toward a tunnel leading to the earth’s core? Small wonder Xiao Yuan brought so many timepieces.
clearly isn’t going to be simple to read. It is only 264 pages long, but it takes a long time to read because you have to read very, very slowly. There are many, many sentences which do not follow on obviously from the preceding sentence. It is around here that I start to reveal my failings as a reader.
Overall, despite the fact that I feel that a lot of the book washed over me, I sort of feel that this is part of the plan. There isn’t really a plot to follow (although when you get to the end, you sort of feel that maybe there was), but there are lots and lots of very strange events that do gradually start to link together giving us a view into the lives of several people and their relationships. It’s weird, it’s difficult to read, it is confusing, but it is, in fact, a lot of fun. What I would be interested to know is how much of the book would make more sense to a Chinese person or someone with a more in depth knowledge of Chinese culture and history. Over the last few years, I have read several novels that look at recent Chinese history, so I have some background to draw on, but I did feel that I was perhaps missing out on some of the references.
Paul’s review (/review/show...) does a great job of giving some background to the book. I recommend you read it (partly because I owe Paul a debt of thanks as it was his copy that I read! And, by the way, the book itself is a thing of beauty.).
3.5 stars - not sure which way to tip the balance!
“Things are always this way. Aren’t you getting used to it?”
Some time ago, I watched the third season of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks. I mention this because that TV series and this book left me with the same bewildered feeling. I have to say that I rather like the sense of confusion and incomprehension, although I can imagine many readers would be infuriated by it.
I almost didn’t read this book. I read some excerpts from interviews with the author and they both attracted me and put me off the idea. One of the author’s key statements seemed to be that readers are not worthy of reading her books (I can’t remember the exact wording but it was something like that which sounded fairly arrogant). This is a good tactic, I think, on the part of an author. The reader is left in a quandary: either you give the book a rave review or you prove your unworthiness as a reader.
This is not an easy book to read. It interleaves multiple tales of lovers, many of whom seem to have been partnered with several other people from other tales which can make it difficult to keep track of who is where and with whom, especially as time doesn’t flow linearly (well, I don’t think it does - it can be difficult to tell which direction it is heading!). But this multi-story narrative is only part of the complexity: any book which can, without any warning and without any follow on, suddenly include a passage that says
Xiao Yuan listened closely to the gentle narrative of the women who tended the mulberries as she relaxed and fell fast asleep. She woke up once, got out of bed, turned on the light, walked across to the wallpapered wall opposite, entered the wall, and went back to sleep standing inside it
or another that says
They were underground discussing the topography of the Gobi Desert among the racket made by the plants and animals. It must have been a marvellous event. Could the train to the capital have been heading toward a tunnel leading to the earth’s core? Small wonder Xiao Yuan brought so many timepieces.
clearly isn’t going to be simple to read. It is only 264 pages long, but it takes a long time to read because you have to read very, very slowly. There are many, many sentences which do not follow on obviously from the preceding sentence. It is around here that I start to reveal my failings as a reader.
Overall, despite the fact that I feel that a lot of the book washed over me, I sort of feel that this is part of the plan. There isn’t really a plot to follow (although when you get to the end, you sort of feel that maybe there was), but there are lots and lots of very strange events that do gradually start to link together giving us a view into the lives of several people and their relationships. It’s weird, it’s difficult to read, it is confusing, but it is, in fact, a lot of fun. What I would be interested to know is how much of the book would make more sense to a Chinese person or someone with a more in depth knowledge of Chinese culture and history. Over the last few years, I have read several novels that look at recent Chinese history, so I have some background to draw on, but I did feel that I was perhaps missing out on some of the references.
Paul’s review (/review/show...) does a great job of giving some background to the book. I recommend you read it (partly because I owe Paul a debt of thanks as it was his copy that I read! And, by the way, the book itself is a thing of beauty.).
3.5 stars - not sure which way to tip the balance!
October 24, 2021
Es gibt Bücher, die sind sehr schwierig zu beschreiben. Dieses Buch geh?rt leider zu dieser Sorte; Man fühlt sich in der Schwebe, die surrealen Faktoren, die sich in die reale Welt reinschieben, erzeugen ein leichtes Unbehagen und w?hrend des Lesens versucht man die Puzzlestücke richtig zusammensetzen in der Hoffnung, dass das Bild am Ende einem mehr Bedeutung geben kann.
An sich fand ich die Geschichte interessant über die "Liebe im neuen Jahrtausend" wie es der Titel schon besagt. Wir sind in China in der Gegenwart und es werden verschiedene Formen von Liebe zwischen Mann und Frau gezeigt, die sich real, falsch und richtig anfühlen. Es geht um viele Geheimnisse, Einsamkeit und Paranoia, die im Wechselspiel zueinander die Realit?t so lange verzerren, dass man sich nicht mehr sicher ist, was wirklich die Realit?t ist. Die Gefühle der Charaktere zueinander waren gut beschrieben, aber ich wusste bis zum Ende nicht, was mir der Autor mit dem Buch sagen will. Au?erdem fühlten sich die Charaktere und auch der Schauplatz leider entsetzlich austauschbar an und vor allem der Schauplatz China so schwach.
Man h?tte hier viel mehr ins Kuriose und Surreale reinrutschen k?nnen, ich fand es schade, dass der Inhalt der Erz?hlkunst nicht gerecht wurde. Es war wie nur die Oberfl?che zu zeigen, ohne ins Innere, das tats?chliche Wichtige, vordringen zu k?nnen.
** Dieses Buch wurde mir über NetGalley als E-Book zur Verfügung gestellt **
An sich fand ich die Geschichte interessant über die "Liebe im neuen Jahrtausend" wie es der Titel schon besagt. Wir sind in China in der Gegenwart und es werden verschiedene Formen von Liebe zwischen Mann und Frau gezeigt, die sich real, falsch und richtig anfühlen. Es geht um viele Geheimnisse, Einsamkeit und Paranoia, die im Wechselspiel zueinander die Realit?t so lange verzerren, dass man sich nicht mehr sicher ist, was wirklich die Realit?t ist. Die Gefühle der Charaktere zueinander waren gut beschrieben, aber ich wusste bis zum Ende nicht, was mir der Autor mit dem Buch sagen will. Au?erdem fühlten sich die Charaktere und auch der Schauplatz leider entsetzlich austauschbar an und vor allem der Schauplatz China so schwach.
Man h?tte hier viel mehr ins Kuriose und Surreale reinrutschen k?nnen, ich fand es schade, dass der Inhalt der Erz?hlkunst nicht gerecht wurde. Es war wie nur die Oberfl?che zu zeigen, ohne ins Innere, das tats?chliche Wichtige, vordringen zu k?nnen.
** Dieses Buch wurde mir über NetGalley als E-Book zur Verfügung gestellt **
April 12, 2019
Totally skimmed the last part, I’m just not a fan of books where the purpose seems to be to not get it!
April 10, 2025
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October 21, 2024
The term "dream-like" is overused for sure, but if there ever was a book that captured the illogic of dreams, it's Love in the New Millennium. There's moments of breathtaking beauty and truly phenomenal visuals (any chapter involving Nest County!) tempered with occasionally frustrating stretches of non-plot. Perhaps one to revisit - a first read to let it all wash over you, a second to pick through out the patterns and secrets in the text. While maybe being 40 pages too long and boring at times (even the otherwise laudatory introduction notes this), it's really like not much else out there. One for adventurous readers nourished more by poetry than by plot.
May 30, 2020
Bewildered Beguiled Bemused
My mind went so many places in this book I am not certain on how to rate it.
I try to never give spoilers but for Westerners interested in reading this please keep in mind the author is considered Avant-Gard .
Now visualize the TV show Seinfeld where each episode is everyday life about nothing and a group of people seem to know others but don’t realize then know the same people. Add in David Lynch twists, magical realism, the ebb and flow of love and partners, and Chinese humor. Then decide if you want to read the book.
I am probably explaining this poorly. I had to take time reading this short book and believe I will read it again to flesh out more ideas.
My mind went so many places in this book I am not certain on how to rate it.
I try to never give spoilers but for Westerners interested in reading this please keep in mind the author is considered Avant-Gard .
Now visualize the TV show Seinfeld where each episode is everyday life about nothing and a group of people seem to know others but don’t realize then know the same people. Add in David Lynch twists, magical realism, the ebb and flow of love and partners, and Chinese humor. Then decide if you want to read the book.
I am probably explaining this poorly. I had to take time reading this short book and believe I will read it again to flesh out more ideas.
August 29, 2024
0/5 stars. This book was horrible I only finished reading it for book club.
It felt like reading a fever dream in the worst way possible. The characters were all one note and honestly awful people and not interesting in the slightest. The writing was awful, nothing flowed well.
It felt like reading a fever dream in the worst way possible. The characters were all one note and honestly awful people and not interesting in the slightest. The writing was awful, nothing flowed well.
Read
March 15, 2023??? ??? ? ????? ???? ? ?????? ?? ??????? ???...
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October 12, 2022
?i idol, b?t 1 sao vì c?m h??ng quá so v?i Hoàng nê ph? hay ?ào nguyên ngoài c?i th? ^^ Nh?ng th?i, quy?t ??nh v?n cho 5 sao
Là m?t trong nh?ng nhà v?n Trung Qu?c ???c d?ch ra ti?ng n??c ngoài nhi?u nh?t, t? nh?ng truy?n ng?n ??u tay nh? Bong bóng xà phòng trên ch?u n??c ?en, Hoàng Nê Ph?… Tàn Tuy?t ?? xác l?p phong cách c?a mình. Th? nh?ng v?i s? chuy?n bi?n t? n?m 2002 tr? ?i, mà trong ?ó Nh?ng chuy?n tình th? k? m?i t?ng l?t vào ?? c? c?a gi?i Man Booker nh? m?t ??i di?n – ?? cho th?y m?t Tàn Tuy?t r?t khác.
Là cu?n ti?u thuy?t có c?u trúc l?, Nh?ng chuy?n tình th? k? m?i bao g?m 11 ch??ng sách, kh?c h?a m?nh ??i c?a nh?ng cá nh?n b? v? có cùng m?c ?ích. Tàn Tuy?t tri?t b? th?i gian và kh?ng gian m?t cách h?u hình, ?? ??a nó ti?n s?u h?n vào ??a h?t n?i t?m, t? ?ó làm nên ch?ng l?p x?p ch?ng lên nhau. Li?u nh?ng nh?n v?t này là ng??i có th?t hay nh?ng h?n ma? Li?u h? b??c ?i và có ??i s?ng, hay ch? t?n t?i nh? d?ng ?n th?n?
Nói Nh?ng chuy?n tình th? k? m?i có ph?n khác bi?t so v?i chu?i tác ph?m sáng t?o tr??c n?m 2002 là b?i Tàn Tuy?t d??ng nh? ?? b?t cay nghi?t v? phía quá kh?, t? ?ó m? ra kh?ng gian v?n ch??ng có ph?n m?i h?n, d? th?m th?u h?n và mang nhi?u ? ngh?a khái quát h?n. Ch?ng h?n Bong bóng xà phòng trong ch?u n??c ?en hay Hoàng Nê Ph?, c? hai ??u h??ng v? m?t th?i kì ?en t?i r?t mu?n ch?n vùi c?a ??t n??c này. Th? nh?ng cu?n ti?u thuy?t này l?i khác, nó h??ng t?i m?t th? gi?i ??i ??ng c?a nh?ng con ng??i khát khao tình c?m, và ? trên cùng là s? t? do.
? ti?u thuy?t này, Tàn Tuy?t có tính gi?u nh?i v? cùng khác bi?t so v?i ph?n l?n tác ph?m m? t? n?i ?au c?ng nh? hành ??ng c?c ?oan c?a bà. T? vi?c t?p trung khai thác nh?ng ng??i “c?ng nh?n chính là n?n móng” làm m?t c?ng vi?c kh?ng m?y v? vang, cho ??n quay ng??c tr? l?i nh?ng n?i ?au h?n, Tàn Tuy?t d??ng nh? mu?n ??n g?n h?n v?i m?nh ??t mà mình sinh s?ng, v?i b?u kh?ng khí kh?c nghi?t và s? ki?m duy?t, b?t r?t c?a nó. Tàn Tuy?t m? ra kh?ng gian v?n ch??ng có ph?n kí bí, th? nh?ng m?t khác bà l?i cho th?y n?i dung c?ng nh? c?m h?ng qu? th?t g?n g?i.
Nói v? tình yêu, Tàn Tuy?t khai thác m?t cách m?nh b?o khát khao yêu ???ng c?a các nh?n v?t. ? các ch??ng ??u, ch?a h?t ???c 2 trang sách thì ?? th?y ???c m?t s? ph?n th?c v? m?t d?c tình. B? tri?t tiêu h?t quá kh? ??nh hình, nên cu?c ??i h? ch? còn là nh?ng hành ??ng mà h? chính là ch? th?. ?m ch? th?i kì “quá ??”, t?t c? nh?n v?t c?a Tàn Tuy?t d??ng nh? chán ghét nh?p ?? c?ng x??ng. H? thà ch?u ?au, thà ch?u t?n th??ng… h?n là qu?n quanh v?i nh?ng ti?ng ?n kh?ng th?i yên ngh?.
V?i h? tình yêu m?t khi ch?m ??n ?? là c?c khoái c?a nh?ng xúc c?m. Nh? v?y nên d?u n?m trong chi?c r??ng có ph?n ch?t ch?i, hay s?u d??i ba t?ng ??t, thì h? v?n yêu và v?n tin mình ?ang ? trung t?m c?a Trái ??t này. Và d?u là m?t h?n ma hay ng??i phàm tr?n, thì h? c?ng e ng?i nh?ng s? c? ??c ??n m?c bám víu vào nhau, d?u cho b?t c? th? gì có th? x?y ra…
?nh h??ng n? quy?n trong tác ph?m này kh?ng h? ?n gi?u mà ???c Tàn Tuy?t phát l? ngay ? b? m?t. Nh?ng ng??i nh? Thúy Lan v?n lu?n trung thành v?i d?c v?ng c?a mình. H? ch?n ph??ng cách s?n lòng sa ng?, và lu?n gi? v?ng khát v?ng t? do. B?i vì “con ng??i ai c?ng có m?t n?”, “ai mà kh?ng có m?t ?áng th??ng”… nên v?i Nh?ng chuy?n tình th? k? m?i, Tàn Tuy?t ?? ??n t?n cùng c?a chính c?t l?i v?n ??, v? s? thành th?c, v? khát khao s?ng… ?? ?em nó g?n l?i v?i m?c ?ích mu?n th?a c?a v?n ch??ng – làm nên th? v?n ch??ng “thu?n túy” trong nh?ng “th? nghi?m” c?a ngh? thu?t vi?t.
Và b?i nh?ng khát khao s?ng, nên l?ch s? là ?i?u mà các nh?n v?t kh?ng h? mong mu?n. T? trong s?u th?m c?a b?n th?n h?, quá kh? v?n lu?n ?? l?i v?t s?o h?n ch?a, t? ?ó l?ch s? r?i lo?n t?o nên nh?ng n?i b?t an kh?ng th?i ám ?nh. H? ch? hi?n t?n trong m?t kho?nh kh?c, ?? s?ng là mình và r?i tan bi?n. Do ?ó dù cho là nh?ng l?ch s? v? các “cánh chim tình yêu” tìm ??n khát v?ng cao c?, thì h? c?ng kh?ng mong mu?n mình ???c ghi l?i.
V?i Nh?ng chuy?n tình th? k? m?i, Tàn Tuy?t ?? t?o ???c nên m?t tác ph?m ?n t??ng, ??c ?áo trong th? gi?i quan c?a riêng mình bà. B?ng cách vi?t ph?n m?nh, gi?i c?u trúc c?ng nh? ??n g?n v?i s? gi?i th? b?n th?, v?i nh?ng ??i s?ng t?m linh… bà ?? t?o ra m?t c?i ??i khác, kh?ng biên gi?i, kh?ng neo ??u… ?? cho th?y r?ng khát khao v??n ??n t? do là ?i?u mà b?t c? ai c?ng ??u mong mu?n, m?c cho l?ch s? có th? ghi l?i, m?c cho tình yêu có th? tan bi?n.
Bài ??y ??:
Là m?t trong nh?ng nhà v?n Trung Qu?c ???c d?ch ra ti?ng n??c ngoài nhi?u nh?t, t? nh?ng truy?n ng?n ??u tay nh? Bong bóng xà phòng trên ch?u n??c ?en, Hoàng Nê Ph?… Tàn Tuy?t ?? xác l?p phong cách c?a mình. Th? nh?ng v?i s? chuy?n bi?n t? n?m 2002 tr? ?i, mà trong ?ó Nh?ng chuy?n tình th? k? m?i t?ng l?t vào ?? c? c?a gi?i Man Booker nh? m?t ??i di?n – ?? cho th?y m?t Tàn Tuy?t r?t khác.
Là cu?n ti?u thuy?t có c?u trúc l?, Nh?ng chuy?n tình th? k? m?i bao g?m 11 ch??ng sách, kh?c h?a m?nh ??i c?a nh?ng cá nh?n b? v? có cùng m?c ?ích. Tàn Tuy?t tri?t b? th?i gian và kh?ng gian m?t cách h?u hình, ?? ??a nó ti?n s?u h?n vào ??a h?t n?i t?m, t? ?ó làm nên ch?ng l?p x?p ch?ng lên nhau. Li?u nh?ng nh?n v?t này là ng??i có th?t hay nh?ng h?n ma? Li?u h? b??c ?i và có ??i s?ng, hay ch? t?n t?i nh? d?ng ?n th?n?
Nói Nh?ng chuy?n tình th? k? m?i có ph?n khác bi?t so v?i chu?i tác ph?m sáng t?o tr??c n?m 2002 là b?i Tàn Tuy?t d??ng nh? ?? b?t cay nghi?t v? phía quá kh?, t? ?ó m? ra kh?ng gian v?n ch??ng có ph?n m?i h?n, d? th?m th?u h?n và mang nhi?u ? ngh?a khái quát h?n. Ch?ng h?n Bong bóng xà phòng trong ch?u n??c ?en hay Hoàng Nê Ph?, c? hai ??u h??ng v? m?t th?i kì ?en t?i r?t mu?n ch?n vùi c?a ??t n??c này. Th? nh?ng cu?n ti?u thuy?t này l?i khác, nó h??ng t?i m?t th? gi?i ??i ??ng c?a nh?ng con ng??i khát khao tình c?m, và ? trên cùng là s? t? do.
? ti?u thuy?t này, Tàn Tuy?t có tính gi?u nh?i v? cùng khác bi?t so v?i ph?n l?n tác ph?m m? t? n?i ?au c?ng nh? hành ??ng c?c ?oan c?a bà. T? vi?c t?p trung khai thác nh?ng ng??i “c?ng nh?n chính là n?n móng” làm m?t c?ng vi?c kh?ng m?y v? vang, cho ??n quay ng??c tr? l?i nh?ng n?i ?au h?n, Tàn Tuy?t d??ng nh? mu?n ??n g?n h?n v?i m?nh ??t mà mình sinh s?ng, v?i b?u kh?ng khí kh?c nghi?t và s? ki?m duy?t, b?t r?t c?a nó. Tàn Tuy?t m? ra kh?ng gian v?n ch??ng có ph?n kí bí, th? nh?ng m?t khác bà l?i cho th?y n?i dung c?ng nh? c?m h?ng qu? th?t g?n g?i.
Nói v? tình yêu, Tàn Tuy?t khai thác m?t cách m?nh b?o khát khao yêu ???ng c?a các nh?n v?t. ? các ch??ng ??u, ch?a h?t ???c 2 trang sách thì ?? th?y ???c m?t s? ph?n th?c v? m?t d?c tình. B? tri?t tiêu h?t quá kh? ??nh hình, nên cu?c ??i h? ch? còn là nh?ng hành ??ng mà h? chính là ch? th?. ?m ch? th?i kì “quá ??”, t?t c? nh?n v?t c?a Tàn Tuy?t d??ng nh? chán ghét nh?p ?? c?ng x??ng. H? thà ch?u ?au, thà ch?u t?n th??ng… h?n là qu?n quanh v?i nh?ng ti?ng ?n kh?ng th?i yên ngh?.
V?i h? tình yêu m?t khi ch?m ??n ?? là c?c khoái c?a nh?ng xúc c?m. Nh? v?y nên d?u n?m trong chi?c r??ng có ph?n ch?t ch?i, hay s?u d??i ba t?ng ??t, thì h? v?n yêu và v?n tin mình ?ang ? trung t?m c?a Trái ??t này. Và d?u là m?t h?n ma hay ng??i phàm tr?n, thì h? c?ng e ng?i nh?ng s? c? ??c ??n m?c bám víu vào nhau, d?u cho b?t c? th? gì có th? x?y ra…
?nh h??ng n? quy?n trong tác ph?m này kh?ng h? ?n gi?u mà ???c Tàn Tuy?t phát l? ngay ? b? m?t. Nh?ng ng??i nh? Thúy Lan v?n lu?n trung thành v?i d?c v?ng c?a mình. H? ch?n ph??ng cách s?n lòng sa ng?, và lu?n gi? v?ng khát v?ng t? do. B?i vì “con ng??i ai c?ng có m?t n?”, “ai mà kh?ng có m?t ?áng th??ng”… nên v?i Nh?ng chuy?n tình th? k? m?i, Tàn Tuy?t ?? ??n t?n cùng c?a chính c?t l?i v?n ??, v? s? thành th?c, v? khát khao s?ng… ?? ?em nó g?n l?i v?i m?c ?ích mu?n th?a c?a v?n ch??ng – làm nên th? v?n ch??ng “thu?n túy” trong nh?ng “th? nghi?m” c?a ngh? thu?t vi?t.
Và b?i nh?ng khát khao s?ng, nên l?ch s? là ?i?u mà các nh?n v?t kh?ng h? mong mu?n. T? trong s?u th?m c?a b?n th?n h?, quá kh? v?n lu?n ?? l?i v?t s?o h?n ch?a, t? ?ó l?ch s? r?i lo?n t?o nên nh?ng n?i b?t an kh?ng th?i ám ?nh. H? ch? hi?n t?n trong m?t kho?nh kh?c, ?? s?ng là mình và r?i tan bi?n. Do ?ó dù cho là nh?ng l?ch s? v? các “cánh chim tình yêu” tìm ??n khát v?ng cao c?, thì h? c?ng kh?ng mong mu?n mình ???c ghi l?i.
V?i Nh?ng chuy?n tình th? k? m?i, Tàn Tuy?t ?? t?o ???c nên m?t tác ph?m ?n t??ng, ??c ?áo trong th? gi?i quan c?a riêng mình bà. B?ng cách vi?t ph?n m?nh, gi?i c?u trúc c?ng nh? ??n g?n v?i s? gi?i th? b?n th?, v?i nh?ng ??i s?ng t?m linh… bà ?? t?o ra m?t c?i ??i khác, kh?ng biên gi?i, kh?ng neo ??u… ?? cho th?y r?ng khát khao v??n ??n t? do là ?i?u mà b?t c? ai c?ng ??u mong mu?n, m?c cho l?ch s? có th? ghi l?i, m?c cho tình yêu có th? tan bi?n.
Bài ??y ??:
August 29, 2023
"??? ??????? ??????! ?????? ??? ??????? ????? ?? ??? ?????!"
???????? ???? ????? ?????? ??? ??? ??????? ?? ??????? ?????? ???? ?????? ???? ????? ???? ?????? ????. ?????? ??? ??? ?????? ???? ???? ???? ????? ???? ?????? ??? ??? ?????? ????? ?????? ?????? ????? ????? ?? ???? ?? ???? ??? ???.. ?? ?????.. ???? ????? ?????? ????? ???????? ?? ?? ????? ???? ??????? ????? ??????? ??? ?? ????? ??????/ ????? ??? ????? ??????? ??????? ????? ?????? ??????? ????? ????? ???? ???? ????? ?????.
?? ??? ??????? ?????? ??? ???????? ?????? ???????? ???? ???? ?? ????? ??????? ???? ????? ?????? ???????? ?????? ?????? ?????? ??? ???? ??? ???? ????? ????? ??????.
??????? ???? ?????? ??????? ?? ??? ?????? ???? ???????? ??? ????? ??????? ???? ?????? ??????? ??????? ????????? ?? ????? ?? ?????? ???? ??? ??? ????? ????? ?? ??? ??? ??????? ?????????? ????? ?????? ?? ????? ?? ????? ???? ?????? ??? ?????? ?? ?????.
???? ??????? ????? ?????? ????? ?????? ?????? ?????? ?????? ???? ????? ???? ????? ?????? ????? ?????? ?????? ?????? ?????????.
??????? ????? ?? ?? ???????? ?? ?? ?????? ????? ????? ?? ??????? ???? ????? ???? ?????? ????? ?? ??????? ?? ?????? ???????.
????? ????? ??????.
???????? ???? ????? ?????? ??? ??? ??????? ?? ??????? ?????? ???? ?????? ???? ????? ???? ?????? ????. ?????? ??? ??? ?????? ???? ???? ???? ????? ???? ?????? ??? ??? ?????? ????? ?????? ?????? ????? ????? ?? ???? ?? ???? ??? ???.. ?? ?????.. ???? ????? ?????? ????? ???????? ?? ?? ????? ???? ??????? ????? ??????? ??? ?? ????? ??????/ ????? ??? ????? ??????? ??????? ????? ?????? ??????? ????? ????? ???? ???? ????? ?????.
?? ??? ??????? ?????? ??? ???????? ?????? ???????? ???? ???? ?? ????? ??????? ???? ????? ?????? ???????? ?????? ?????? ?????? ??? ???? ??? ???? ????? ????? ??????.
??????? ???? ?????? ??????? ?? ??? ?????? ???? ???????? ??? ????? ??????? ???? ?????? ??????? ??????? ????????? ?? ????? ?? ?????? ???? ??? ??? ????? ????? ?? ??? ??? ??????? ?????????? ????? ?????? ?? ????? ?? ????? ???? ?????? ??? ?????? ?? ?????.
???? ??????? ????? ?????? ????? ?????? ?????? ?????? ?????? ???? ????? ???? ????? ?????? ????? ?????? ?????? ?????? ?????????.
??????? ????? ?? ?? ???????? ?? ?? ?????? ????? ????? ?? ??????? ???? ????? ???? ?????? ????? ?? ??????? ?? ?????? ???????.
????? ????? ??????.
May 4, 2019
There is something about Love in the New Millennium that I was not able to connect with. Out of the entire Man Booker International longlisted books for 2019, this is the one that I struggled the most with. It was not because of the unlikeable characters or toxic relationships, there was just something that did not work. I spent a lot of time wondering if I felt disconnected from the cultural aspects of this novel, but I have come to the conclusion that me and Can Xue do not agree, or at least with this book.
The premise of this book is basically love stories of the new millennium. It is a collection of interconnected stories that center around a few different characters. Love in the New Millennium is meant to be an exploration into modern day romance, dating and relationships, however there is nothing inherently modern about this novel. Has the author adopted same for a magical realism where modern people are living in a world void of technology? I do not remember a single mention of the internet or cell phones in the entire book. I know this a Chinese novel, so culturally things are different, but I find it hard to believe that technology does not play a part in their lives. Can Xue is 66 years old, so it felt like she did not truly understand how young people live.
“People like us, more dead than alive, always indecisive.”
Having said that, this book was packaged as a dark comical look at a group of women living in a world of constant surveillance. I went into this thinking maybe this will be an exploration into women living in a world of social media. An Orwellian look at dating in the computer age. However, this book feels more like Middlemarch in a sense that it is not the surveillance cameras that people have to worry about, it is the gossip from other people.
The main problem with Love in the New Millennium for me what probably the fact that I built this book up differently in my head. Generally I prefer not to know too much about the books I plan to read, but since this was longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize, as well as the BTBA, I felt like I needed to know more about this book in order to join in on the conversations before actually reading it. I was hoping for a satirical look into dating in the new millennium, as well as some insights into modern day China, but this novel delivered none of that.
“Before entering a dream, she thought, a little enviously, they must be so happy. In her dream, she heard the couple outside referring to her as “the orphan.” When she heard these two syllables, or—phan, her tears rolled down in waves, soaking the pillow. Her dreamscape was passionate, with two silvery forms always floating around her. She saw milkvetch all around, honeybees everywhere, to her right the houses of the disappearing village, and the maple leaves burning like fire.”
Having said all that, there is this weird dream-like, almost surreal quality to the novel that played a small factor in not abandoning this book completely. My main reason for sticking to the book was because it was nominated for the Man Booker International Prize. The writing was never really bad, Annelise Finegan Wasmoen did a great job of translating this into English. For me, my main verdict came down to the subject matter and my disappointment in not exploring these very important issues. There are so many different socio-political, philosophical and psychological avenues that were left unexplored.
When Can Xue is blurbed as the “most important novelist working in China today” and is also known as an avant-garde writer, I expected something more from Love in the New Millennium. She is also a literary critic who has written about Dante, Jorge Luis Borges, and Franz Kafka, so you cannot judge me for expecting so much more. Love in the New Millennium left me wanting a very different book, and I think that might have been what disappointed me the most about this novel. I have no idea why it made the longlist for both the Man Booker International Prize and the Best Translated Book Award, but clearly others see something in this book that I could not see.
This review originally appeared on Translated Lit:
The premise of this book is basically love stories of the new millennium. It is a collection of interconnected stories that center around a few different characters. Love in the New Millennium is meant to be an exploration into modern day romance, dating and relationships, however there is nothing inherently modern about this novel. Has the author adopted same for a magical realism where modern people are living in a world void of technology? I do not remember a single mention of the internet or cell phones in the entire book. I know this a Chinese novel, so culturally things are different, but I find it hard to believe that technology does not play a part in their lives. Can Xue is 66 years old, so it felt like she did not truly understand how young people live.
“People like us, more dead than alive, always indecisive.”
Having said that, this book was packaged as a dark comical look at a group of women living in a world of constant surveillance. I went into this thinking maybe this will be an exploration into women living in a world of social media. An Orwellian look at dating in the computer age. However, this book feels more like Middlemarch in a sense that it is not the surveillance cameras that people have to worry about, it is the gossip from other people.
The main problem with Love in the New Millennium for me what probably the fact that I built this book up differently in my head. Generally I prefer not to know too much about the books I plan to read, but since this was longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize, as well as the BTBA, I felt like I needed to know more about this book in order to join in on the conversations before actually reading it. I was hoping for a satirical look into dating in the new millennium, as well as some insights into modern day China, but this novel delivered none of that.
“Before entering a dream, she thought, a little enviously, they must be so happy. In her dream, she heard the couple outside referring to her as “the orphan.” When she heard these two syllables, or—phan, her tears rolled down in waves, soaking the pillow. Her dreamscape was passionate, with two silvery forms always floating around her. She saw milkvetch all around, honeybees everywhere, to her right the houses of the disappearing village, and the maple leaves burning like fire.”
Having said all that, there is this weird dream-like, almost surreal quality to the novel that played a small factor in not abandoning this book completely. My main reason for sticking to the book was because it was nominated for the Man Booker International Prize. The writing was never really bad, Annelise Finegan Wasmoen did a great job of translating this into English. For me, my main verdict came down to the subject matter and my disappointment in not exploring these very important issues. There are so many different socio-political, philosophical and psychological avenues that were left unexplored.
When Can Xue is blurbed as the “most important novelist working in China today” and is also known as an avant-garde writer, I expected something more from Love in the New Millennium. She is also a literary critic who has written about Dante, Jorge Luis Borges, and Franz Kafka, so you cannot judge me for expecting so much more. Love in the New Millennium left me wanting a very different book, and I think that might have been what disappointed me the most about this novel. I have no idea why it made the longlist for both the Man Booker International Prize and the Best Translated Book Award, but clearly others see something in this book that I could not see.
This review originally appeared on Translated Lit:
October 2, 2024
3 & en halv ??
Okej s? ja jag kanske skumml?ste sista tredjedelen men t?nker r?kna det ?nd?. Tror verkligen jag hade gillat den mer om jag hade l?st den sj?lvmant o inte f?rs?kt cramma 400 sidor p? en kv?ll inf?r seminarium dagen d?rp?… gillar magisk realism! och surrealism! ?lskar hur boklogiken fungerar precis som min dr?mlogik, hela boken k?ndes verkligen som en av mina notes app sammanfattningar av en sjuk dr?m jag haft. Liiite f?r l?ng och jag brydde mig tyv?rr inte om alla karakt?rerna lika mkt (farbror wei.. host host). Solid!
Okej s? ja jag kanske skumml?ste sista tredjedelen men t?nker r?kna det ?nd?. Tror verkligen jag hade gillat den mer om jag hade l?st den sj?lvmant o inte f?rs?kt cramma 400 sidor p? en kv?ll inf?r seminarium dagen d?rp?… gillar magisk realism! och surrealism! ?lskar hur boklogiken fungerar precis som min dr?mlogik, hela boken k?ndes verkligen som en av mina notes app sammanfattningar av en sjuk dr?m jag haft. Liiite f?r l?ng och jag brydde mig tyv?rr inte om alla karakt?rerna lika mkt (farbror wei.. host host). Solid!
September 26, 2024
Min frontallob e int tillr?ckligt utvecklad f? att uppskatta eller f?rst? mig p? den h?r tyv?rr. Sm?rtsam l?sning
March 22, 2019
It’s a surrealistic plotless story about love and loneliness, full of dreams, magic realism, bizarre dialogues/situations, ghosts, told through more or less connected, but deeply lonely, characters, which are in constant search for love, exploration of their roots and meaning of the life. I didn’t like it... it’s just too much experimental (to the point of senseless) for me. The only positive thing that I can say is - some passages are humorous.
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March 2, 2022 ???? ???? ??? ?? ???? ???? ??? ??????? ???? ?? ????? ?????? : " ??? ??????? ?? ??? ???? ?? ???? ??????? ?? ????? ????? ???? ??? ???? ??? ?? ???????. ???? ?? ??? ???? ????? ???? ???? ?? ??? ???. ??? ???? ???? ??? ???? ??? ?????? ??????????? ???? ????. ????? ????? ?? ????? ??????? ?? ?????? ????????? ??? ???? ???????? ??????????? ?? ??????? ?? ??? ???? ?????? ???? ?????? ???????? ?????? ??? ???? ??????? ????? ????? ????? ????? ???????? ????? ????? ????????? ????????? ??????? ??? ??? ??? ????? ????? ????? ????? ????. ???? ?? ???? ????? ?? ?? ????? ?? ?????? ?? ??? ??? ???????? ????? ?? ?????? ??? ????? ????? ??????. ????????? ?????????? ???? ????? ??? ???? ?? ???? ???? ???????? ???? ?? ???? ???? ?? ??? ?? ????? ???? ???? ??? ?????? ?? ?????? ????? ????? ?????? ??? ???? ??? ?? ??? ?????? ?? ???? ????? ??? ????? ?????? ????? ?? ????.
???? ??????? ???? ???? ??? 2013 ??? ??? ?? ?????? ??????? ?????? ??????? ??????? ?? ?? ?? ?????? ?????? ????? ?????? ??? ??????? ?? ??????? ???????? ?? ???? ?? ????? ??? ????????? ??? ?? ???? ????? ?????? ?? ?????? ?????? ?????? ??????? ???? ???? ?? ???? ????? ???? ?????? ??? ???? ?? ??????? ???? ????? ?????? ?????? ?? ????? ????? ?? ???? ?????? ?? ??????? ????? ?????? ????? ????? ?????? ????????? ??????? ??????? ???????? ????? ???????? ??????? ??? ????? ??????? ?? ????? ??? ?? ??? ???? ??????? ??????? ?? ????? ?? ????????? ???? ?????? ??? ?? ???? ?? ???? ?????? ??????? ????? ????? ?? ????? ?? ????? ???? ????? ??????? ?? ?? ?????? ?????? ??? ???? ????? ?????? ???? ?? ??????.
????? ??????? ?? ?????? ?? ?????? ?????? ???????? ?????? ???? ??? ???? ?????? ?? ????? ???? ??? ?? ???? ?????:
??? ????? ????? ????. ???? ?? ????? ????? ????? ?????? ?????? ?????? ??? ??? ??? ???? ??????? ???? ??? ???? ???????? ????? ??? ????? ????? ???? ????? ?? ??????? ?????? ??????? ?????. ????? ??????? ?? ?????? ??? ??? ????. ????? ?? ???? ?? ????? ????? ?? ?????? ???? ?? ????? ??????? ???????. ??? ??????? ??? ????? ??? ??????? ???????? ?? ?????? ???. ?? ??? ????? ?? ?????? ???? ?????.
???? ????? ?? ??????? ?? ??? ????? ?????? ??? ???? ?????? ????? ??? ???? ??? ?????? ???? ????? ???? ??????? ?? ???? ?????. ??? ???? ????? ??? ??? ?? ????? ??????? ?? ??????? ???? ??????? ??? ??????? ?????? ????? ?? ????? ???????? ?? ????? ???? ????? ????? ?????? ??????? ???? ??? ???????? ?? ???????.
??? ????? ??????? ?? ??????? ????? ?? ????? ???????? ????? ???? ???? ??? ???? ????? ??? ??? ??? ?? ????? ??????? ?????? ???? ????? ?? ?? ???? ??? ?????? ???????... ???? ???? ??????? ???? ??????? ???? ???? ?? ??????? ??????:
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?? ???? ?????? ??? ??? ?????? ?? ??? ?? ?????? ???? ??????. ??? ?? ???? ?? ??? ????? ??????? ???? ?? ?????? ????? ?? ???? ????? ???? ??? ?????? ????? ?? ?????. ???? ????? ??? ?????? ??????? ?????? ?????? ??? ?????? ???? ??????? ?? ?????. ??? ???? ?? ??? ??? ?? ??? ??????? ???? ??? ?? ??? ???? ??? ?????. ???? ?????? ????? ????????? ??? ????? ??? ??????? ??????? ??????? ??? ?? ?? ???? ????? ??? ?? ??????? ???????? ???????? ?????? ?? ??????? ?????? ?????? ??? ????? ?? ????? ???? ??? ???? ?? ??? ?????? ??? ?????. ??? ??? ????? ???? ??? ?????. ??? ????? ?? ??? ????? ??? ??????? ?? ????? ???? ??? ?? ?? ?????? ?????.
**
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March 20, 2022
???? ?? ????? ?????? ??????? ??????? ????? ??????? ?????? ???? ??????
????? ????? ??????? ???? ?? ??? ???????? ???? ??? ?????? ?? ???? ?? ?????? ??? ??? ?????? ??????. ????? ?????? ??? ????? ????? ?????? ????? ???? ?? ?? ?? ????? ?????? ??? ?????? ????? ?????? ??? ???? ???? ??? ???? ??? ????? ??? ???? ????? ???????? ????????? ?????????? ??????? ???????? ???????. ???? ??? ?? ????? ?????? ????? ??? ?? ???? ???????? ????????? ???????? ??????? ???? ?????? ??? ????? ???????? ????? ????. ????? ??????? -??? ?????????? ??????? ???? ???? ??? ???????- ????????? ??????? ?? ??? ???? ???????? ??? ??????? ????? ???? ????? ???????? ???? ????? ????? ???? ????? ??? ????? ????? ??? ?????? ????? ???? ??????? ????? ??? ???? ?? ????? ???????? ??????? ???????. ?????? ????? ?? ???? ????? ??? ??????. ?????? ????? ???? ???????? ?????? ??? ?????? ?????? ?? ???????. ???? ??????? ??? ????? ?????? ??????? ??? ????? ????? ??????? ???????? ?? ??????? ?????? ??? ??????? ???????? ??????.
May 25, 2019
This can best be described as a soap opera with a big cast of characters that are encountered time and again, moving backward and forward through time. Tells the story of Cuilan and Wei Bo's relationship.
September 8, 2021
This book could have been written by William Vollmann, with the small triumphs among fallen people. Ok so it’s more fanciful and less sordid, but it’s not so far away from his narratives of the San Francisco streets.
December 29, 2019
I don’t understand it but it somehow makes so much sense.
I love Can Xue’s writing very much.
It is comforting to me.
I love Can Xue’s writing very much.
It is comforting to me.
Read
December 9, 2021mind broke, no more mind
August 4, 2023
Confusing, dense, magical realism, surrealism, mythological stories providing an analogous/symbolic account of modern life in China.
Middle aged characters who long to be prostitutes or to live in prison, many who long for ancestral villages which may or may not exist.
This is a world where it seems nothing can be relied on. Not time, not place, and rarely love.
Everyone seems to know everyone else, privacy is minimal, and some escape to live in caves and underground tunnels.
The character of Xiao Yuan is a favorite of mine. She is the keeper of time yet the time is never correct. Married, middle aged, with maybe two mentions of children, she travels for her job and she and her husband have a variety of lovers. She falls in love with a doctor who practices both Western and traditional plant medicine and eventually leaves her life in the city to become a geography teacher in a village at the foot of a mountain, waiting for her reunion with the doctor. It’s a rich storyline and like the doctor, it lies in both reality and fantasy.
I think the book is too long. Had it been shorter it would have been a more enjoyable read. At some point it merely jumps from one nonsensical scene to another with seemingly no point. Maybe there is a point and I’m missing it, but I found later sections tedious and difficult to read. If the author wanted the reader to feel unmoored and confused then she succeeded.
Middle aged characters who long to be prostitutes or to live in prison, many who long for ancestral villages which may or may not exist.
This is a world where it seems nothing can be relied on. Not time, not place, and rarely love.
Everyone seems to know everyone else, privacy is minimal, and some escape to live in caves and underground tunnels.
The character of Xiao Yuan is a favorite of mine. She is the keeper of time yet the time is never correct. Married, middle aged, with maybe two mentions of children, she travels for her job and she and her husband have a variety of lovers. She falls in love with a doctor who practices both Western and traditional plant medicine and eventually leaves her life in the city to become a geography teacher in a village at the foot of a mountain, waiting for her reunion with the doctor. It’s a rich storyline and like the doctor, it lies in both reality and fantasy.
I think the book is too long. Had it been shorter it would have been a more enjoyable read. At some point it merely jumps from one nonsensical scene to another with seemingly no point. Maybe there is a point and I’m missing it, but I found later sections tedious and difficult to read. If the author wanted the reader to feel unmoored and confused then she succeeded.
May 30, 2024
Can Xue requires a specific area of your brain that accepts the weird and surreal as is without any question and roll with the story as it progresses. After reading this book slowly, it was still unclear as to what is it the writer wants to convey? Was it the hedonism that exists underneath any uptight society with heavily policed populace? Or was it that there was an independence in the little boundary that one sets to themselves and pursue a career because it "was what seemed right in that moment"?
A plethora of characters come and go, and with a suspension of belief, its easier to accept that there is certain kind of magical realism that does exist in this world where there are spirits that haven't had their end rituals to be put to rest, a monkey that seem to be the employee of a newspaper press except for the other (human) employee, a doctor who passes through these worlds, lovers in a cotton factory and a society that seem to be sitting on this precipice of real and fantastical.
The disjointedness in the narration and characters who appear and disappear and random, made the reading slightly boring. It could also be that I am reading this book completely wrong and have missed the metaphor.
It is what it is.
A plethora of characters come and go, and with a suspension of belief, its easier to accept that there is certain kind of magical realism that does exist in this world where there are spirits that haven't had their end rituals to be put to rest, a monkey that seem to be the employee of a newspaper press except for the other (human) employee, a doctor who passes through these worlds, lovers in a cotton factory and a society that seem to be sitting on this precipice of real and fantastical.
The disjointedness in the narration and characters who appear and disappear and random, made the reading slightly boring. It could also be that I am reading this book completely wrong and have missed the metaphor.
It is what it is.
February 22, 2020
A little bit of a bizarre novel with some jumps around, this one requires your full attention to ensure that you’re picking up on every nuance. It’s the sort of book that isn’t designed to follow a rudimentary plot form, and it just follows the characters like a camera around them. The blurb on my copy was somewhat deceptive as I went in anticipating a totalitarian state, but instead I found a study of love in a ‘Gone With The Wind’-esque approach. There’s a lot to think about within it, but it’s the sort of novel that you need to take each sentence as it comes and be thoughtful about it. I can’t pin down entirely why this was such a high rating for me- it’s evocative and I enjoyed the mind games it played with me. The translation is also very well done, and I feel it preserves the original text well. Many other references are woven into the story as well, and you’d have to be an expert on so many facets to be able to place them all. This is just...a lovely piece of literature that keeps the reader constantly thinking, and if you like books that are more cerebral, it’s the one for you.
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