Chinese experimental author Can Xue is like the Lady Gaga of modern Chinese literature.
- Harvard Review

Can Xue is an avant-garde writer who is mentioned sometimes as a candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her stories are described as surreal, nonrational, dream-like; or on the other hand, incoherent, bizarre, impossible to make sense of. Most of her work has not been translated into English but I Live in the Slums, a novella and a collection of short stories, has just been named to the International Booker Prize longlist.

(Can Xue also has a delightful self-puffery streak; a fun game of "Who Said It: Zlatan Ibrahimovic or Can Xue?" could be had. "I can't help but laugh at how perfect I am." - Zlatan. "Can Xue's works are truly exceptional, these kinds of fictions have already surpassed the profundity of philosophy." - Can Xue.)

She has said that both she and her readers are involved in the creation of meaning and interpretation of her works. Readers should work (hard, mind you, she doesn't like to be disappointed by us) to actively create meaning and perform the creative process while reading. With all this in mind, I curiously opened this volume and read the novella that begins the book, titled "Story of the Slums."

This novella features a rat ("I'm not a rat" - Rat) existing on the margins of a deprived community, shuttling from house to house, abused and victimized by violence, with all manner of bizarre settings and actions described with no rational cause and effect. Strange, but not lacking in the ability to have themes and meaning taken from it. What lines I jotted down from the story:

*)What in the world happened? I didn't know. Really didn't know. Everything was baffling.
*)I couldn't say I understood her. I didn't. I seemed to understand every word of that dialect, but when I put them together, I had no idea what she was saying."
*)My tangled relationship with people was probably the main reason I continued staying in the slums.
*)"Will the little thing die?"
"No way. It's a born survivor."
*)People were so fickle! I thought, we probably aren't the same.
*)The slums were my home, and also the hardest place for me to understand. Generally speaking, I didn't make a deliberate effort to understand it. Destiny drove me from one place to another.
*)I endured, I endured.

The themes I get from it are of existing apart, existing as an outsider who doesn't fit in or understand people and things around them, indeed is often baffled by what goes on. Existing as someone who is commonly treated badly. Yet, being a survivor, a tough thing that strives and survives. These themes seem to me to continue being present in the stories that continue the book.

In "Our Human Neighbors" a magpie couple are set apart (and above) the rest of their flock, and as all the other birds disappear to a seeming grim end, they alone survive. "It's impossible to understand what's going on in people's minds, isn't it?" asks our narrator's wife. "How dare you doubt your own species?" thunders our narrator's father. "When I tried to get close to them, they looked as if they were saying there was no need for me to exist in this world," says our narrator.

And it continues. In "The Swamp", whose narrator tries to find a geographic location hidden from him, he's told "What you mean is certainly not what I mean! God, why have I kept talking with you all along? How could you ever understand me? Impossible!" In "The Other Side of the Partition" the story's narrator is excited to jump into the darkness on the other side of a dividing line from all her family and community, despite being caused considerable physical pain the first time, she survives it and goes right back. In "Shadow People", our narrator is the only being who consists of more than a mere shadow, "I couldn't touch him, either... I belonged to the shadow people, and yet I was different from the others." He is told, "You'd better lie on your stomach on the floor and not move. Then no one can see you. If they can't see you, they won't be annoyed."

Despite being set apart and often abused, these outsider characters actually seem to have something that makes them superior to their supposed peers. In "Our Human Neighbors", our magpies have made the best and most cleverly formed nest, by far. In "Shadow People" our narrator decides that, "He had spoken that way because he envied me. I - a shadow with a tail." In "Crow Mountain", it's the narrator's friend who is different, and "The path she'd taken had everything - flowers, birds, cherries, chestnuts. I, on the other hand, was surrounded by darkness."

"I Am A Willow Tree" I interpreted as a description of what it can feel like to be an intellectual - like, say, Can Xue. A willow tree is planted into a garden with many other kinds of plants but does not receive the same nourishment and needs-meeting from the gardener. When rain falls, it does not get the same enjoyment, and from the shallow soil it cannot draw the same sustenance. The other plants all sing the gardener's praises, but not the willow tree, and in turn the gardener always seems to be keeping a suspicious eye on the willow, and at one point chops off part of a root and fills in the hole with dirt.

The gardener can be seen here as the government, the other plants in the garden the masses, the willow is the intellectual - set apart from the masses, different, tolerated by the government but sometimes the recipient of its violence (the chopping away of a root and filling in its space with dirt being particularly ominous). "I had no way out. My way out lay in thinking of a way out. It lay in 'thinking' itself," muses the willow, while its roots reach far down and contact some unknown region, stimulating its growth. It sometimes wonders if it can survive in this garden, but as is the book's general theme, it endures and lives.

"Her Old Home" is an examination of looking backwards at history. A woman left her old home very sick, and recovered health in her new environment. Twenty years later she is invited back by her home's new owner, who has recreated the home's interior exactly, and who even looks like her in pictures at places the woman remembers from her past. She doesn't remember the details of this place perfectly, but there is a warm comfort there and it tries to really draw her in and keep her there. "You don't need to fully understand us. All you need is to feel our love, that's enough," says a memory/person, in a most warm and inviting manner. But beware the dangers of sentimentality, though it may feel good. She was not healthy here, looking backwards toward an idealized history is dangerous and self-deceiving, and in the end she vows to not indulge it anymore.

All in all these are very interesting stories, though I feel it would be best to read them spaced further apart in time. Do not gorge on Can Xue, the brain is not a natural at reading stories like these where rationality and logical patterns are frequently absent, and it can become tiring. Each story given space and time with the reader, however, intrigues. ( )

* I would like to thank NetGalley and the publisher of the opportunity to review this book. *

This is a collection of short stories from avant-garde Chinese writer Can Xue. They are set among the dwellings of the poor underclass, but each has its own air of strangeness, and even magic. Sentient animals and trees, shadow people, ghosts, giants, and disappearing buildings are among the devices Xue uses. There are some very interesting stories here, such as the title story and "Her Old Home", but the collection as a whole is uneven and may be a bit too much of an acquired taste for many. ( )

"I Live in the Slums" by Can Xue is a collection of short stories. The stories were difficult for me to follow as they are quite unconventional.

Can Xue is the pseudonym for Deng Xiaohua. Perhaps "alter ego" is a better word choice than "pseudonym" because Deng Xiaohua speaks about Can Xue in third person. She is known widely as an avant-garde writer and many of her works can be found in translation online.

Many writers of her generation - her family was persecuted throughout the Cultural Revolution - have written "scar literature" or fantastical, almost magical-realist fiction. Can Xue seems to take the magical-realism a bit farther by giving voice to animals and plants. While I love that idea, I found it very difficult to wade through these stories. There is very little sense of time or place, so readers need to infer quite a bit in order to develop the stories.

There is a lot of absurdity in the stories, but there seems to be no particular reason for confusing the reader. In interviews, Can Xue has admonished her critics for not being creative enough to understand her work, and I find that a bit off-putting.

The stories are translated by Karen Gernant and Zeping Chen. I suppose the translations are fine, but these stories just didn't flow at all for me. I had trouble even with individual paragraphs and sentences. ( )

Booker International 2021 Longlist. My 8th read of 13 from the longlist.

This book consists of unusual short stories. Some are weird and almost nonsensical (I Live in the Slums). Others don't really go anywhere, and there is no resolution (Venus). A lot of them are based in nature and have flora/fauna narrators, rather than human. My favorites were all toward the end of the book, my favorite two being Her Old Home and I Am a Willow Tree.

I don't know that I would consider these stories unique in any way other than often being confusing. I don't know why this made it onto the longlist, but the longlist and shortlist are both so strange and disappointing this year this is actually one I have enjoyed more. ( )