Vertical Motion

by Can Xue, Karen Gernant (Translator), Chen Zeping (Translator)

Two young girls sneak onto the grounds of a hospital, where they find a disturbing moment of silence in a rose garden. A couple grows a plant that blooms underground, invisibly, to their long-time neighbor's consternation. A cat worries about its sleepwalking owner, who receives a mysterious visitor while he's asleep. After a ten-year absence, a young man visits his uncle, on the twenty-fourth floor of a high-rise that is floating in the air, while his ugly cousin hesitates on the stairs . . .

Can Xue is a master of the dreamscape, crafting stories that inhabit the space where fantasy and reality, time and timelessness, the quotidian and the extraordinary, meet. The stories in this striking and lyrical new collection-- populated by old married couples, children, cats, and nosy neighbors, the entire menagerie of the everyday-- reaffirm Can Xue's reputation as one of the most innovative Chinese writers in a generation.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, China, Chinese Literature, Asian Literature, 21st Century, Asia

186 pages, Paperback

First published September 13, 2011

About the author

残雪

Can Xue (Chinese: 残雪; pinyin: Cán Xuĕ), 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)

Reviews

[Henk · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reading Can Xue is like wading into a Dali painting, where cause and effect, perspective, time and normal rationality is left behind. In these 13 stories nature has not just a soul, but animals can often speak as well, while the border between life and death feel permeable
This was a question that normally would be raised, but I had already abandoned normal logic

Impressed with the translators of Vertical Motion, even in English I probably only knew 30% to 70% of the time what was going on, and I can’t imagine how reading the Chinese original would be.

Animals, ancestors, grandfathers, hospitals, rain that is invisible to others and soil form recurring themes and I would say the stories are thoroughly surreal, whatever Can Xue herself says.

Full comprehension is not the goal and also feels unachievable.
In the format of a short story bundle this fortunately bothered me less than in Love in the New Millennium, and sometimes the descriptions are so innovative that I could even say I enjoyed the bundle.

Short summaries per story below.

1 Vertical Motion
It was obvious that one could become accustomed to everything
We start from the perspective of decreasing termites under a desert, asexual and just eating and remembering their community former members, their ancestors.

2 Red Leaves
Perhaps once body is most vibrant when one’s life reaches it’s final stage
A sick man on a ward is contemplating the suicide of a recently recovered accountant from cancer room mate.
Meanwhile people turn into catmen around him. It is not explained what this entails.
A lost student appears, who was supposed dead after jumping into icy water with his heart literally bared. Also a wheelchair is pushed around in rounds while the narrator his family and friends are around, but all no longer remembered by him.

This isn’t like my body would be my least concern, this isn't my world is something one would expect Can Xue characters to utter rather.

3 Night Visitor
The debt is due now
A father opens a years long neglected side door with the help of a daughter, leading to rumours and an upset family balance.

4 An affectionate companion’s jottings
Told from the perspective of a cat.
A black man disrupts the relationship between her and her sleepwalking, suicidal owner who works as a journalist.

5 A village in the big city
But I don’t think he is ugly.
That is because you didn’t get a good look at him.
Brutal.

An apparently ageless uncle who lived 24 story high is visited by a nephew that feels and sees his face changing. The nephew who has Puppy as (nick?)name is renamed to hedgehog, his deceased brother.
Stolen playing cards, memories lost and an uncanny relationship between an apartment and a lake outside.
Someone’s nephew being so ugly that he doesn’t want to be seen.
Stairs just disappear and martial arts form a fascination that doesn’t come back later. And there is invisible rain that does make characters soaked.

6 Elena
A weird night time visitor has an unusual affinity with animals.
Sleepwalking and mysterious rain recurs again.
Olfactory observations form the main part of this story, and strange stones that seem alive feature.

7 Moonlight Dance
A lion is chasing a zebra, observed by our narrator who tills the earth to restore nature.
If the narrator is an animal I have no idea which one.
Earthworms being depressed.
Corpses of moonlight, very poetic name for fireflies.
Arguments with fish.

8 The Roses at the Hospital
A rose garden in a hospital is not as fun as imagined, with dead kids forming a grim background

9 Cotton Candy
A imaginary cotton candy seller (her goods seem imaginary, but who says that she herself isn't?) is assaulted by two kids. Honey jars of memory overflow.

10 The brilliant purple china rose
A mysterious plant, completely underground, is planted by a couple. It can only grow when it is forgotten.
It finds its home in a house were everything is covered by cloth, only removed when things are used.

11 Rain scape
Fantasy is still the way we do things best
A granite walled building, in which time progresses differently to the outside, intrigues a woman. She is kept at a distance by ghosts that change their appearances and rain falling on a bright day.

12 Never at peace
A student visit his former master, who is both more lucid and decrepit than expected

13 Papercuts
She felt that this peaceful phenomenon was nothing but an illusion
A giant owl, a daughter making mysterious black rings (mainly sold to blind people?) and losing half of her face and an infatuation of the past coming back, resulting in swamp sex. Also her husband seems to be changing, flickering.
There is also a floating wildfire, executions and is time and cause and effect being inverted near the end of this story?

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is my first foray into the work of Can Xue (real name Deng XiaoHua). She grew up in the Cultural Revolution and did not have a high school education and so is largely self-taught. Her adopted name is a play on words because it means the dirty snow which cannot melt and also the pure snow on top of the mountain.
The stories have familiar settings in China but they are by no means simple. They are often surreal and disturbing, everyday settings and relationships are subverted. Words like magic realism and experimentalism have been thrown around. The themes are old ones, but addressed in new ways with the unusual, a disappearing staircase, flowers that grow underground and a very large and sinister owl. Xue says that her work is soul literature:
“I do not tell plane stories; I tell stereoscopic stories. …. when we are reading, we should regard a work as a medium that can start the a priori ability—an ability for prior direct-viewing in our soul. We use the work to stimulate that ability, and let the structure of time and space in our heart appear. Then we use the direct-viewing to watch the beautiful scenery in the work that belongs to oneself at last.”
There are themes, the subterranean is one, as is moving away from the city, exploration of secret spaces and there are often animals playing a significant role. The characters often are struggling with life and with the situations they find themselves in;
“The person was on the stairs, which is to say he was in midair. Judging by his voice, he must be hanging in midair. I couldn’t bear to shout again, because I was afraid he would fall. Maybe the one facing danger wasn’t he, but I. Was he saying that I was in danger? I didn’t dare shout again. This was Uncle Lou’s home. Eventually he would have to return. Perhaps he had simply gone downstairs to buy groceries. It was a nice day. The sun was out, so it was a little hot in the room. So what? I shouldn’t start making a fuss because of this. When I recalled that someone outside was hanging in midair, I started sweating even more profusely. My clothes stuck to my body; this was hard to endure.”
The familiar slides into unfamiliarity. There is enough information to set the imagination going, but interpretation is very much up to the reader. This is from Red Leaves:
“After finishing the cigarette, Gu thanked the worker and stood up, intending to continue up the stairs, when he suddenly heard the worker beside him make a cat sound. It was very harsh. But when he glanced at him, he looked as if nothing had happened. No one else was here. If he hadn't made the sound, who had? Gu changed his mind; he wanted to see if this person would do anything else.

He waited awhile longer, but the worker didn't do anything, he just put his cigarette butt in his pocket, rose, and went back to the water cart. He pushed the cart into the ward. Gu subconsciously put his hand into his own pocket, took out the cigarette butt, and looked at it, but he saw nothing unusual. In a trance, he twisted and crushed the butt. He saw an insect with a shell moving around in the tobacco shreds. The lower half of its body had been charred, but it still didn't seem to want to die. Nauseated, Gu threw the butt on the floor and, without looking back, climbed to the eighth floor.”
The usual precis and description of the stories would be superfluous; these stories need to be read.

[Korcan Derinsu · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5/5

Yazarla ilk tanışmam. Birbirinden tuhaf, herhangi bir kalıba sığdırmanın kolay olmadığı öyküler var bu derlemede. Bazılarını sevdim (ki sevmek doğru kelime değil aslında, yazarın kendine has bakışını hissedebildim diyeyim) bazılarıyla da hiç bağ kuramadım ama yazarın çirkinliği gösterme şeklini (bu tanımı da derlemenin çevirmeni Aslı Solakoğlu’nun videosundan öğrendim) takdir ettim. Can Xue’nun her sene neden Nobel adayı olduğunu da az çok anladığımı düşünüyorum. Çin’den çıkıp başka bir anlatımın peşine düşmesi, bunu da içerikle örtüştürmesi hayli ilgi çekici dahası çok biricik. Edebi zevk kısmı konusunda biraz mesafe var ama biraz kafamda demlensin, belki o da değişir.

[Inderjit Sanghera · Rating 4 out of 5]

Add title
'Vertical Motion' by Can Xue
The reader of 'Vertical Motion' may reflect, somewhat hopelessly, that they feel lost amidst Xue's surreal stories and eerie imagery, that they are struggling to find meaning in Xue's weird, wonderful and whimsical short stories which appear to have no connection. Yet if the reader instead ensconces themselves in Xue's world, appreciates her surreal aesthetic vision and realises the meaning of Xue's stories are nothing less than the joys of imagining and storytelling, then they will come to appreciate the brilliance of the stories in 'Vertical Motion'.

There are a few highlights amidst the barely connected collection of stories which form part of 'Vertical Motions', one of which being the observations of a cat on her lachrymose owner, who appears, much to the cat's bewilderment, stuck in a state of perpetual ennui which is only punctuated by the occasional appears of a sinister visitor. 'The Roses at the Hospital' is a beautiful and poetic depiction of a somewhat magical rose garden in a hospital garden and 'Never at Peace' depicts the Machiavellian machinations of a old man in his final days.

What all of the stories have in common in Xue's ability to craft unique worlds, worlds which in many ways our barely recognisable when compared to our own, but yet contain a familiar panoply of human emotions, from hatred and pain, to joy and laughter. Xue has created worlds which are uniquely hers.

[J.M. Hushour · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fast to become one of my favorite living authors, Can Xue (dirty snow) is perhaps one of our world's best expressors and exemplars of that kind of grim, but lovely-in-a-foreboding, angle of our nature. In this collection, it's a vertical axis of descent and ascent that binds the stories together, with images of inherence, inverted inversion, and a strange plastic organicity centered on growth inward and outward all at once that re-defines itself constantly. Can Xue says that she writes emotions and feelings and this is very clear. With a singular momentum, she dances along the claw-tips of ferocious existence. She writes about those places where the claws dig in.
In other words, read it or just be plain damn dumb.

[Amari · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I finished the first story, I went directly back to the beginning and started it again. It didn't take long to realize that I was in the presence of greatness.

The surrealism present to some degree in each of the stories began to wear on me somewhat after a while and I lost my drive to try to figure out what was lying underneath. However, as I read, I did start to feel more attuned to the absurd in daily life. This was pleasant, comfortable and weird. It's very positive when a book of short stories affects the way I interpret what is happening around me.

I was also really pleased with the translation by a team of two who have published ten books together. Impressive!

[Chad Post · Rating 4 out of 5]

DISCLAIMER: I am the publisher of the book and thus spent approximately two years reading and editing and working on it. So take my review with a grain of salt, or the understanding that I am deeply invested in this text and know it quite well. Also, I would really appreciate it if you would purchase this book, since it would benefit Open Letter directly.

[Zeynep T.]

DNF (didnotfinish). 54 sayfa okudum. İlk üç hikayeye tekabül ediyor. Okuduğum yere kadar puanım 1 olur. Yazarın hayatını bilirseniz metinler biraz anlam kazanıyor sanki ama Can Xue avangartlığı aşıp saçma rüyaların not alındığı günlük gibi bir iş koymuş ortaya. Anlatım dili ya da hikayelerin hiçbiri herhangi bir duygu, hayranlık, üzerine düşünmeye değer bir tema uyandırmadı bende. Daha önce İngilizce okumaya çalışıp yarım bırakmıştım, Türkçesi de aynı sonucu verdi. Yazar Nobel edebiyat ödülünün adaylarından. Çevirmen Aslı Solakoğlu'nun emeğine sağlık.

[Meg · Rating 4 out of 5]

Can Xue has an interesting approach. She has a particular effect she wants to create with each story, and sets out to accomplish this, without worrying herself over whether her readers have managed to hold on for the course of the story or whether, along they way, they fell out of the cart and are sprawled by the roadside in a daze. She unapologetically deploys dream logic, unexpected viewpoints, strange imagery and utterances. Nothing is ever explained or resolved; hypotheses remain unconfirmed, probable connections unproved.

And yet, Can Xue does have the ability to elicit emotional response: “An Affectionate Companion’s Jottings” (情侣手记) wounded me deeply, more than anything I’ve read in awhile, though I am probably unusually susceptible due to the subject matter. Still I felt some connection to the characters’ mindsets and their strange worlds in "Night Visitor" (夜访); "The Roses at the Hospital" (医院里的玫瑰花); and "Rainscape" (雨景). Don’t think I’ll ever forget, either, the experience of reading two stories narrated by an insect working the earth, as in “Vertical Motion" (垂直运动) and “Moonlight Dance" (月光之舞). I seem to prefer Can Xue when she writes from the point of view of a nonhuman; isn’t afraid to splash the story with lurid nightmare imagery; and hints at a narrator’s sinister side or past guilts. I think she’d write some amazing horror but she doesn’t quite skew that way, and besides, like I said earlier, she has her own artistic vision and doesn’t care what her readers would like.

In Chinese, Can Xue writes clear and clean prose--perhaps a necessity if the meaning and trajectory of the stories themselves are often so obscure. It makes for especially accessible reading for me, so I think I will try to read another book by her in the future.

I found some of the translation choices regrettable: occasional sentences imposed with an awkward phrasing nonexistent in the original. But on the whole, the translation is quite solid and better than what I’ve come to expect of Chinese to English translation. Given the surreality and simplicity of the prose, if only Murakami's translator knew Chinese, they would be her ideal translator.

[Alta]

I had read Five Spice Street—one of the most original novels I’ve ever come across—by Can Xue, so I knew what to expect when I opened Vertical Motion. The latter is a rather eclectic collection, from the title story, written in a dry, impersonal tone, in the voice of a “little critter” that lives deep under the earth, to more emotionally-colored stories, such as “Cotton Candy,” in which a child, fascinated with a cotton-candy machine, daydreams about being a vendor.

This collection, although less captivating than Five Spice Street, confirmed my impression that Can Xue is one of the most interesting contemporary world writers. Several months later, the power of her novel is undiminished: I am still thinking about it, in spite of a less-than-average translation (which makes it all the more impressive). Surprisingly, Vertical Motion, which has been translated by the same team, is quite a good translation. I am not sure how to explain this: a better editor, more revisions, or simply the fact that the translators are now more experienced?

[K.samayavel · Rating 5 out of 5]

All surrealistic stories are excellent. She keep us to live in the unusual circumstances in her stories. Her refined imagination go beyond the human world and catches the struggling people in unknown systems. Right from the locations of the stories to their characters and happenings everything is surreal. We brought a Special issue on Can Xue. Reading and understading are tough and the matured readers only can appreciate the Stories. For the fans of Borges, here is a one more Borges who handles totally surreal Stories.

[Miglė · Rating 4 out of 5]

Can Xue was my great discovery of 2021 - I was reading this collection of short stories while being ill with covid, which produced a strange, but not unpleasant sensation, dream worlds of the author reflecting in the fever of corona:) I enjoyed it greatly, although I have to say her writing was more engaging and unraveled nicer in the full length novel Frontier

[Daniel · Rating 2 out of 5]

Finally: I can put this book away and move on to other short fiction.

I am not sure what to say about this anthology. I was looking forward to reading some weird stories from a Chinese writer, and I was happy to include a new female writer in my repertoire. As it turns out, these stories are so weird as to be nonsensical at times. I never felt attached to a character or an idea, and I felt only a small stirring of emotions in a few stories.

The old adage applies here: this was not my cup of tea. I'm glad I drank it down, though, if only for the exposure to something different.

[Gregory Duke · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5

My skull is a rusted iron pan with a flat bottom and a crank that makes the honey jars of my memory pop open, scaring and incapacitating me, a rusted iron pan in which sugar is churned into cotton candy, a cotton candy like silk (or cotton), and Can Xue is the (imaginary? ghastly?) woman with an entrepreneurial spirit in control of that very cotton candy machine who may or may not be imaginary (a ghost?).

[Vetle · Rating 3 out of 5]

Det er noe spesielt med denne novellesamlingen. Historiene har en helt unik atmosfære og mange av karakterene har en dybde jeg ikke ville forventet fra et kortformat som noveller.

Dessverre traff den ikke helt akkurat nå. Jeg gikk blindt inn i en bok uten å være forberedt på å skulle «tenke» så mye som boken forutsetter. Hadde det vært en roman ville det ikke vært et stort problem, men nå i sommerferien orker jeg ikke helt å reflektere over alle mangfoldet av historier i denne samlingen. Jeg utelukker ikke at jeg prøver på nytt en gang, og er ellers veldig interessert i å lese mer av forfatteren.

[Chrétien Breukers · Rating 4 out of 5]

Schitterende verhalen. Niet zozeer surrealistisch of experimenteel, maar ‘diep’, in de minst erge betekenis van het woord. Can Xue schrijft over de wereld onder en naast en boven ‘de’ wereld.

[Jim Elkins · Rating 1 out of 5]

Can Xue may be China's "one possibility" of a Nobel (a terribly outdated thing Susan Sontag said, quoted on the cover -- now it has the unfortunate resonance of China's rejection of the Nobel as a tool of Western politics) but there is no evidence for it in this book. These stories are sometimes astonishingly inventive, in a continuous, unedited, stream of consciousness way, but they are so loosely written that I continually lose faith in her control of the sense, affect, direction, purpose, or meaning of the text.[return][return]A story called "An Affectionate Companion's Jottings," written from the point of view of a cat, is an adequate example. It's quite inventive and diverting to read about the cat's impressions of its depressed and occasionally suicidal owner. But Can Xue seems to think that surrealist and illogical details, which are sprinkled throughout her stories, are automatically generators of expressive sense. In this case, a "black man" visits the cat's owner, and stays some time without speaking. Aside from the unfortunate choice of a "black man" (any visitor would have done as well, and Western readers can't be expected to join in the author's simple equation of blackness with strangeness), the problem is that the visits are never explained. The rest of the story is more realistic; that detail is from another kind of writing, a mildly surrealist or magic-realist tradition. Can Xue apparently doesn't notice that the closure of the story of the cat and its owner is at odds with the openness of the unexplained visits of the "black man," and that that dissonance will appear to readers as an author's problem, not an author's gift.[return][return]I think Can Xue is at her best when she concentrates on either surrealism or realism, because she has no clear sense of how they mix. I like "Never at Peace," a story of an old man who behaves unaccountably. It is entirely in a realist vein. I also like "Vertical Motion," a crazily inventive story about a creature that lives in the soil. But the mixtures are all rum. "The Brilliant Purple China Rose" mingles a well-imagined relationship between a couple with a magical rose that blooms upside down; "The Roses at the Hospital" has more fantastical roses (this time with fetuses at their roots). The latter story seems especially carelessly composed: I see no evidence she went back and rethought anything. Each invention, it seems, was put to paper as it occurred to her. Tighter writing is what she needs.

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

I belong to the moonlight; the lion belongs to the darkness. The strange thing is that the lion is always walking back and forth, bathing in the moonlight in the wasteland, and I am generally tilling the humus soil with the earthworms. I only till, never harvest. Sometimes, I work my way out of the ground to stand beside the shrubs and wait. When a bat stops to rest, I jump onto her back. Then, carrying me, she flies to the ancient cave. I don't want to describe my experience in the dark cave: it's a place eerier than hell. Even in the daylight, every now and then the tragic cry of slaughter comes from the cave. I wait in the cave until nightfall, when my friend carries me on her back and flies toward the forest. When she stops on a pine tree, I leap to its highest branch. From there, I look out: the wasteland undulates in my field of vision, and the lion is anxiously looking for food. His objective is the zebra on the opposite shore of the stream; my objective is the lion. But why does he never attack? Does he like the high he gets from being dominant?

- Moonlight Dance

Thus begins a typically esoteric tale from this collection - straight in with the weirdness, no concession to introducing an unusual perspective, everything rife with symbolism, charged with meaning, difficult to decode but alluring and inventive. I think Can Xue will yield further treasure if I keep exploring...

[Michael Kent · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing book, but don't expect to walk away feeling like you understood much if any of it.

[birdbassador · Rating 5 out of 5]

i liked how after each story i grew increasingly convinced of the fact of my own mortality.

[Peyton · Rating 4 out of 5]

"We can't imagine what the growing environment underground is like. We can only infer what it is."

[michal k-c · Rating 3 out of 5]

Was really quite moved by the title story — it’s strange in a way you don’t encounter very often. Otherwise this yielded mostly diminishing returns for me, with a couple notable exceptions. Looking forward to reading more Can Xue though, have a few more queued up on my desk.

[Alex · Rating 4 out of 5]

possibly the weirdest thing i've ever read

[Michael]

There is nothing western, let alone Romantic, about the work of Can Xue, but Vertical Motion is a book stricken with what William Wordsworth might have called "the weary weight of all this unintelligible world." This collection of stories is a kind of black hole. Any stable entity we might call "meaning" fails to escape its event horizon. It collects (mostly) early stories from her most aggressively unsettling phase, the same period that produced Five Spice Street. In all of them, we get some combination of the following characteristics:

1. Narratives, usually but not always first-person, are very precise and specific, and yet the totality of these details is intentionally aporetic: facts accrue to no stable, total order. Instead,

2. Facts seem sometimes to mock the narrators, and always to mock the reader, who is grasping for meaning, who, unless endowed with extraordinary negative capability, wants the text to make sense.

3. Knowing that this is what the reader seeks, Can Xue flirts relentlessly with allegory. One feels that she is always on the verge of offering up some kind of social or political critique. But,

4. She's fucking with you. The failure of allegory, the failure of parts to make up a coherent whole, is her central trick. Her interest is in exploring how unintelligibility plays out across various frames and contexts, and in all of these, she tempts the reader to believe they are standing on solid ground, only to disabuse them with a mixture of effects that run the gamut from sly humor to something I can only describe as a kind of horror rooted in the uncanny. Only what's uncanny is precisely what is to-hand, the stuff of daily life, everyday relationships among family members and acquaintances, etc.

5. This makes her sound like a one-trick pony. There is a sense in which this might be true, but it is the same sense in which Kafka or Borges is a one-trick pony. They have a distinctive work they do; Can Xue does too. But why would we want to read something that mocks our efforts to understand, that communicates in order not to communicate?

6. This is where the Chinese-ness of Can Xue becomes vitally important. Can Xue's great antecedent, the founder of modern Chinese fiction, Lu Xun, wrote in a similar vein, with a lucid style, a light touch, but the most devastating irony. But Lu Xun, initially writing in the wake of the Republic and May Fourth movement and looking backward to the chaos of, e.g., the Taiping rebellion, is very clearly engaged in a multi-pronged social-critical project. On the one hand, he targets the ossified Confucian system inherited from the Qing, with its endless examinations and pedantry and its tendency to aggravate the distance between the privileged and the poor. Yet while the May Fourth movement and others looked for a modernization, an "enlightenment," that would enfranchise rural folk, those who articulated such utopian goals often failed to understand the complexity of rural peasant life, or the ways communities work, and they also, in being so foolish as to lionize any particular group of humans en bloc, failed to reckon with the human failings of those who would supposedly benefit from the annihilation of the old Confucian order. Lu Xun was a writer whose work encompassed in subtle and devastating ways exactly how compromised matters were on all fronts; he quite literally abandoned formal medical training to become the literary "doctor" of China's ills, as he himself put it, and his patients came from all walks of life and levels of the social order. But after the fascist GMD regime of Chiang Kaishek and the authoritarian socialism of Mao Zedong led to the deaths of millions, to unspeakable persecutions, to failed utopian hopes and stunning betrayals of the ideals of earlier figures like Sun Yatsen, sweeping up in their malignity people who included relations of Deng Xiaohua (that is, Can Xue), Lu Xun's delicate and problematized but nonetheless real sense that progress was possible, that sense could provisionally be made, that cultural doctors could, by writing, hope to treat the nation's psychic wounds, seems to have become untenable. Thus, the false pretense of allegory and the lure of intelligibility do, in fact, disclose some kind of sociopolitical content. But that content no longer offers access to utopian visions, however qualified, of what writing can do. This is why Can Xue is a black hole. She writes as though ideology has so thoroughly engulfed the modern subject that the subject can no longer recognize or locate itself within it, or as its subject, with the result that, at every stratum of the sociopolitical world, human minds are confronted with conditions of radical unknowing.

7. Is any of this really so far from what happens to the individual in a "post-truth" society governed by an authoritarian monster? Don't we too often find ourselves in a state of aporetic shock when we confront people we thought we knew, understood, even loved, and try to make sense of the fact that they have become radically other, and that the constellation of forces that have done this to them have made the world itself, or pieces of it, seem entirely alien? Isn't this itself the black hole whose event horizon we are trying to escape, but fear we cannot?

8. But Can Xue's subject matter in these stories is not authoritarianism per se. It is about the worlds we live in; it is localized, atomized. And it lacks the moorings even a Kafka might provide. Kafka's worlds, however unheimlich, do ultimately place one Before the Law; they do obey a logic that laughingly annihilates the subject; there are answers, but anyone named K. can't seem to reach them, and pays an ontological price for failing. Can Xue is somehow more dreadful in suggesting that there is no law to recognize, even if only as it crushes us; there is, instead, only a state of radical disconnection within relations of inexplicable unfamiliarity that manifest themselves in ways that are amusing but render the self and the worlds it tries to inhabit unexpectedly hostile, chary of transcendence of any kind (even the destructive, Kafkaesque kind), and more isolated in human company than alone. She is as uncanny as Kafka, but she is more unmoored. That is her homegrown critique of the tradition that stems from Lu Xun, and it is her hallmark. However different stylistically, it perhaps has another analogue in the omnipresent paranoia of Pynchon, the sense that a vast congeries of systems is working at unfathomable scale to hem in and discombobulate our little lives and our hopes of coherence. And so we get a kind of distinctively Chinese gnosis-solvent.

Can Xue is, and belongs, in the discussion for the Nobel Prize this year. That puts her, in my opinion, on a short list with some very heavy hitters, a list that also, if there is any justice on earth, includes names like these: Mircea Cărtărescu, António Lobo Antunes, the aforementioned Thomas Pynchon, William T. Vollmann, perhaps Alexis Wright. She has not only Kafka but even, in the most bizarre way, Dante Alighieri as western peers. (The titular story, "Vertical Motion," seems to trope the Paradiso, but its animal narrator is sightless, and there is ultimately no directionality.) Those are some pretty awesome peers to have. But I think the best I can do with her is to say that she is to Lu Xun as Vladimir Sorokin is to Andrey Platonov. If you know, you know.

Why not five stars? Because it takes a particular kind of masochism to love, rather than admire or just plain endure, the inevitable withholding of meaning, closure, sense, intelligibility. Can Xue lays a heavy burden on the reader. But I think about this collection a lot, and I will return to her soon enough. She's predictable in some deep sense, and yet she is endlessly fascinating. That's a neat trick. It is her σφραγίς.

[Fen · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's been a while since I read such a unique collection of short stories. I don't know how Can Xue does it, but she creates an uncanny and gripping atmosphere in all her stories, which are bizarre and plotless. Xue zeroes in on idiosyncratic characters (some are not even human) and avant-garde imagery, blending them together to create art. Most of these stories I cannot quite explain how they work; I barely understand what happened. What's remarkable is that I don't care! Xue's writing isn't about a coherent plot, but about the journey through the dreamscapes she creates. And although I would not call these stories character-driven (most of them maintain a certain detachment), the characters presented here are given enough depth and development to feel three-dimensional.

This is my favorite kind of literature, the sort that abandons all convention and instead attempts to capture that which is, on the surface, impossible to describe with words. It is a pleasure to read and also inspirational to me as a writer.

[Amelia · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is so weird. It is beautifully written but there's no sense to it at all. It's like someone was on LSD but was very good with words and wrote beautiful nonsense. Of course, short stories are meant to stand alone and these do. Some are from the perspective of a critter (the best, I think), some from the perspective of a child, others from the perspective of an adult. The setting are all sorts, including underground, in the countryside, in a big city, etc. But, so many of the stories have no... story. They just feel like random thoughts. Beautiful thoughts but nonsensical.

[Didier Vanoverbeke · Rating 4 out of 5]

aA haunting, macabre collection of tales that often left me uncomfortably hooked. A few stories feel like the underground counterparts to Cosmicomics, pretty much every other entry is filed to the brim with decrepitude, eroded lines of communication, warped perceptions, and broken boundaries. Thoroughly enjoyable, if you ask me.

[Tony Gaxiola · Rating 2 out of 5]

I guess that I do not have a deep enough understanding of Chinese Culture to fully appreciate this book.

[Eadweard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Original and dream-like short stories, I enjoyed them very much.

[Aaron · Rating 2 out of 5]

These short stories read like a stranger's no-context dream journal.