Vertical Motion
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"There's a new world master among us, and her name is Can Xue."—Robert Coover
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.
Can Xue is a pseudonym meaning "dirty snow, leftover snow." She learned English on her own and has written books on Borges, Shakespeare, and Dante. Her publications in English include, The Embroidered Shoes, Five Spice Street, and Blue Light in the Sky, among others.
Karen Gernant is a professor emerita of Chinese history at Southern Oregon University. She translates in collaboration with Chen Zeping.
Chen Zeping is a professor of Chinese linguistics at Fujian Teachers' University, and has collaborated with Karen Gernant on more than ten translations.
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The animals and plants that figure in Xue's latest are used not only as metaphor but also as omens and characters. "What led to this? Milk. That's right milk," says the cat who narrates "An Affectionate Companion's Jottings." The flowers of "The Roses at the Hospital" shelter babies as though invested with a secret power. Xue's Kafkaesque world is grounded in reality but infused with an eerie omniscient feeling. In the affecting title story, an unnamed "critter" lives "in the black earth beneath the desert." As hard as it digs, it never reaches the surface. Elsewhere, cockroaches, rats, and other creatures are objects of wonder and/or narrative catalysts. Xue (Five Spice Street) is a natural storyteller; eight of her 13 stories have first-person narrators who share a confidence or a unique observation that draws the reader in. And, like Kafka, Xue often withholds information to pique interest. The traditional stories fare less well; Xue's direct prose lacks psychological complexity and endings don't live up to foreshadowed promises. But at her best, Xue captures the wonder of the natural world and then, with great assurance, steps beyond into something entirely.
