Duo Duo's Snow Plain

Duo Duo (b. 1951), one of the most important contemporary Chinese poets, is from a generation that witnessed the persecution of its parents—intellectuals qualified as “degenerate bourgeois” by the communists—and came of age during Mao’s so-called “Cultural Revolution,” when these intellectuals and bourgeois were exiled to the countryside to do manual labor. After the crush of Tiananmen Square in 1989 Duo Duo lived in Europe for fifteen years, and then returned to China. These two very different experiences are, obviously, present in his writings. A newly released translation from Zephyr Press (trans. by John Crespi), Snow Plain, includes translations of six short stories written in the 1980s and 90s, some set in China, some in Britain and Canada. The stories set in China are far better, as they exude a certain strangeness the other stories don’t have. “Sumo” and “The Day I Got to Xi’An” are among the strangest stories I’ve ever read. It’s hard to find an equivalent in Western literature, as their strangeness is different than, say, Kafka’s. “Sumo” is vaguely reminiscent of Robbe-Grillet’s “Last Year in Marienbad”—except much better. The only writer with a comparable style is another contemporary Chinese author, Gao Xingjian (winner of the Nobel Prize). Snow Plain Selected Stories by Duo Duo
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Published on February 17, 2011 22:20 Tags: chinese, communism, exile, fiction, short-stories
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Notes on Books

Alta Ifland
Book reviews and occasional notes and thoughts on world literature and writers by an American writer of Eastern European origin.
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