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.

[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.

[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

[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.

[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?).

[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

[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.

[Literary Review The · Rating 5 out of 5]

By Drew Calvert

For The Literary Review
Volume 54 "The Rat's Nest"

The books and films that have come out of China this past quarter century suggest a
country in profound disorder. Some have highlighted the plight of migrant workers
(the world’s largest “floating population”); others have satirized the nouveau riche. One
or two have cast its polluted cities as twenty-first century dystopias. For Chinese artists
of all kinds, absurdity reigns supreme. In the opening scene of a documentary by filmmaker Huang Weikai, a young, shirtless, unhinged-looking man drifts aimlessly across
a busy five-lane highway, the symbol of human obliviousness in the face of industrialization. In Still Life, a film by Jia Zhangke, slow-panning shots of the Yangtze River (as it
approaches the infamous Three Gorges Dam) communicate more fundamental absurdities: the overwhelming power of a river, and the equally overwhelming consequences
of the government’s modernization plan. In Brothers, a novel by Yu Hua, the excesses
of the ruling class are grotesquely absurd when compared to society’s down-and-outs.
The global fascination with modern China has much to do with its perceived disorder:
it has undergone displacement on an epic scale, its architecture is both grandiose and
frail, and its astonishing economic growth might soon be out of control. Its society is
changing fast enough to threaten the very ability of people to make sense of their lives.
What distinguishes Can Xue, a writer who came to prominence in the 1980s, is
that her stories deal with disorders of a radically interior kind. Her new collection,
Vertical Motion—one of several now that have been translated into English—is populated with characters both fascinating and hellish: a bulbous-eyed cotton-candy vendor, a psychologically astute cat trapped inside a refrigerator, an excessively violent
owl, a pair of ghosts in gaudy wigs. They can be frightening (the owl’s eyes flash with
“murderous green light” and hovers, like death or ancient grievances, within swooping distance of a town), and ridiculous (the ghosts were “nothing but locksmiths or
pharmacists when they were alive”). But to say that the stories are about these characters is not particularly useful, because each of them represents something more
profoundly disorienting. They are investigations into the more infernal spheres of
human life: the pathologies that curdle inside families, the subtle forms of cruelty
that can destroy a complacent spirit, and the sadness of certain lies, such as those the
elderly tell to cover the embarrassment of their decay.
Can Xue is often associated with a group of avant garde novelists who emerged
in the 1980s—a group that includes better-known authors such as Yu Hua, Mo Yan,
and Su Tong (who, along with Wang Anyi, was shortlisted for this year’s Man Booker
International Prize). The work of these writers, who came of age during the Cultural
Revolution, is indelibly marked by historical trauma. Trauma is a distinct quality of
contemporary Chinese literature: whereas American writers of comparable age may
recall a certain amount of cultural and political turbulence during the 1960s, sit-ins
and Flower Power can seem rather benign when set against the harrowing details of
the anti-Rightist campaigns that were afflicting Maoist China. Not every Chinese
story alludes to the Cultural Revolution, but it might help to explain several shocking
but understated passages in the book, such as this one from “Red Leaves”:

He told him there’d been a hole in his chest since birth and his heart protruded
from that hole. He could see his own heart beating. Ordinarily, he covered the
hole with gauze and then taped it in place. He confided to Gu that he didn’t feel
this disfigurement was a major handicap, and he added innocently, “Look, don’t I
get along well?”

Among her subversive peers, Can Xue is the most stubborn about holding true to an
artistic vision that may not please her readers. (She is also one of the few women to be
associated with a confrontational literary movement consisting mainly of men.) She
uses a pen name that perhaps offers a clue to her aesthetics (“Can Xue” means either
“dirty snow” or “leftover snow”; her real name is Deng Xiaohua), and she seems to
consciously set herself apart from her colleagues by referring to their work in interviews as “safe.” (I take her to mean that these authors write from a relatively comfortable depth of consciousness, not that they write to please the censors.) While others
have written frankly—and occasionally with satiric delight—about China’s historical
violence and contemporary decadence, Can Xue’s concerns as an artist seem at once deeper and more obscure. She is less easily packaged as a “dissident” author who
thumbs her nose at the authorities, unless those authorities are traditional narrative
and oppressively dull metaphors.
Instead of grandiose settings or elaborate plot devices, Can Xue invites readers
into her psychic netherworld through her narrators’ bizarrely suggestive pronouncements. In “Vertical Motion,” the title story about a civilization of insect-like creatures
living below the earth’s surface, the narrator explains: “I never hallucinated for very
long: I didn’t like sentimentality.” In “An Affectionate Companion’s Jottings,” written
from the point of view of a cat owned by a chronically depressed newspaper editor,
the reader is introduced to an alternate universe of affection: “In order to help him,
I jumped up and nipped his hand. This little trick worked: he calmed down as if just
waking from a dream, and urged me to bite him a little harder, until I drew blood.”
Like many of the stories, this one relies on at least one episode that is shocking,
haunting, or hilarious (and often a mix of all three): the cat witnesses his owner try
and fail to hang himself in the kitchen of his apartment. When the owner accidentally
shuts the cat inside the refrigerator, the owner becomes aware of his own crippling
psychological state, which is not to say he can save himself from it. Meanwhile, the
cat’s narrative brings us as close as possible to this man’s solitary grief—and, in the
case of the refrigerator scene, takes us where we literally cannot go:

Crouching on the shelf, I soon lost consciousness. I had a long, troubling dream,
in which the sky was filled with frost-shaped butterflies. Two of them fluttered and
landed on the tip of my nose. After moistening my hot breath, they melted into two
streams running down my face: I couldn’t stop sneezing.

One challenge for the contemporary Chinese author with an English audience is
to write in a way that will authentically represent the inner lives of Chinese people
(which may entail some implicit criticism of the government) without pandering to
the Western desire for satires of Mao or the Communist Party. Can Xue is certainly
more interested in people’s inner lives than she is in creating political caricatures.
In fact, I would say that Can Xue’s stories are about contemporary Chinese politics
only insomuch as Beckett’s early plays are explicitly about the French Resistance, or
Kafka’s stories are about the affairs of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In her novel
Five Spice Street, which chronicles the elusive world of Madame X, peanut seller,
alleged occultist, community politician, and the object of ruthless suspicion among
the residents of an unnamed town, one would be hard-pressed to find a satisfactory
correspondence with Chinese politics. (Can Xue has argued in her criticism that Kafka’s work is primarily a “literature of the soul,” despite the political commentary
she encountered in the 1980s, when he was first translated in the People’s Republic.)
While some call Five Spice Street a political allegory, she prefers to call it her “spiritual autobiography.” As far as I know, Beckett never used this phrase to refer to his
novel Molloy, but it seems to me a fair description. Both Five Spice Street and Molloy
contain, in their sly and rueful way, entire literary traditions. For both Can Xue and
Beckett, the absurd does not constitute a whimsical literary genre but rather the basic
condition of human beings as spiritual castaways.
Judging by the growing number of young Western students who are serious
about Chinese as a literary language, it is inevitable that a more nuanced criticism
will emerge. Those who are able to articulate the crucial difference between a novel
by Tom Wolfe, which is usually marked by deliberate social commentary (in the
tradition of Emile Zola) and a novel by John Updike, which is usually marked by his
artistic impulse to “give the mundane its beautiful due” (in the tradition of Gustav
Flaubert), may begin to recognize that such distinctions exist in Chinese prose as
well. In China, of course, widespread censorship means that the dilemma of literary
style is magnified to an extreme. The decision of whether to write a work of epic
social criticism reminiscent of Zola (as Yu Hua has done with Brothers) or attempt
to create a lasting, stand-alone work of art (as Yu Hua has previously done with To
Live) has, one could say, extra-literary consequences.
Once Can Xue constructs her characters’ personal hells, she can hang her
stories on narrative voice alone. “Red Leaves,” for example, takes place in a hospital
where even psychic wounds are made literal, and while such imagery drives the story
for the most part, there is also—and this is where Can Xue gets difficult—an attempt
to introduce a narrator whose past we can almost, but not quite, piece together. Here
is how one patient in the hospital describes another’s suicide:

The person hadn’t killed himself because his condition had worsened and his pain
was unbearable. He knew he was improving after going through chemotherapy.
The next day he would have been moved out of the ward for serious cases. Who
could have guessed that he would do this? This guy was really good at choosing
an original approach

Ultimately, the voices take us to a murkier place beyond the ego or id; the result is
both unnerving and funny

If a reader expects a traditional voice, however—a narrator who introduces herself properly and reflects reasonably on her experiences in chronological time—he or
she is likely to feel unmoored. “Moonlight Dance,” for example, begins:

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.

One of the most disturbing stories in the collection, “Cotton Candy,” is about a group
of children’s fascination with the cotton candy sold by an elderly street vendor, whose
swollen eyelids and cryptic remarks give her the air of a prophet or seer. “No matter
how much energy you put into your work,” she says at one point, “the hungry ghosts
will eat everything you make.” The story opens with a description of the children’s
love for cotton candy—it seems to spin into existence out of thin air!—and their
curiosity about the vendor. But the child who narrates the story cannot taste what the
other children taste, which sets a darker chain of events in motion:

The cotton candy those children ate certainly was flavorful. If they were eating only
air, they wouldn’t kick up such a row with their parents demanding a few pennies
to enjoy this kind of thing. I understood them. Maybe something was wrong with
my taste buds. Later on, I brazenly asked my parents for a few cents, and this time
I bought a small pear-shaped one. I tasted it gingerly with my tongue. I saw this
thing melt little by little on my tongue, and still I tasted no flavor. It was so unfair.

Even in the English translation, it is impressive how smoothly the story transitions
from innocent wonder to primordial desire—a transition that, for the European or
American reader, might recall Dostoevsky or Flannery O’Connor. Two of the children come up with a plan to replace the old woman and become vendors themselves,
which eventually means robbing the woman in order to “amass enough capital”:

I thought the children were all on to me: they must be jealous of my desire to
become a vendor. Somebody might secretly sabotage my plan. But where could
I raise the money? I had to force the old woman to divulge her secret recipe for
shaking cotton out of thin air. I also had to ask her how to get rid of the strange,
frightening sound the contraption made.

Here is Can Xue’s style on full display: the unorthodox point of view, the sense of
foreboding, and the unsettling, comedic fusion of the demonic and the banal. Taken
together, these stories are a reminder that absurdity as a human condition is not
unique to any one country, and it is not limited to political interpretations. Capturing
the absurd, the uncanny, or the nearly unfathomable has always been the task of
ambitious writers. Despite having to read her a few steps removed, both culturally
and linguistically, her English audience will be able to see that this author is nothing
if not ambitious.

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[Heronimo Gieronymus · Rating 5 out of 5]

The recipient of declamatory praise by the likes of Robert Coover and Susan Sontage (she is a "new world master" according to the former, China's foremost candidate for Nobel laureate according to the latter), Can Xue has in recent years become something of a cause célèbre among Western readers, perhaps in manner to similar to the way Clarice Lispector and César Aira have (though of the three, she is the only one not on the New Directions roster). It stands to reason that Coover would be fond of Can Xue, as her writing is playful, unusual, and completely at odds with realist orthodoxy. Coover has certainly spent some time deconstructing and subverting fables and templates germane to them, and Can Xue's stories often feel like curious, assertively individual fables in and of themselves. They evoke something of an uncanny folk tradition from another weird and alien world. When I reviewed her novel FRONTIER on Goodreads, I noted how for nominally experimental fiction, it is interesting how that novel progresses in a very simple sequential manner, not unlike a children's story. The same can more or less be said of her short stories. The writing itself is spare and sober. Things progress sequentially, one thing happening after another. What makes Can Xue's writing wild and unusual in simply the irreal sense of character and place as well as the fantastical nature of incident. It is predictably common to refer to Can Xue as a surrealist. There is certainly some reason to pull out this habitually overused descriptor. (She also, like her countryman Yan Lianke, would seem to be influenced by Latin American magical realism.) As in dream, a Can Xue story will often very suddenly and remarkably entirely shift its bearings, things can morph or adopt new aspects, and things routinely occur which defy logic. In my review of FRONTIER, I also stated that I sometimes felt like I was reading something not unlike a kind of automatic writing. I felt this again reading the stories collected in VERTICAL MOTION. One senses that there is very little obstructing the flow of creation that enacts these stories. I sense that Can Xue consistently pursues the first strange thought she has as occurrences amass in the curious shimmering worlds she engenders. People mention the influence of Borges, Kafka, and Bruno Schulz. Of these three I think it is Bruno Schulz with whom Can Xue has the most in common. Both create worlds with plastic foundations that shift and self-modify like dream. Both have a sensitivity to the almost occult power of animals. Though both seem to come from a place almost of total guilelessness and awed innocence, Can Xue's style of writing reflects this in a way Schulz's more flamboyant approach does not. Can Xue's work consecrates the creative act. In "Vertical Motion," the fascinating introductory story from which the collection takes its name, the narrator is a creature, a tuber living beneath the soil, who in contravention of the habit of her species, begins to dig through the soil in an exclusively vertical direction, ending up in a state of exalted isolation where she risks possible annihilation-by-way-of-surfacing. Is the not a metaphor for the transcendent course opted for by the committed artist? Vertical motion is a vehicle for transcendence and an overcoming of ceatural constraints. The name Can Xue (Dirty Snow) is a pseudonym intended to parody slang commonly used to denigrate experimental writing in China. The name itself embraces a kind of imposed separateness. It is telling that we continually find characters in Can Xue who find themselves perplexed and alienated in a confounding world. Perhaps the preeminent state of being in Can Xue is located in the shiver of uneasiness provoked by an encounter.

[Jim · Rating 3 out of 5]

I first became aware of Can Xue when Jon Fosse won the Nobel Prize for Literature; many had, apparently, hoped it would be Can Xue. It'd been a while since I'd read anything and as Fosse's work is dense, I opted for the "simplistic, almost childlike" style of Can Xue. Richard Brautigan pulled it off in In Watermelon Sugar so I was hopeful. Having read, and thoroughly enjoyed, the short story 'Vertical Motion' in The White Review I opted to read the rest of the collection. So, it's fair to say, I began reading with high expectations but by the time I reached the last story I was skipping chunks of paragraphs and just wanted it to be over. So, what changed?

To be fair the first story is very different to the rest featuring a strange race of 'little critters" living way underneath the earth and yet, somehow, far more aware of humans and their ways than they ought to be. Something draws the story's hero to break free from his mundane existence and dig vertically; a true explorer. And, yes, he makes an unexpected and welcome discovery close to the surface. All in all, a charming story.

All the other stories are set amongst the humans and focus on mainly domestic and social issues but with inexplicable elements thrown in. Surreal is a term often used to describe her writing and it's as good a one as any. Expecting a reader to do his or her fair share is one thing—in general I'm all in favour of that—but you, the writer, have to give them enough material to join the dots. There were too many unexplained and unexplainable elements in these, basically decent, stories; they distracted from the good. As Aaron N. Cheng says in his review of the collection for The Harvard Crimson, "Each story feels unfinished, building up to a resolution that never comes." You're always left wondering at the end but not in a good way.

I see plenty of 5-star reviews so, clearly, Can Xue has her appreciators but many also admit to not understanding much of what they've read but not minding. Which is fair enough. Much the same has been written about the poetry of TS Eliot and I get the attraction. As with Eliot I so wanted to like these stories but felt a bit left out.