Mother River

by Can Xue, 残雪, Karen Gernant (Translator)

The thirteen stories in this collection are vintage Can Xue. Similar to her novels (The Last Lover, Frontier) and other collections (Vertical Motion) the focus is less on what happens and more on the experience of reading.

"Mother River" is a short bildungsroman of a young man who decides to become a fisherman (and crafter of spherical maps) and discovers that performing the role itself is more important than the number of fish they catch.

Surreal, provocative, and unique, Mother River reinforces Can Xue's status as one of the most reward and complex writers working today—and a perennial favorite to win the Nobel Prize.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, China, Audiobook, 21st Century

265 pages, Paperback

First published February 4, 2025

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

[Sarah ~ · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mother River - Can Xue



تضم هذه المجموعة القصصية لواحدة من أشهر الكاتبات الصينيات؛ ثلاثة عشر قصة، قصص-يمكن القول أنها واقعية سحرية، غنية بالخيال يصعب متابعتها، من هنا تأتي الحيرة لكن أحببت القصص الأولى خاصة، أغلب قصص النصف الأول، أحببت تركيزها على الطبيعة والعائلة والمجتمع والحب والشعر والفقد وعلاقة الإنسان بالطبيغة وتقديمها لهذذه الأفكار في صور جميلة ومؤثرة وحوارات عذبة وإن كانت غير مفهمومة كما ذكرت.


"هل حبيبتك هنا؟ سألتُ جي.
هي في كل مكان، لكنها لا تكون حيث أكون قطْ."
*هذا الاقتباس من القصة الحادية عشر
...


قصص عجيبة وغريبة ومحيّرة، تبدو كسلسلة أحلام طويلة غير منطقية بالمرة لكن دافئة في ذات الوقت،، بسيطة ومدهشة في آنٍ واحد.

[Kaija · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm biased but also this is probably the best Can Xue to date. Funny, beautiful, daydreamy. You're in for a treat.

[Chad Post]

Might be my favorite Can Xue book yet!

[Noe · Rating 3 out of 5]

Anxiety inducing… often difficult to follow… and also contains so many beautiful images and touching depictions of dynamics between family/community members. I can’t wait to read more of her work.

“‘Is your sweetheart here?’ I asked Ji.
‘She’s everywhere, but never where I am.’”

(Is that how you use quotation marks around dialogue?)

[Matthew Linton · Rating 3 out of 5]

Can Xue is a trickster. Her stories begin simply. A boy and a river. Retired schoolteachers living in a retirement community. A young man frustrated with his family. But then something strange happens. A mysterious shadow appears. Each person in a couple suspects that the other is keeping a secret. A coffee shop owner has a secret golden peacock. Can Xue’s stories are consistent and surprising and consistently surprising.

Humankind’s relationship with nature is the central theme of Mother River, a new collection of thirteen stories by Can Xue translated by Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping for Open Letter Press. Nature is sometimes the center of her story as it accommodates itself and hides from an ever-expanding humanity. But nature also manifests itself through animals that can symbolize secret loves or hidden strength.

Fans of magical realism will find a lot to like in these stories as will fans of Japanese authors like Haruki Murakami and Kobo Abe. Those interested in contemporary Chinese authors like Mo Yan (particularly his Republic of Wine) and Gao Xingjian will find aspects of Can Xue’s work familiar, though her relationship to contemporary Chinese fiction is ambiguous.

We will see if Can Xue wins the Nobel Prize for Literature in the coming years. If so, Mother River will be an important collection for helping English readers appreciate her style and perspective.

[Fin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Won me fully over by the end (unlike Frontier) - although a lot of that may be down to me being excited about Xishuangbanna's heavy appearance here. That latter triptych of stories set in Xishuangbanna ended up being my fav on literary merits too - it gave me a similar feeling to a film of Apichatpong Weerasethakul (high praise!), where reality becomes a space of dreams, shaped by the confluence of the inner unconscious mind and the natural world.*

*((An also v apichatpong - loved the 68 year old woman-45 year old man age gap relationship representation in the final story))

[birdbassador · Rating 5 out of 5]

very good! might be the one i recommend to people first, now. as a sign of its beginner friendliness: in other can xue stories, often the character will have the dream logic-driven sense of gnostic dread that, without their knowledge, by acting or not acting when they should have, or saying the wrong thing, or saying the right thing but in the wrong tone, they have permanently ruined their lives and are separated forever from a catharsis or understanding that has now slipped through their fingers. in these stories it will look like that is going to happen but then another character will pop up to reassure the protagonist that they are doing their best and not to worry about it and perhaps even serve them something to eat or drink. i find that relaxing.

[W.S. Luk · Rating 3 out of 5]

The best parts of this short story collection—magical-realist vignettes about a farm where stones grow out of the soil or a hidden forest in a city—remind me of Calvino's Invisible Cities in their ability to make you nostalgic for gently fantastical worlds you've never visited. Many of these stories dwell compellingly on themes of urban alienation, scrutinising the experience of living in a rapidly transforming modern China. However, even though most of these stories opened with intriguing images, their frequently irresolute and open-ended conclusions left me somewhat unsatisfied on a few occasions. My sense is that this ambiguity is a deliberate choice rather than a fault, so perhaps I'm just not quite on the wavelength of Can Xue's style.

[Jessica · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stories like dreams... The pull of the natural world even when modernity rules, the urge to merge with that world... I found the first six stories much more powerful than those of the book's second half. The best of these stories are deeply mysterious and may merge with your own dream world...

[Laurie Noelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

pleasantly confused the entire time

[Loveing · Rating 5 out of 5]

Can xue escapes into the soul and creates an open non-local literary space. This space has no certainty, material, or specific time and space. Infinite spiritual love connects everything. For those who seek the meaning of life, Can xue is a must-read writer.

[Will · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my favorite Can Xue short story collection to date, and could be her best book available in English. Can Xue is still Can Xue, so these stories can be rather surreal and difficult at times, but this might just be her at her “easiest” and most rewarding (and potentially her most humorous).

[Yetong Li · Rating 2 out of 5]

although the characters are all written as people, it would almost be more fitting for them to be sentient flowers or objects
tradition and things keeping you tied down to a hometown.
what is the point of nothingness?
what is of substance and what is now (shadows)
a common theme is that a lot of character usually avoid or dislike social activities. a lot ruminates on the “benefits” or whether it is necessary for humans to be social/or if we can exist in our own isolation (a world of our own)
interconnectedness and finding novel and undiscovered terrain in places you have lived in for years
something is always brewing, on the brink of happening but not quite
honestly would not recommend. found myself bored and reading just to be done with it.

1. mother river — a bit esoteric. felt like trying to grasp a fish, i would almost “get it” and then it would slip out and elude me. felt like this quote captured it quite aptly: “I could either catch fish as Meng Ha did, or I could not catch them.”
2. stone village —
1. “Why were we keeping watch over these stones?“
2. “Did they think that as long as we weren’t starving we should stay here?”
3. smog city
1. “It came and stayed, and people accepted it as they do the air.”
2. faceless heads
3. what we remember as a collective
4. i wasn’t sure at first but i tentatively think i like the different vignettes
4. the drummer boy
1. “it was the odor you smelled in a home where someone had just passed away”- for me, that’s formaldehyde
2. “… and all of a sudden, I was curious about this city.”
3. “I’m an outsider here, but this is where my roots are.” - articulates perfectly the irony of his situation
4. “It is the pure silence of mourning.”
5. bit weird, bit spiritual
5. the neighborhood
1. his disconnect from society
2. sports facility v community garden
3. woah that just entered into magical realism / wind up bird chronicle world
4. “New-age people have new ways!”
5. “Mrs. Yuan had gradually discovered various black holes in her life” - i read them as an abstract concept on the first go but here it is literal
6. the young man who loved to think deeply
1. “The texture of things in such places was like water snakes or wisteria.”
2. “but for some reason, the wisteria had never appeared in his dreams. Dreamland was unreliable”
7. something to do with poetry
8. the inside story
1. papa hoh dreaming of being a pilot - same as my father!
2. the enigmatic golden peacock
3. “You’ve seen it already; you just have to change your perspective”
9. the lion king
1. scientific expedition turns into unrequited love for a lion
2. “It was impossible for him to remember that he had come across a person on a particular evening”
3. “Everything had been turned upside down just because of that chance encounter by the river lasting less than thirty seconds.
10. at the edge of the marsh
1. “Leihuo understood that today was a turning point in his life: he had argued with his family, and now at the marsh he had run into destiny’s frightening demon.”
2. pigs, winter melons, and monitor lizards
3. “Later he wondered what kind of thing had crumbled in Dad’s heart.”
11. night in xishuangbanna
1. a mysterious town that never sleeps
2. flying turkeys and girls who steal your soul
3. natives v outsiders
4. reminds me of 白蛇传
12. the goddess of xishuangbanna
1. “But if you haven’t met the person, could you call this “love”
2. bungalows and bears
13. love in xishuangbanna
1. one persons trash is another persons treasure
2. “living dictionaries”
3. “Mi thought again of Jasmine’s not mentioning Fragrant River’s sexuality”

[mingorae · Rating 2 out of 5]

i really wanted to like this book but i found myself not connecting with it as much as i hoped 🙁 the first few stories i did enjoy but found it harder to decipher as i went through the book. i fear the ambiguity is not for my little brain to comprehend. however, the imagery in this book was really beautiful – did feel very dreamscape-ish

[jessica · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’s difficult to rate a collection of short stories. Some I loved and some I found too impenetrable or even dull. Some of the strangest prose and storytelling I’ve ever encountered. I think if you can just let it wash over you and don’t engage with it logically at all, it can put you into a really pleasant dream-like state of mind.

[Josh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Chinese magical realism, I was unfamiliar with your game.

[Emily]

I really tried, but I found the first four stories in this collection totally impenetrable. I feel like there's either context that I'm missing (because I haven't read a lot of Chinese literature), or the style simply isn't for me. I gave up after finishing "The Drummer Boy", then picked "The Lion King" at random and didn't like that either.

[Alexander Starr · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of short stories that hit more than miss. Bizarre, touching, nonsensical, perfectly sensical. Maybe it’s because he has been on my mind, but the way these stories are told and unfold made me think of David Lynch.

[Mihir Bellamkonda · Rating 4 out of 5]

i got dizzy

[sarah · Rating 1 out of 5]

I’m sorry but I just did not Get it at all🙏

[L.S. Popovich · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this collection.
As I have enjoyed all of Can Xue's story collections. This one reads a bit different from her others. More concerned with daily life is one way to describe it. The thirteen stories here feel of a piece. Almost like a novel spliced into stories. The Xishuangbanna in her stories and the recent novel The Enchanting Lives of Others must be based on where she lives, which is the remote mountain village called Xishuangbanna. The characters across the stories and various novels feel like recurring characters, under different names, and must be composite characters drawn from her life.
It is usually only conjecture to claim to know where writer's draw their ideas. Can Xue's ideas never cease to intrigue me.
The stories in this collection unfold in locales devoid of technology. The style remains primordial. Her sentences are casually subversive. They yield odd interpretations if you isolate them. As the words gather on the page into paragraphs, narrative forms. As usual, characters act and speak in unpredictable ways. Their speech is bereft of the tenets of modernity. They seem pulled from far back in history, telling of transcendent experiences buried within the mundane.
Mostly, the stories lack mawkish melodrama. Typically, the protagonist contemplates facets of their surroundings and contemplate elements of life, infusing the whole with mystery.
Beautiful observant moments punctuate the uneventful plots.
Subtle surrealism blurs the line between character's claims at reality and what the reader expects from the run-down, earthy setting. Can Xue's microcosms are always worthy of interpretation, analysis, commentary, and silent enjoyment. You cannot recommend her works to most people. They simply won't get it.
She seems effective at implanting dream images. Her writing is possessed of uncanny wit and brazen allure for me. I must recalibrate before transitioning between her work and that of another author. Her exotic mindset challenges my default mental code.
For instance, "Something to Do with Poetry," a strange golden peacock appears. I couldn't get that out of my head. Why is it in the story? Because the story would not be a Can Xue story without it.
Objects, themes, obscure metaphors, totems, permeate the stories.
We encounter multiple instances of caves, fish, nets, shadows, rivers, maps, holes, hunger, animal instincts, qigong, telescopes, the South Pole. What are the connections? Mostly, these things just float around in Can Xue's head until she decides to write them down. Many of the tales don't seem to have a point beyond explicating the objects of a place, the internal tinting of a character through their revealing a relation to the focus image. Yet often, characters pass the time with nothing to do. They grumble, conspire, and exit the scene frequently. Mushroom picking becomes an adventure away from the ordinary. The author finds poetry in simple moments. Her sentences are disarming because they cannot be reconciled with daily experience. She evokes charm, gravitas, and plainness that shouts.
The stories congeal out of unlikely ingredients. Unsavory elements mingle with elegant complexities, usually through character interaction.
In the first story, we are treated to:
The logistics of fishing village life, the onset of an unaccountable shadow. The geometry of the village expressed in a sphere. The river as a carrier of haunting shadows. The river as a weaver of lives. A community who keeps esoteric knowledge hush-hush from our narrator, and thence from the reader. Essentially, the act of entering into special knowledge has a cost of disorientation and dislocation from reality. One my welcome cognitive dissonance in order to part the veil. We can meditate upon the possibility of spherical movement. We visualize a human transforming into a fish. On a return journey, the land must curve back on itself. Thus, the author invites the reader to reread the story. We can posit that doing so will change us. The fish in the river are actually people. Yet, the main character's understanding is limited to the village and he is incapable of grasping the concept of space beyond the village. A fascinating story.
I gave the first 2 stories and the 7th story 5 stars. The 3rd-6th story deserve 4 stars. The 8th and 9th stories deserved 4 stars. The remaining 4 stories caused fatigue. I was trying too hard to tease out obscure meanings from her prose and interpret the weirdness. I should've just enjoyed them as storytelling specimens. I will have to give those another visit in order to appreciate them further.
As such, this can be a challenging volume.
The second story, "Stone Village," is classic Can Xue. A struggle for survival ensues as stones grow around the village, interrupting peoples' lives. Enigmas abound. The theme of the story sinks beneath a pervasive tone, becoming a stone that insinuates as it sinks beneath a river of images and unfocused people. As this story embodies the element of earth, the next takes on the shape of air. It is called "Smog City." This time, the village is plagued by smog. Train tracks lead nowhere, veering off into wilderness. The trains have no destination. The smog obscures the lives attendant and the murky locale. The main character takes up residence in a train station called Snail Station. She speaks directly to the reader, trying to invite them into Smog City. This is irresistible to me. She is trying to win over the reader to a peculiar sensibility. Go with the flow, breathe in the intoxicating smog. This is the wonderful glamor of her method.
The next story, "The Drummer Boy," compares people to earthworms and vegetables. They come from the earth, echoing the Biblical claim that we are dust. (Science claims we are star dust. But of course, the stardust became earth dust.) In this story, animals are killing themselves. Don't ask why. The persistent smells of the slum persist. The place is going to the dogs as they say. Communication with the dead results in unsatisfying answers. I find the entire story to be a rumination on the way childhood memories have a different cast than adult memories.
In "The Young man Who Loved to Think Deeply," low-income life and contemplative existence are given much literary space to exert positive influence on the narrator. Similarly to her novel Barefoot Doctor, the story advocates for a simple life, a well-examined one. Miracles are taken for granted here, as they always are. No one is amazed no matter how bizarre things get in Xishuangbanna. "Dreamland was unreliable." This short sentence tells us much. We dwell in a land of sleep, at the mercy of our subconsciousness and the folly of our natures. We come awake to the dimension we inhabit to surface from absurdity. Something's always about to happen. But it never seems to take place in a way that's convincing. An unexplained murder is left unexplained. A persistent fog clouds perception. The approach of an unidentified sound is remarkable for its blatant vagueness. We live with secrets, harboring doubts about ourselves most of all. We cannot even begin to doubt the external world without first doubting ourselves almost out of existence. Senses can only be trusted as far as our weakness extends. Superstitious causes might explain all events. The inside of a human personifies the sky.
The stream of thoughts triggered by this suggestive style of intimation never seem to end. They wind on into untold depths.
Loves, inner strengths, animals acting human and humans acting like animals. The lovingly depicted nostalgias we cannot place, cannot locate on a connectome, or brain atlas are available at will from this author. Can Xue is a grandmaster of an unrecognizable beauty. She is a cartographer of ambiguous desires.

[junatuna · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting surrealism but sometimes felt like the plot had no direction. Hard to analyze - maybe the intent is not to analyze as much but rather to accept the plot for the way it is. Mainly set in rural cities, lots of dreamy imagery, lots of animals. Common pattern of the protagonist feeling like an outsider and looking at the world differently than those around them. Or having a certain "vision" and being enlightened/having an epiphany by the end of the story. Hard to follow in general. General storyline of mystical cities was interesting though.

Some favorites:
Smog City - a smog overtakes the city to point where it is hard to see but people get used to it
The Neighborhood - neighborhood disagreement about building a sports facility, grieving death of daughter
At the Edge of the Marsh - follows Uncle Ji who looks at the world differently

[Michael Lieto · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5/5

Like a lot of short story collections, I found this a real mixed bag. I think some of the writing is very strong and descriptive. You really get some vivid imagery and almost every story. This is HEAVY magical realism, which works sometimes and does not in others. A few of the stories really moved me, but a good chunk of them were just ok or forgettable. I am sure I'm missing some context as a non-Chinese person, and it seems a lot of the same beats are hit in these stories: connect to nature to unlock a secret life/meaning. This is an enjoyable read, though for me it had some frustrations and the last third of the book really slow slowed me down.

Fav stories: Drummer Boy, Stone Village, At The Edge of The Marsh, The Neighborhood

[Letitia Moffitt · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well ... on the one hand, the author is adept at crafting dream-like stories, and that's not an easy thing to do. Of course, real dreams are difficult to grasp -- and remember -- and that's true here as well. I suppose they're to be experienced and not much else, because on the other hand, they are pretty easily forgettable. Aside from the surreal situations, which are kind of fun to read, characters act in seemingly random, incomprehensible ways, and that makes it hard to take away anything. Plus, a little of this kind of writing goes a long, long way, and a whole book of it can seem monotonous. Still, though, a unique collection that some readers will adore and others will scratch their heads over.

[Sam Bizarrus]

Not my favorite Can Xue book, these stories speak to her sly and deceptive edge, and a kind of ecological consciousness that feels part of her broader preoccupations. I recommend it for readers who are willing to dig into more of her books, and willing to play along with her surreal and oblique tongue. In fact, the short story form feels like a nice place to become acquainted with this idiosyncratic talent.

I'm choosing to forgo a star-rating on this one; I think some stories are more complete and compelling than others, as is often the case in this form, which makes a kind of summative numerical judgement a bit moot.

[Trevor Arrowood · Rating 3 out of 5]

A truly surreal group of short stories. Can Xue takes the reader to otherworldly places that are off-kilter from our reality and full of nearly uncanny characters. I want to rate this higher, but these stories aren’t meant to be read once. I will go back to some of these, and that may change my rating in the future. But still, these were good stories that brought a level of enchantment and disturbance with them

[Wohn Jick · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5/5 Xue's writing is both engrossing and utterly perplexing. Most of these stories have little to no obvious meaning (though of course one can find some beneath the surface) and are full of random fantastical things happening with no explanation. While this does make for an interesting reading experience most of the time, by the end of the collection (especially the final 43 page story) I was ready for it to end. Curious to see if her longer works are more structured.

[Dave Bennett · Rating 2 out of 5]

If this book weren’t short stories and only ~250 pages I would’ve quit about midway. Nothing about it resonated with me. I’m sure some people would enjoy the imagery/nature, but not a single one of the 13 stories made sense to me. Given that it is a translation, I wonder if some of the meaning or wordplay was lost, but it just seemed to me like magical realism that missed every mark.

[Shawn · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really really really really want to love Can Xue’s writing, but I just can’t. I can’t put my finger on it, but it just doesn’t do it for me. There are so many good things going for it, but, put them all together and it the whole is underwhelming for me.

[Mikee · Rating 3 out of 5]

I take issue with this translation (though, obviously, I cannot compare it with the original material)… everything is “some things”……. Overall, I find that this translation doesn’t do justice to the beauty of the absolutely insane phenomena unraveling in this fever dream of a read!