Can Xue, autorka kilkunastu powieści, około pięćdziesięciu nowel, ponad stu opowiadań i kilku tomów krytyki literackiej, od lat jest wymieniana w gronie faworytów do literackiej Nagrody Nobla.
Jej kolejna powieść w PIW-ie (po Ulicy Żółtego Błota) opowiada o grupie nieznajomych, którzy wsiadają do pociągu, lecz ten nie dowozi ich do celu. Pasażerowie doświadczają zamknięcia, strachu, przeczuwają katastrofę, która faktycznie nadchodzi. Pozbawieni oparcia przypadkowi znajomi zawierzają sobie własne wspomnienia; tymczasem pociąg okazuje się widmem kursującym w ten sam niepokojący sposób od lat, zbierając outsiderów i dając im na chwilę iluzoryczne schronienie.
Po części alegoria, po części gorączkowy sen, powieść – jak zawsze w przypadku Can Xue – jest niewygodnym obrazem współczesnych Chin.
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.
The release of any new translation of a Cán Xuě (残雪) work is cause for celebration - and this one lived up to the hype. First of all, its length is ideal, clocking in at 148 pages, as it gives the surrealism room to breathe and grow without becoming tedious. Compared to some of Cán Xuě's other works, Mystery Train has a bit more plot and somewhat more straightforward symbolism. The story begins on a train journey, centered on a character named Scratch, who is a bit of an every-man, an unmotivated farm hand eager to elide a hard day's work. The story gets weirder at every turn. Eventually the passengers disembark into the wilderness, a landscape populated with wild beasts, and the narrative re-centers on another character, Birdie, a woman who stands in subtle contrast to Scratch. I enjoyed the in-jokes, starting with a preface written in the third-person by the author. The author makes another appearance in the text, this time in the form of the conductor - a character who locks the passengers in their compartments and tells them stories that never come to a point. The self-deprecating humor was welcome in an increasingly dark tale. There was profundity in the symbolism, particularly as the story moved toward the end, even if it never went deeper than a metaphor for the truism that life is hard. Yet despite the darkness, Mystery Train may be the most fun I've had reading this year. (I'm not sure what that says about me.) This was translated by the outstanding Natascha Bruce and published by Sublunary Editions, a relatively new press based in Seattle with an intriguing catalogue focused on literary fiction and poetry.
Can Xue is one of the recurring nominees for the Nobel Prize. I can see why. Her body of work is varied and unique, relevant, and large. This short novel takes place mostly on a train. One of my favorite literary settings. The main character undergoes a kafkaesque series of mishaps, ending up in a very different place by the end. The vivid prose and bizarre characters will keep you turning pages. It is a quick read, full of subtext. The uncontrollable fate of our hapless protagonist is never boring. His interplay with a woman prisoner, or employee, in one of the train cars develops into a twisted, touching love story.
This is a good entry point into Can Xue. One of her accessible works. She tends to overcomplicate matters, slathering on details by the dozen, skewing the perspective into inhuman realms of dreamlike pseudo-satire. But here, she remains clear, even when describing outlandish behavior and brutish cruelty. She excels at flourishes of imagery, and constructing a bulky conglomerate of blundering prose fantasias.
Calling this a surreal psychological novel seems accurate yet also wildly inadequate. Can Xue in her preface notes that the characters are made stronger through enduring suffering, which seems arguable to me. They are clearly unhappy and miserable while riding this mystery train of life, aside from brief moments of respite, and live with a death wish which they all ultimately fulfill as the wolves of the world tear the life from them. Maybe a lesson in enduring suffering until the grateful release of death comes for you. Kinda dark!
So while it’s not really my kind of book then, Can Xue’s writing, as I read through interpretations into English of course, I still find charming as I read along. Her writing is a unique and likable character. And actually, charmingly goth is an aesthetic I do tend to enjoy.
feverish for sure but almost a bit too normal, narrative-wise, if that's a valid complaint. like there were parts where i almost expected things to resolve and bigger pictures to be made clear and that's not what i come to can xue for
tak moglby wygladac moj sen podczas jakiejs giga goraczki ngl; ostatnia czesc (trzy historie przynalezace do ciemnej nocy) zdecydowanie najlepsza, szkoda ze najkrotsza
Can Xue, the pen name of Deng Xiaohua, was born in China in 1953, and by the late ’50s her family (Communist Party members) began being persecuted by others within the Party, resulting in years of life and work in “re-education” camps, and ending Deng’s formal education by age 13. Nonetheless, she persisted, and her works have been nominated for prestigious international literature awards, including nominations for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature for her novel The Last Lover, longlisted for the 2019 Booker International Prize for Love in the New Millennium.
Mystery Train is a novella of a long, strange trip whose subtle but persistent sense of Twilight Zone-like disorientation is well-captured in Natascha Bruce’s English rendering. Its mood and its characters’ behaviors put me in mind of Kafka’s Amerika, in which a number of people with vague purposes meet on a trip, form and break alliances, and inhabit a dream-like haze with a logic of its own that is nonetheless easy to follow and convincingly reasonable in the circumstances. In Mystery Train, the protagonist, named Scratch, is a chicken farm hand whose boss has sent him on a trip to buy feed. But the city Scratch is headed to is not on the map, his employer forgot to give him one of the contracts to take to the feed company, and he increasingly feels that he’s been fired with a thousand-yuan severance package.
Love interests are quickly struck up and consummated in this book, amid the train shut down, disappearance (!), forced mountainside camping, successful attacks from wolves, tent burnings, and so forth. But as with the violent chaos, the women Scratch finds himself with are repulsive but sexually satisfying. Ultimately, “He felt sorry for himself, watching as the little door in his heart clicked shut. He didn’t want to be there, probing life’s mysteries with a stinking, birdbrained woman.” The “birdbrained woman” is the butt of abuse for the first two sections, but at this point, for the third section, the story’s point of view is hers, Birdie’s.
If, as Can Xue herself has said, her stories and novels are autobiographies of her interior life, could the mysterious train be a stand-in for Mao’s re-education camps? When Birdie recalls her first days on the train, she remembers an older woman, Belle, scolding her:
“You keep judging people and things according to the standards you had before coming on board, and this isn’t doing you any good. . . The train has severed our links with anywhere outside it, and we have to relearn everything from scratch. I recently started sewing and it’s done wonders for my self-confidence!”
Escaping the unsheltered chaos that the refuge has become is difficult, after the train disappears, since the group is prone to attacks from wolves. Scratch and Birdie, finally manage a way out. As they set to rest, the narrative turns to Birdie, whose tale it becomes in the last third of the book—the tale of a woman whose face was disfigured as a child, resulting in an ugliness so profound the father puts her on the mystery train he has heard about.
What kind of autobiographical life can this possibly represent? What does it mean when something that had the quality of eternity to it—the mystery train—has now disappeared? Well, there’s the sudden wrenching out of one life into another, for reasons out of one’s control. There’s the casual abuse doled out by men against women, presented as just the course of natural events. It was a man who abandoned her as a child; it was a man who put her on the train; it was a man who conducted the train; it was a man who raped her; and it was a man who abandoned her, again, who wanted nothing to do with “a stinking, birdbrained woman.” The train has gone, the men have gone, and Birdie now controls the narrative.
mega dziwna proza. początek i pierwsza część bardzo ciekawa, reszta z każdą stroną coraz dziwniejsza (dla mnie niezrozumiała lol) i trochę się wynudziłem but kinda vibe
🚉🕯️ Tajemniczy pociąg Can Xue to nie jest zwykła powieść o podróży – to raczej metafizyczny eksperyment, w którym granice między snem a jawą, logiką a absurdem zostają celowo zatarte. Autorka, od lat uznawana za jedną z najbardziej oryginalnych pisarek chińskich, proponuje czytelnikowi doświadczenie przypominające sen gorączkowy: nielinearny, niepokojący i hipnotyczny. Pociąg, który nie dowozi pasażerów do celu, staje się tu mikrokosmosem ludzkiej egzystencji – miejscem, gdzie spotykają się jednostki wyrzucone poza nawias świata, a czas zatrzymuje się między wdechem a wydechem.
🚉🕯️ Główny bohater, zwany Blizną, budzi się w wagonie bez świadomości, dokąd jedzie i po co. To nie tyle postać z krwi i kości, ile raczej figura – symbol człowieka pozbawionego kierunku i poczucia sensu. W pociągu spotyka innych pasażerów – ludzi dziwnych, milczących, jakby wyjętych z innego wymiaru. Z każdym kilometrem atmosfera staje się coraz bardziej duszna, a rzeczywistość zaczyna się rozmywać. Czasem pociąg stoi, czasem rusza, ale nie ma pewności, czy w ogóle się porusza. Wrażenie zamknięcia, zimna i obcości potęguje uczucie klaustrofobii – zarówno przestrzennej, jak i emocjonalnej.
🚉🕯️ Can Xue, jak przystało na mistrzynię literackiego surrealizmu, nie pozwala czytelnikowi na komfort jasnych interpretacji. Jej świat jest pełen symboli, które wymykają się prostym objaśnieniom. Pociąg może być snem, czyśćcem, społeczeństwem, a może samym człowiekiem – nie ma jednej odpowiedzi. Autorka bawi się językiem i percepcją, tworząc narrację, która rozsadza granice tradycyjnego realizmu. Z pozoru drobne dialogi niosą ciężar filozoficzny, a groteskowe sceny mają w sobie poezję i lęk. To literatura, która wymaga uważności i otwartości, bo każda strona jest tu jak fragment układanki, której obraz końcowy pozostaje niepełny.
🚉🕯️ Wśród postaci wyróżnia się Gęś – kucharka o zniekształconej twarzy, dziwna, zmysłowa, a jednocześnie tragiczna. Jej rozmowy z Blizną balansują między absurdem a intymnością, między potrzebą bliskości a niezdolnością do jej osiągnięcia. To spotkanie dwóch samotności, które odbijają się od siebie jak echo w pustym wagonie. Can Xue mistrzowsko portretuje ludzką niezdolność do porozumienia, pokazując, że nawet we wspólnym zamknięciu człowiek potrafi być potwornie sam. W tym świecie nie ma wyraźnych granic dobra i zła – są tylko cienie, z których wyłaniają się kolejne warstwy znaczeń. ㅤ 🚉🕯️ Tajemniczy pociąg można odczytywać jako metaforę współczesnych Chin, ale też jako uniwersalną przypowieść o ludzkiej kondycji. Can Xue nie moralizuje, lecz obserwuje – z dystansem, czasem z ironią, zawsze z fascynacją tym, co niepojęte. Jej proza jest gęsta, niekiedy hermetyczna, ale właśnie w tej nieprzejrzystości kryje się jej siła. Autorka nie prowadzi czytelnika za rękę; raczej wciąga go w labirynt, z którego można wyjść jedynie, akceptując brak sensu jako formę sensu. To opowieść o ludziach, którzy próbują nadać znaczenie chaosowi, choć wiedzą, że to niemożliwe. ㅤ 🚉🕯️ Lektura Tajemniczego pociągu nie jest łatwa, ale przynosi wyjątkowe doświadczenie – coś między medytacją a halucynacją. Can Xue zaprasza do świata, w którym nic nie jest pewne, a każdy gest i słowo mają podwójne dno. To książka o samotności, o potrzebie bliskości, o iluzjach, które trzymają nas przy życiu. Jednocześnie to niezwykle poetycka próba opisania chaosu współczesnego istnienia. Dla jednych będzie to lektura niezrozumiała i męcząca, dla innych – odkrycie literackiej odwagi i nowego sposobu opowiadania o świecie. Jedno jest pewne: po wyjściu z tego pociągu nic nie wygląda już tak samo.
Can Xue is a contemporary Chinese experimental writer. I’ve read her before, a story in the collection "Chairman Mao Would Not Be Amused: Fiction from Today's China" (1995). If the author bios of her are correct, she had a horrible life as a child, because her family was persecuted by the communist government. At least some of that suffering seems to well up in "Mystery Train," and it is processed through a Borgesian and Kafkaesque lens.
People who end up on the train–find their way to the train, or are put on the train–don’t belong anywhere else (excluded, expelled, exiled, alienated, rejected, dealt with). The train is not a place to belong to or be; it does not lead anywhere. I initially thought that it represented a reeducation camp, but there is no reeducation. The train is just mobile storage of a growing population of human cast-offs. It is also a kind of sociological experiment. How can such alienated beings find connection–a social order–with each other, or can they?
This book reminds me of the Mexican author Juan José Arreola’s story “The Switchman,” which is about the failures of the Mexican train system, symbol for the failures of reason, the Enlightenment, and the colonial project in Latin America. In one part of the story, the switchman talks about trains that find themselves at the end of tracks in the middle of uncharted territory and the passengers get off, cannibalize the train, and create a village. The switchman spins the story of a failed train system into a positive, if irrational, example of the spread of civilization or the colonial project. In contrast, in the second chapter of "Mystery Train," the train leaves all the passengers at a dark, unknown site with tents and other paraphernalia, but no one works together, and, instead, everyone remains abject and alienated, and the possibility of a meaningful social order fails. For the characters who interact and tell each other their stories, they cling to their abjection and alienation, making some kind of mutually beneficial social order impossible. Dark book.
Czy zastanawialiście się co by było gdybyście żyli tylko dniem dzisiejszym? Bez myślenia o tym co było i o tym co będzie? Bez zastanowienia się o przyczynach i skutkach decyzji i wydarzeń?
Takim modus operandi zdaje się kierować autorka niezwykle zagadkowej noweli Tajemniczy pociąg. Główny bohater został wysłany na specjalne zadanie przez swojego szefa, jednak okazuje się, że jest to tylko podstęp by pozbyć się nieszczęśnika ze swojej fermy. Szukając odpowiedzi na pytanie dlaczego, poznaje szereg nietuzinkowych postaci, którzy coraz bardziej zaczynają mącić mu w głowie, a proponowane rozwiązania nie do końca mają sens. Nie ma tutaj czasu na dywagacje i oddawanie się przemyśleniom. Główny bohater poddaje się ciągowi zdarzeń i czeka, że bezsens przyniesie trochę otrzeźwienia....
Can Xue nie ukrywa, że czerpie swoje inspiracje z realizmu magicznego, jednocześnie będąc pod wpływem Kafki, który widoczny jest na każdym kroku. Bohaterowie zagubieni w swoich historiach, próbują nadać im sens, a wydarzenia zaprzeczają samym sobie. Pogoń za znaczeniem kończy się porażką i to co pozostaje to biec do przodu i liczyć na szczęśliwe zrządzenie losu, bo sens istnienia może przyjść w nieoczekiwanym momencie i z nieprzewidywalnej strony.
Can Xue stwarza swój mikroświat, w którym warto się zanurzyć, bo jest to literatura stawiająca wiele pytań, a odpowiedzi musimy spróbować odnaleźć sami, chociaż z góry wiadomo, że łatwo nie będzie.
This one put me in mind of object lessons. You keep thinking you’re getting closer to a pattern, to a logic that generates a commentary, or some type of message. But things keep turning away. It’s almost like an assemblage that follows it own internal structure, but is completely independent from the world of meaning. Sure, you can go through and assign enough similarities to the real world, but I feel that Can Xue would just laugh at you and then throw a rotting cabbage at your head. Ok, yeah, people act uncomfortable around people with physical deformities—and that’s bad—but this book is not setting out to teach us to be kind to others. I considered that. I thought, ok, maybe this is amplified and the rest of the things are anchored to the world as well. It’s either too on the nose, (everyone is suffering and waiting for the wolves to come rip them to shreds, killing them and releasing them from their duty in life, which will be taken up by someone else) or a shifting terrain of loneliness upon which it is hard to gain purchase.
And then, of course, there’s the eponymous mystery train, which seems far too direct. So, my father told me about this mystery train. You get on it and things are mysterious. That’s what we were just on. That’s the explanation of the mystery train. Get it? Don’t be presumptuous. Just be humble and keep moving ahead. Ignore all the sexual assaults.
历史性、记忆与遗忘、trauma。我不是想刻意往这方向读,但是这种得不到长辈的回答和在上无法留住所有过去的理念与逻辑确实不得不让我想起跟长辈(特别是经过历史灾难的长辈)沟通的感觉,全是一番“you’ll understand when you’re older”,而我猜这番话一部分包含的是长辈对此记忆的无解与失控。还有,长辈通常是在你最想知道答案时消失。
I will start of by patting myself on the back for starting and finishing this. Truthfully, given that the author pre-informs readers of the experimental nature of this work, it wasn't so bad. The story is deeply unsettling and disorienting, and like the main character, i couldn't wait to get of this train. Of course all literature is not meant to be happy or neatly resolved. There is a full spectrum of emotions outside of rationality and self satisfaction and I have to say this book does it well. It definitely reminds me of The Trial by Kafka, you keep reading to the end , hoping for clarity if not a happy ending, but that never comes. Frankly i should stop whining and be mature about this. Life is complex and indescribable in myriad ways. This book is just a reflection of that reality. I like to think that I have matured in some way by reading this book. It's definitely an experience.
Eksperymenty literackie często bywają trudne do przyswojenia, ale nie w przypadku Can Xue. Ta dziwaczna historia naprawdę potrafi zaintrygować i zachęcić do czytania dalej. Może to właśnie jej specyficzny klimat sprawia, że przyciąga nas jak magnes. Już od samego początku następujące po sobie wydarzenia są bardzo tajemnicze, wprawiając nas w zmieszanie, bo nić łącząca wszystkie przedstawione sytuacje zdaje się być bardzo cienka. Nie ma tu jasnych odpowiedzi, nie wiemy jak upływa czas, ani gdzie się znajdujemy. Czy bohaterowie istnieją naprawdę czy tylko się nam wydaje? To i wiele pytań zachęca nas, aby wziąć udział w tej podróży.
What a fever dream. I feel like I came out of this book understanding less than when I started. I read this for class, and even the professor was lost.
All the characters behave very irrationally, displaying signs that they’re not completely in their right minds, and there are many hints of Stockholm syndrome within several of the female characters. It’s just bizarre, and certain parts made me upset, especially with the past conductor casually raping all the female passengers, and that problematic behavior going unaddressed.
I feel like the message of this book was lost on me.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
I admit I didn't understand the meaning of the book. The train seemed to be a metaphor for life with nothing but oblivion at the end and everybody sleeping through it and wearing masks. The message I took away is what Belle told Birdie about not presuming you understand anyone's motives. However reviewer Tom pointed out that the author's family's time in the camps could be the metaphor with the author the conductor that locks characters into their train car. That makes the story more interesting to me.
This might be Xue's most accessible book. It's still full of the shadowy events, still full of the mutating characters, both in a metaphorical sense literal sense, that make her writing unmistakable. But this time the narrative is concise, tightly structured, you could even say plotted, even as the strange pleasures of reading Xue are preserved intact. A great introduction to her work.
This book has VIBES. Dark, but not creepy or melancholy... more like moving through a thick, obscuring fog. Even though it is short, it feels dense. I fear that I read it too quickly, because I was so drawn in.