Bajos fondos

by Can Xue, Tyra Díez (Translator)

Bajos fondos es una asombrosa fábula contemporánea cargada del temperamento experimental y filosófico presente en toda la narrativa de Can Xue, una de las voces más relevantes e innovadoras de la literatura china actual. En ella, Wei Qi, una carismática rata que ha sido desahuciada del valle de sus ancestros, nos relata sus peripecias en el extenso barrio de chabolas donde se ve obligada a subsistir.

Una crónica singular en la que conviven en sintonía el lirismo y lo absurdo, que surge del crudo paisaje del arrabal y de los vínculos erráticos que va forjando con sus habitantes, humanos o alimañas, seres vivos o espectros, atados irremediablemente a las duras condiciones que los bajos fondos les imponen, a medio camino entre la resignación y la esperanza.

Genres: Short Stories, China, Fiction, Asia, Asian Literature, Chinese Literature, Collections

128 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2020

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

[♑︎♑︎♑︎ ♑︎♑︎♑︎ · Rating 5 out of 5]

With Can Xue I need to let go of my normal requirement that sentences need to make sense or be related in any way to what came before or after them, and further, I need to let go of any expectation that I am an equal partner in this particular writer-reader relationship; instead, I'm a toy dachshund being led along a broken sidewalk, a little too fast and with a collar that's a little too tight, and all I can do is to run along on my stumpy legs, tip-tip-tip-tip-tip, until I get to the end, where I might be fed a little treat if I did my best to keep up, and if I didn't stop to sniff feces or flowers, either one, along the way.

[Jaidee · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.25 "creative yes but I don't like it" stars !!

Thank you to Netgalley, the author and translators, and Yale University Press. I am providing an honest review. This was released May 2020 and longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2021.

I got to 37 percent and just had to stop. Continuing forward would not be fair to the author, the book or to me. The novella takes up the first third of the tome. "I live in the Slums" is about a cognizant rodent that survives in a dystopian slum and philosophizes and has ongoing existential crises while trying to survive. This was so bloody loooooooooooong and although I could distantly appreciate this piece I just wanted it done. I read two further short stories where I had the same subjective experience ....a group of magpies are killed off slowly...and an avoidant cicada exists and is admired....

I just cannot do this so I am stopping. This was not an awful reading experience but it was not even a fair experience. The prose and translation are well done. Upwards and onwards...

This will sit on my 2.5 star shelf not because it was an ok reading experience but I can understand why this is a creative and interesting (for others) book.

[Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer · Rating 3 out of 5]

She had looked forward to being in a large building of uncertain design and groping her way into a strange room

This book has been longlisted for the International Booker Prize. It is a collection of short stories by an author not afraid of analysing and promoting her own work – like many famous sports and acting stars she is fond of talking of herself in the third person, placing herself in legendary company and criticising the inadequacies of those who have not yet reached the same level of appreciation of her genius.

Like though those stars she has some justification for her views – her work is widely regarded as already being under consideration for a Nobel Prize.

Many of the stories in this collection are available on line – so to get an idea of her work, I read those, and then, it seemed appropriate to allow the author to review her own work (and capture my own reaction to it) in the words of each story.

Our Human Neighbours
http://www.conjunctions.com/online/ar...

baffled, she asked me, “It’s impossible to understand what’s going on in people’s minds, isn’t it?” I absolutely agreed with her. I certainly couldn’t understand what I had just experienced

The Old Cicada
https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/a...

… his expression complicated by his bizarre thoughts.

Crow Mountain
https://www.asymptotejournal.com/fict...

you gave me such a bizarre experience. Now I really wanted to go home

Euphoria
http://www.conjunctions.com/print/art...

So she was puzzled most of the time. It was OK to be puzzled, but she did long to be oriented

Venus
http://www.conjunctions.com/print/art...

You don’t understand. You don’t get it.” Her cousin waved his hand, revealing his annoyance.

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 3 out of 5]

Longlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize

In my mind, a voice kept asking, What in the world happened? I didn’t know. Really didn’t know. Everything was baffling.
...
So she was puzzled most of the time. It was OK to be puzzled, but she did long to be oriented.

I Live in the Slums is a collection of stories from Can Xue (pseudonym for Deng Xiaohua) translated by Karen Gernant and Chen Ziping.

This is Book 10/13 for me from the International Booker Prize longlist. I commented on book 9, Summer Brother, that the blurb was a little misleading (a good thing as I preferred the actual book). Here the blurb includes:

Can Xue’s stories observe no obvious conventions of plot or characterization. That is the only rule they follow. Instead, they tend to limn a disordered and poetic state given structure by philosophical wonder and emotional rigor.

which is much closer to the reader’s experience and from past experience of the author, she likely wrote herself.

Can Xue certainly has deserved international recognition. The same website that correctly called Louise Gluck as the 2020 Nobel Prize winner - profitability for me as one of only two people to place a bet with Ladbrokes on this - based on books checked-out from the library to which the Swedish Academy members have access, also had Can Xue as a likely shortlistee. But her biggest fan does seem to be herself based on interviews, which I’m never sure are or are not partly tongue in cheek:

Speaking of her pseudonym in the third person she has said (https://www.asymptotejournal.com/inte...

Can Xue's works are truly exceptional; I feel that the most important skill my translators can have is to read the original intensively, thereby having a thorough grasp of the deep underlying humor and general feel of the language in my works. How precisely they express something in their translations is closely connected with their power to feel and their ability to grasp logic, because these kinds of fictions have already surpassed the profundity of philosophy.

My work belongs to an especially advanced kind of literature, far more ahead of its time than Kafka was to his readers in his day.

The author has placed herself in the line of Dante, Bruno Schulz, Kafka, Borges and Calvino ("My literary works are the same as theirs: every piece has a solution, a taut emotional logic", interview in Bomb (https://bombmagazine.org/articles/can...). She also acknowledges Shakespeare, Cervantes, Goethe, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and the Bible.

And has admonished her readers:

“Reading my fiction requires a certain creativity. This particular way of reading has to be more than just gazing at the accepted meanings of the text on a literal level, because you are reading messages sent out by the soul, and your reading is awakening your soul into communication with the author's...Most of my readers stop at the level of “dream reading,” which is still a conventional way of reading.

I have previously read two of her novels, both translated into English by Annelise Finegan, and felt I didn’t quite get to, let alone past, dream reading:

The Last Lover (2014)- winner of Best Translated Book Award for 2015, as well as being longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize (forerunner of the International Booker):
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Love in the New Millennium (2018), longlisted for the 2019 Man Booker International:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Other Can Xue translations which I haven’t read include Blue Light in the Sky (2006), Five Spice Street (2009), Vertical Motion (2011), and Frontier (2017), all translated, as it this, by Karen Gernant and Chen Zipin, as well as earlier translation by the team of Ronald R. Janssen and Jian Zhang.

The 16 stories in I Live in the Slums were published in the original between 1996 to 2018, and several have been previously published in English translation, most notably in Conjunctions Indeed I think only 4.8 (Catfish Pit, Lu-er’s Worries, I am a Willow Tree, The Outsiders and The Queen, plus 4/5ths of The Story of the Slums) are new in English translation.

The first, Story of the Slums (original publication 2006-7, 85pp), is the longest, at c.85 pages a novella, written in five parts that were published serially originally. It is narrated by a creature somewhere between a rat and a rabbit, but who seems to reject that identity (echoes of Kafka’s Metamorphosis?)

Then what was I? People called me “Rat,” but I wasn’t an ordinary rat. I was much larger. I was a maverick, a loner. I had only faint memories of my parents and wasn’t interested in the opposite sex, and so I wouldn’t have descendants. I was a thing that looked like a rat but wasn’t a rat. I was a pilgarlic who had sponged off others on stoves in the slums and had carelessly fallen into the tunnel under the slums.

The story that follows sends them on a Dantesque journey through the slums, which she tries and fails to escape with stairs into a city of glass above, and then down into the tunnels beneath, infused with their memories of their ancestral home on the grasslands. One interpretation of the story would be an allegory for urbanisation and development, although I suspect that would be a mere dream reading.

And it features a rich cast including a house-mouse with a taste for human flesh, a portrait that comes alive, brothers each of whose eyes look at their other eye rather than outwards, an eclectic collection of old people, a wicked goat, a vicious scorpion who can grow four times in size, a boy with a magical spinning-top, poisonous ants, roosters that emit thermal radiation, a flying squirrel with particularly smelly farts, and much more.

As often in Can Xue’s work, the narrator seems as baffled at times what is going on as the reader (What in the world happened? I didn’t know. Really didn’t know. Everything was baffling), indeed they don’t really even try to make logical sense of it all (The slums were my home, and also the hardest place for me to understand. Generally speaking, I didn’t make a deliberate effort to understand it.)

If the identity of the narrator of Story of the Slums is unclear even to them, Our Human Neighbours (2016, 14pp) spells it out in line oen: I’m a middle-aged magpie who lives in the suburbs. And the next story The Old Cicada (2010, 9pp) while narrated in the third person, focuses on a near neighbour of the magpies (albeit that story was written 6 years later), the elder of the cicadas.

The Swamp (2013, 28pp) has its protagonist, Ayuan, attempting to locate the ancient swamp that lies beneath the modern city, through a series of surreal adventures, before concluding the swamp is wherever you wish it to be, and was one of my favourites in the collection.

She sat down and asked Ayuan to buy her a drink. Her mind was somewhere else while she stared at the wineglass.
“They put too much pressure on him,” she said.
“Do you mean Liuma?” Ayuan asked nervously.
“No, I mean myself. I always refer to myself as ‘he.’ Although this is a little frightening to ‘him,’ it also has an advantage, for ‘he’ can go all out in struggles. Back in my home village, this isn’t unusual. If a person goes all out in struggling with a crocodile, the person is likely to win.”

“What time is it now?”
“Two o’clock in the afternoon.”
“It was night when I arrived. Why am I still here?”
“You’re the one who’s been hanging around. These empty bottles are all yours.”
“Who are those folks?” he asked, pointing at two sneaky people wearing white straw hats.
“Lower your voice a little. They’re outsiders who raise turtles. They arrived in the morning and they’ve been waiting for you ever since.”

Sin (1996, 16pp) is the earliest story and is, by Can Xue’s standards, relatively conventional - a story of a woman whose father left her a mysterious box (when he gave it to Mother, he said very seriously that the contents of the box were confidential. He meant to open it himself when I was grown up, for it contained something important having to do with my future) but which remains unopened and she forgets until a cousin who the family dubbed ‘Killer’ hints that it may contain details of a family ‘sin’ passed down the generations.

The Other Side of the Partition (2018 - but actually the English translation was published before the original in 2016, 7pp) is the shortest in the collection, about a mysterious kitchen that seems to exist on the other side of the partition wall to the communal kitchen in a residence, only accessible at midnight.

Shadow People (2010, 17pp) has similarities to Story of the Slums as people in the narrator’s city, fleeing the blazing heat from the sun, retreat indoors and gradually become literal shadow people (At first, because of inner extrusion, people gradually became thin, and then even thinner, until they turned into shapes like flagpoles. Although there were no flags, a little something did seem to be fluttering at the top—neither quite like people’s hair nor quite like hats. Later, even these flagpoles retreated shamefacedly indoors. … Where had the people gone? We hadn’t gone underground, nor were we hiding inside the hollow walls. If you carefully investigated the foot of the bed, the back of the bookcase, the corners of the room, the backs of the doors, and other similar places, you would discover pale shadows flexing and twisting ) although the narrator fails to find acceptance from their shadow compatriots as the narrator has a corporeal tail.

Crow Mountain (2011, 12pp) has the narrator attempting to enter a building that at face-value appears to be a small municipal office, but which is referred to as Crow Mountain and seems to transform once inside.

Catfish Pit (2012, 18pp) is a neighbourhood of two-story dwellings due for demolition to be replaced with a skyscraper. The only resident not initially anxious is Widow Wang who is too busy making her kimchi.

“What do you think of the proposed compensation?” the young man asked.
“Fine. Whatever. Please leave.”
The man stole away like a cat. Bending her head, Woman Wang continued working. She added greengage plums, beans, gherkins, Sichuan pickles, and other things to the kimchi crock.

Euphoria (2013, 10pp) has the elderly but euphoric Ms. Wen exploring a building, from the outside ostensibly a 6-story place for senior citizen’s activities (chess, card-playing) but on the inside one that becomes stranger and stranger with my mysterious rooms and one day becomes a bungalow shaped like an octopus and on the next visit has twenty-five floors (and on the top floor the only stairs lead upwards), so she was puzzled most of the time. It was OK to be puzzled, but she did long to be oriented.. The story rather feels a metaphor for the readers experience of Can Xue’s own work, although Ms. Wen benefits at times from a tape-recorded voice that helps explain where she is.

Lu-er’s Worries (2012, 18pp) has a teenage boy concerned about whether he’s living up to his father’s expectations, whether village life is really for him … and the fact that half of the local mountain has disappeared overnight leaving a vertiginous drop, and no-one else seems to have noticed.

Her Old Home (2013, 18pp) has a 55 year-old woman returning after many years to visit her old home from 20 years earlier, to find the person she sold it to has bought copies of all her old furniture and is essentially trying to live her old life.

I Am A Willow Tree (2013, 17pp), as the title suggests is another with a non-human narrator, a dying, young willow tree who discusses the failings of the gardener responsible for his care with the other plants in the garden (the strange thing was, as far as I can tell, none of the other plants complained about him. Rather they considered their injuries badges of glory).

The Outsiders (2012, 19pp) has a girl, during a snowstorm (oddly she leaves no footprints in the snow) visiting a village of outsider, Mosquito Village, near to some tombs including her brother’s, and where she encounters a creature that seems a form of “rat” (echoes of the Stories in the Slum).

The Queen (2018, 24pp) is the most recent story, and tells of a woman living alone in the wilderness outside a village who is venerated by the fascinated locals. She is the daughter of, so people say, a knife-sharpener who left the village, came back rich and returned calling himself king (after the old king and his queen died, the Wang villagers quite naturally began calling the couple’s only child Queen) and the story that follows get increasingly, well, CanXuesque.

Venus (2013, 13pp) starts Qiu Yiping, a thirteen-year-old middle-school student, was secretly in love with her thirty-five-year-old cousin with the whimsical name Xuwu. An orphan whose parents had died long ago, he was a scientist researching hot-air balloons, and he seems more in love with his balloon and his claim that when he flies he almost reaches Venus.

Overall: Voice wise I slightly preferred Annelise Finegan’s translations, where she lives distinctive Chinese onomatopoeia (typically doubled) rendered phonetically in English, which I missed here. But I prefer Can Xue in the short-story form where the sense of bafflement is more bearable.

That said this is perhaps a collection to dip into rather than read every story - The Swamp, The Old Cicada, Shadow People, Crow Mountain and The Queen would be a good sampler, some of which can be found online.

3 stars.

[Emmeline · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 stars

Well, that was painful.

I suppose I could have rounded up, because there’s almost certainly something going on here, and despite the high level of gibberish there’s a palpable sense of place, a surreal, fictitious, shifting place …but I do not read more than 300 pages for a sense of place.

Can Xue was new to me, and I can’t say I wasn’t warned. But the comparisons to Borges, Kafka, Calvino and this collection being largely focused on non-human voices, the plants and animals of the slum, tempted me to try it. I can’t see any similarity to Borges, myself. Borges has impeccable logic, even though you can often only find the solution to his puzzles through paradox. I have read only a little Calvino and Kafka, and it’s true I didn’t always understand, but I certainly enjoyed the journey more. I’m prepared to accept that this may be cultural, and may be my own limitations.

Can Xue’s style is frenetic, disjointed, violent, random, full of non sequiturs and strange colloquialisms and endless mid-sentence self-interrogations. Sometimes, in spite of itself, some meaning, or some implication shines through. The proof is in the fact that I actually read all these stories, even though I hated all of them bar two (“The Old Cicada,” which read more simply, like a fable, and “Her Old Home,” whose conceit of a woman who sells her home and then goes back to visit the woman who bought it and discovers it’s been decorated exactly as it was when she lived there was fascinating enough to pull me through).

My biggest complaint was in the writing, or the translation. I don’t know who to blame. Random selection:

“They could not imagine what the palace would be like if the queen were not there. The queen should live in the palace forever. Was this the difference between her and the old king? The villagers didn’t want to probe the question. They venerated their queen, loved their queen (of course, she was their queen!): this was enough. Hey! Just look at the queen’s nimble footsteps: Wasn’t it like flying?”

“All of a sudden, the girl prodded the hell money with a bamboo stick, and the burning pieces of paper flew toward Daisy’s face. Daisy’s face hurt from the heat. She covered her face with her sleeve and retreated.”

I wrote better than that when I was eight years old. God, I hated all the stupid exclamation marks and question marks and overused words and things happening “suddenly” in this book. To me it sounded like the worst kind of translationese, but it's possible the author sounds that bad in the original, I suppose.

Had it been nicely written, I might have had the patience to piece together my own interpretations. Or had there been a nice scholarly introduction to give a person some kind of indication of what might be going on, and if what might be going on had sounded interesting, I might have been more forgiving of the leaden prose.

As it is, I’m sorry book, but it’s not me, it’s you.

[Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Chinese experimental author Can Xue is like the Lady Gaga of modern Chinese literature.
- Harvard Review

Can Xue is an avant-garde writer who is mentioned sometimes as a candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her stories are described as surreal, nonrational, dream-like; or on the other hand, incoherent, bizarre, impossible to make sense of. Most of her work has not been translated into English but I Live in the Slums, a novella and a collection of short stories, has just been named to the International Booker Prize longlist.

(Can Xue also has a delightful self-puffery streak; a fun game of "Who Said It: Zlatan Ibrahimovic or Can Xue?" could be had. "I can't help but laugh at how perfect I am." - Zlatan. "Can Xue's works are truly exceptional, these kinds of fictions have already surpassed the profundity of philosophy." - Can Xue.)

She has said that both she and her readers are involved in the creation of meaning and interpretation of her works. Readers should work (hard, mind you, she doesn't like to be disappointed by us) to actively create meaning and perform the creative process while reading. With all this in mind, I curiously opened this volume and read the novella that begins the book, titled "Story of the Slums."

This novella features a rat ("I'm not a rat" - Rat) existing on the margins of a deprived community, shuttling from house to house, abused and victimized by violence, with all manner of bizarre settings and actions described with no rational cause and effect. Strange, but not lacking in the ability to have themes and meaning taken from it. What lines I jotted down from the story:

*)What in the world happened? I didn't know. Really didn't know. Everything was baffling.
*)I couldn't say I understood her. I didn't. I seemed to understand every word of that dialect, but when I put them together, I had no idea what she was saying."
*)My tangled relationship with people was probably the main reason I continued staying in the slums.
*)"Will the little thing die?"
"No way. It's a born survivor."
*)People were so fickle! I thought, we probably aren't the same.
*)The slums were my home, and also the hardest place for me to understand. Generally speaking, I didn't make a deliberate effort to understand it. Destiny drove me from one place to another.
*)I endured, I endured.

The themes I get from it are of existing apart, existing as an outsider who doesn't fit in or understand people and things around them, indeed is often baffled by what goes on. Existing as someone who is commonly treated badly. Yet, being a survivor, a tough thing that strives and survives. These themes seem to me to continue being present in the stories that continue the book.

In "Our Human Neighbors" a magpie couple are set apart (and above) the rest of their flock, and as all the other birds disappear to a seeming grim end, they alone survive. "It's impossible to understand what's going on in people's minds, isn't it?" asks our narrator's wife. "How dare you doubt your own species?" thunders our narrator's father. "When I tried to get close to them, they looked as if they were saying there was no need for me to exist in this world," says our narrator.

And it continues. In "The Swamp", whose narrator tries to find a geographic location hidden from him, he's told "What you mean is certainly not what I mean! God, why have I kept talking with you all along? How could you ever understand me? Impossible!" In "The Other Side of the Partition" the story's narrator is excited to jump into the darkness on the other side of a dividing line from all her family and community, despite being caused considerable physical pain the first time, she survives it and goes right back. In "Shadow People", our narrator is the only being who consists of more than a mere shadow, "I couldn't touch him, either... I belonged to the shadow people, and yet I was different from the others." He is told, "You'd better lie on your stomach on the floor and not move. Then no one can see you. If they can't see you, they won't be annoyed."

Despite being set apart and often abused, these outsider characters actually seem to have something that makes them superior to their supposed peers. In "Our Human Neighbors", our magpies have made the best and most cleverly formed nest, by far. In "Shadow People" our narrator decides that, "He had spoken that way because he envied me. I - a shadow with a tail." In "Crow Mountain", it's the narrator's friend who is different, and "The path she'd taken had everything - flowers, birds, cherries, chestnuts. I, on the other hand, was surrounded by darkness."

"I Am A Willow Tree" I interpreted as a description of what it can feel like to be an intellectual - like, say, Can Xue. A willow tree is planted into a garden with many other kinds of plants but does not receive the same nourishment and needs-meeting from the gardener. When rain falls, it does not get the same enjoyment, and from the shallow soil it cannot draw the same sustenance. The other plants all sing the gardener's praises, but not the willow tree, and in turn the gardener always seems to be keeping a suspicious eye on the willow, and at one point chops off part of a root and fills in the hole with dirt.

The gardener can be seen here as the government, the other plants in the garden the masses, the willow is the intellectual - set apart from the masses, different, tolerated by the government but sometimes the recipient of its violence (the chopping away of a root and filling in its space with dirt being particularly ominous). "I had no way out. My way out lay in thinking of a way out. It lay in 'thinking' itself," muses the willow, while its roots reach far down and contact some unknown region, stimulating its growth. It sometimes wonders if it can survive in this garden, but as is the book's general theme, it endures and lives.

"Her Old Home" is an examination of looking backwards at history. A woman left her old home very sick, and recovered health in her new environment. Twenty years later she is invited back by her home's new owner, who has recreated the home's interior exactly, and who even looks like her in pictures at places the woman remembers from her past. She doesn't remember the details of this place perfectly, but there is a warm comfort there and it tries to really draw her in and keep her there. "You don't need to fully understand us. All you need is to feel our love, that's enough," says a memory/person, in a most warm and inviting manner. But beware the dangers of sentimentality, though it may feel good. She was not healthy here, looking backwards toward an idealized history is dangerous and self-deceiving, and in the end she vows to not indulge it anymore.

All in all these are very interesting stories, though I feel it would be best to read them spaced further apart in time. Do not gorge on Can Xue, the brain is not a natural at reading stories like these where rationality and logical patterns are frequently absent, and it can become tiring. Each story given space and time with the reader, however, intrigues.

[Isa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I actually made a coherent review for this book as a staff pick but my longer thoughts on this are that there is something so frenetic about the way that Can Xue writes that is disorienting but in a good way. Perhaps it has more to do with my love affair with cities and the deep, deep relationship cities have with postmodern art forms (Although Can Xue apparently rejects postmodernity, but I digress--), but the stories were fun to read and definitely left me sitting down for awhile trying to figure shit out (This was a futile endeavour as Can Xue's work doesn't leave much room for figuring anything out).

The slum she writes about is not a definite place, and the entirety of the area remains largely unnamed. Despite the anonymity, however, she creates a world that is tangible while still seeming to exist somewhere in between the fantastic and the physical. The stories are told by a large array of narrators both human and nonhuman as they coexist together, trying to figure out what it means to relate to one another. This isn't a pretty picture though, it is the slum after all, and the existentialist questions (and dread, I suppose) is compounded by graphic descriptions of violence and body horror as well the struggles of hardship and poverty.

Time is also unreliable here, where the buildings and its inhabitants exist in the tension between modernity and tradition. I say this with a caveat, however, my observation of the lack of a definitive time may be more of an affect of Western writing rather than Asian. I cannot speak for Chinese writing in particular as I'm not terribly fluent in the literature, but the themes of slums -- and entire lives, by extension -- being upended to make way for wealthier real estate is something Io'm more familiar with. This is explicitly captured in "Catfish Pit." What I'm saying is...while the stories may not be tied to a specific time, I think trying to situate it in that fashion is futile.

It's not hard to say that there are many contradictions in this book. There is tenderness and love in the muck. The gore and general grossness becomes almost bucolic. The only thing that one can grasp onto is her nebulous world. It's a dizzying yet exciting read that is testament to Can Xue's experimental style and her love of binaries and opposing forces.

[Areeb Ahmad (Bankrupt_Bookworm) · Rating 2 out of 5]

“At this moment, I so much wanted to be transformed into one of the Shadow People. I really admired these guys who swayed to and fro. Even their sadness was sublime. If I died some day and became a nut-brown strip hanging on the wall and thus didn’t occupy any space, how wonderful that would be!”

For Deng Xiaohua, Can Xue is more than just a pseudonym: an avatar of sorts, a separate identity. She refers to it in the third person in interviews, loftily asserting that she is ahead of everyone else and there is no writer like her in the world. So having read this collection of stories translated by Chen Zeping & Karen Gernant, I will admit that I am inadequate to make much sense of this "advanced kind of literature" that's "too ahead of the curve". I struggled to read it and struggled to understand it. I was not adequately rewarded. The blurb is conceited enough to make me think she wrote it herself.

Weird really doesn't being to describe the stories. There are chimeric shape-shifting buildings that defy physics, a city of shadow people, an eerie bog that can materialize anywhere, ruminating cicadas & thoughtful magpies. She manipulates space and identity in intriguing ways. I found her language simple & her writing style abrupt. Absurd is commonplace, events occur at random, violence is around the corner. Her disjointed narratives are usually vague, littered with casual outbursts and non-sequiturs. There clearly is an audience for this, but it isn't me. I am happy to have put it behind me.




(I am on the 2021 Booker International Shadow Panel and I received a finished copy from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.)

[Valentin Marcu · Rating 4 out of 5]

First shot of contemporary Chinese fiction and boy does it feel alien, but an alien that has a humanoid shape and feels oddly familiar.

Don't expect conventional plots, characters or an order of things as you're not going to get them. What you ll get instead Is a collection of short stories that lean more towards poetry and philosophy (a blend of western existentialism and a Chinese philosophy that I'm soo unfamiliar with.)

But if you ever feel like a nasty rat living in a dump who cannot help questioning its existence or the existence of things overall besides being extremely busy struggling to survive all the mess around them: the first short story (also possibly the longest one, also the best one) a go.

And if you want to roleplay- read it as I did while travelling by an extremely dirty train that I have to take on a daily basis 🙃. It really adds to the experience. (Or idk, don't clean your house for 2 months for authenticity).

[Gregory Duke]

The titular story is so Dantesque and odd and distancing, and yet it has this loose, uncanny humor to offset its relentlessness that kept me intrigued. I got through half of the collection, and I will read more of Can Xue's work at some point, but I don't have the mental fortitude to force myself to even just tell myself that I'm processing these pages to any reasonable capacity, even if that may amount to Xue's hated "dream reading." College work takes enough out of me as is. Strange that the first two books from this year's International Booker Prize longlist have led me astray. This is significantly more accomplished than the Vuillard though. No comparison. I just wish I could more easily feel what Sontag does.

[warisha ‧₊˚]

on hold
No bc I still don’t know why the house rat who is actually a human, was nibbling away at the old mans feet and the old man went on with his life like nothing happened…?
Is this a metaphor???? Do I have to correlate this to something bc else?? Or is that just Chinese storytelling???

[elena · Rating 4 out of 5]

"El enano entonces me llamó “rata”. No me hacía ninguna gracia ese nombre. Qué iba a ser yo una rata, si era mucho más grande" al final todos vivimos en base a nuestra perspectiva

[Charlie Corn · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's so hard to give a star rating for books like this. As with previous Can Xue works, it's hugely thought-provoking and admirable, and the translations are excellent. Can Xue is hard work though - not just the often terrifying imagery, but mostly the fact that nothing is certain. Time, names, geography, the physicality of objects and beings... everything is confusing and untrustworthy. It's hugely impressive stuff, but it's hard to say it's an enjoyable read.

'Sin' was the highlight for me, and that may be because as the oldest story in the collection it was the most tangible, a fairly straight horror story about a locked box. The Story of the Slums is undoubtedly the major work in the collection though, relentless in pace and subject but thoughtful and even tender in moments.

Sadly the publishers have let the side down with the underwhelming and almost cheap-looking cover art.

[Marina PC · Rating 5 out of 5]

A mi me ha encantado, igual porque hacía tiempo que no leía un libro con tanta imaginación. Es un libro sobre una rata que vive en unas chabolas y como experimenta el mundo desde su perspectiva. Hay topos, enanos, cosas súper raras y magia. No es un libro con un sentido lógico ni una trama fija, pero si es un libro corto para viajar a un mundo diferente, para nada convencional. A todo esto, añadir que está muy bien escrito, y usa metáforas y otros recursos de una forma que me encanta, cargados de sencillez. Si te gustan los libros kafkianos ( así rollo la metamorfosis, aunque ese no me encanto) te va a gustar. 🐀🐀

[Kevin Kindred · Rating 1 out of 5]

Can Xue is a writer of some renown, so I assume there is something of quality in this insufferable little book, and that it’s simply too smart for me to find. I didn’t enjoy a single minute of reading this.

[Kaden]

The first story was truly novel to me. All the stories are quite strange, I like it.

[Sini · Rating 4 out of 5]

De Chinese schrijfster Can Xue (1953) wordt vaak als Nobelprijskandidaat getipt. Bovendien laat zij zich inspireren door kanjers als Kafka, Borges en Dante. Wat zichtbaar wordt in haar ongeremde en groteske fantasie en haar adembenemende visioenen van helse onderwerelden. Ook haar bizar- originele en eigenzinnige schrijftalent is opvallend. Net als haar barokke verbeeldingskracht die alles op losse schroeven zet. Bijvoorbeeld in "I live in the slums", een bizarre verhalenbundel die de lezer voor tientallen tantaliserende raadsels stelt.

Can Xue doet -zoals veel Chinese schrijvers- niet aan logische plotlijnen of psychologische verklaringen. Haar personages en hun belevenissen zijn daardoor zeer enigmatisch. Bovendien verkiest zij fantastische grilligheid en macabere grotesken boven realisme en waarschijnlijkheid. Al haar verhalen zijn dus vol van ongrijpbare vreemdheid en bizarre verrassingen. En precies daardoor zijn ze heel stimulerend voor mijn brein en mijn fantasie. Net als de verhalen van Kafka en Borges.

In een van Can Xue’s verhalen zien we twee kleine jongetjes, die gefascineerd worden door onbestemde, voor volwassenen onhoorbare stemmen aan de andere kant van een keukenmuur. Maar we doorgronden nooit de realiteit achter die keukenmuur. Is dat misschien een parallelle wereld met onzichtbare koks? Maar hoezo dan? In een ander verhaal lezen we hoe een klif verdwijnt en er alleen leegte overblijft, en hoe een meisje een elegante salto maakt in die leegte. Maar we snappen niet hoe dat kan en wat dat betekent. Al worden die leegte en die salto wel poëtisch en raadselachtig fraai beschreven. Net als het magische, alomtegenwoordige, maar onbevattelijke moeras of vijver vol herinneringen, waar een personage uit weer een ander verhaal vergeefs naar zoekt.

Ook is er soms sprake van een raadselachtig geluk, voorbij alle conventies. Zoals het geluk van een wilg, die weigert om water te drinken. En die met zijn wortels tast naar onbekende nieuwe regionen en voedingsbronnen. Wat onderdeel is van een eigenzinnig besluit: “I’d better learn to seize an alternative happiness in being parched, tense, and tormented”. Dat lijkt in de verte op Kafka’s verhaal “De Hongerkunstenaar”, waarin de hoofdpersoon zich doodhongert omdat hij het voedsel van de wereld niet lust. Maar wat betekent Kafka’s verhaal? Of dat van Can Xue? Hoe ziet die “alternative happiness” eruit? Wat moet ik mij voorstellen bij het geluk van een uitgedroogde wilg? Of bij het steeds dieper tasten van zijn wortels? En hoe kan het dat het zoeken naar dit onvoorstelbare geluk mij zo ontroert?

In nog een ander verhaal zien we hoe een vrouw dwaalt door een voortdurend metamorfoserend gebouw met continu veranderende trappen, deuren, kamers en vloeren. Ook lezen we hoe zij zelf eveneens metamorfoseert. We leven bovendien verbaasd mee met haar euforie over al die metamorfoses: “One could enter into different things and become the thing itself”. Maar die euforie blijft een “profound mystery”, voor haar en de lezer. Net als de ongelimiteerde vrijheid van gedachten die zij dankzij die metamorfoses ervaart. En ook alle andere verhalen zijn van zulke maffe mysteriën doordesemd. Mysteriën die je niet moet willen begrijpen, en niet als symbolen of allegorieën moet willen ontraadselen, maar gewoon met open oog moet ondergaan.

Hoogst merkwaardig is bijvoorbeeld het lange openingsverhaal “Story of the slums”. De vagebonderende en thuisloze ik- figuur dwaalt daarin van het ene onbestemde huis naar het andere, in een ondefinieerbare achterbuurt ergens in een naamloze stad. In die huizen slaapt hij dan steeds op een kachel of fornuis. Dat is al tamelijk verbazend. Maar nog verbazender is dat de ik- figuur door andere personages ineens een rat wordt genoemd. Dat verrast de ik- figuur eveneens. Maar hij kan daar geen duidelijk ik- beeld tegenover zetten: “What was I? Was this a decent question?”. En zelfs: “I wasn’t a person. I could not speak”. En die existentiële onzekerheid wordt alleen maar groter. Want later zegt hij “I was a thing that looked like a rat but wasn’t a rat”. Bovendien zien anderen hem weer als een slang. Of als een ongewoon grote huismuis, die – net als de andere overmatig grote huismuizen in die achterbuurt- steeds allerlei mensen in de benen bijt.

Een ik- figuur zonder spraak, zonder duidelijk ik, zonder duidelijke vorm, die zichzelf ziet als ratachtig ding dat geen rat is….. Hoe wonderlijk. Verwijst dit naar de Chinese folklore, waarin veel magie en dierenverhalen voorkomen? Verwijst dit naar “het Jaar van de Rat”, dat het begin markeert van de Chinese dierenriemcyclus en een frisse start symboliseert Chinese dierenriemjaren? Verwijst dit daarmee dan ook naar het aanpassingsvermogen en de vindingrijkheid die de essentie belichamen van dit dierenriemteken? En misschien ook naar het aanpassingsvermogen dat de ik- figuur nodig heeft in de voortdurend veranderende achterbuurt waarin de omstandigheden steeds metamorfoseren? Of verwijst dit juist naar Kafka’s "Die Verwandlung", waarin de hoofdpersoon veranderd is in een kever? Is de ik- figuur misschien een gemarginaliseerde mens die zijn menselijkheid verloren heeft? Ook al omdat hij verweesd blijkt, geen voorouders meer heeft, van een verloren magisch “homeland” droomt, en nachtmerries heeft over kooien waarin zijn voorouders een voor een stierven? Is hij misschien een outcast die door de maatschappij is verstoten? Is hij de protagonist in een surrealistische nachtmerrie? Is hij wellicht een parodistische versie van Dante, die dwaalt door een parodie op de Danteske hel? Of is die ik-loze ik-figuur dat alles tegelijk en meer? En mede daardoor vooral een raadsel dat ons onoplosbaar in ons gezicht staart? Ik neig naar dat laatste. En vooral daarom blijft dit verhaal maar spoken in mijn hoofd.

De raadsels vermenigvuldigen zich bovendien als een dolle. Zo zijn er zomaar ineens doorzichtige mensen in glazen huizen, of enigmatische tunnels en onderwerelden waarin de ik- figuur verzeild raakt. Waaronder ook weer tunnels lijken te kronkelen. En ik zeg “onder”, maar onderwereld en bovenwereld lijken voortdurend van plaats te verwisselen. Ook zijn er hutten waar onze ogen geen vat op krijgen: “Their design had totally ignored the way eyes function”. En veel van die verbazende taferelen worden zonder enige verbazing bekeken, met een welhaast kinderlijke naïveteit. Alsof het totaal ongewone volkomen gewoon is geworden. Wat ons als lezer dan weer extra verbaast.

Op andere momenten echter is dit verhaal buitensporig grotesk. Bijvoorbeeld door de beschrijving van een kolossale en uitermate griezelige schorpioen. En vooral door wat er met dat beest gebeurt: “Just as I was closing my eyes, I saw a terrifying scene: outside the window that furtive black cat was eating the red scorpion! This was so scary, so sickening! The scorpion’s back leg was still struggling outside his mouth. The cat twisted his neck a few times and swallowed the whole scorpion. This scene was so ugly that I now was fully awake. All at one, I sensed that my entire body had become eyes, for not only could I see ahead, but I could also see behind myself, and not only could I see the exterior, but I could also see the interior. For example, I saw the scorpion continuing to struggle in the cat’s belly. And looking at myself, in my abdominal cavity an eye was wrapped in membrane- the very eye that I had swallowed. […] I didn’t dare watch any longer. I closed my eyes. But this was even worse, for I saw so many people and events inside myself”.

Een stuitend tafereel. Maar mij fascineert het. Vooral omdat het zich ontvouwt zodra (en doordat) de ik- figuur zijn ogen sluit. Alsof alles zich vooral in zijn eigen door nachtmerries geteisterde hoofd afspeelt. Of alsof hij niet met open ogen naar die taferelen durft te kijken. Treffend is bovendien dat wat de ik- figuur in zichzelf ziet zelfs nog grotesker is dan het tafereel buiten hem. Terwijl dat tafereel er al voor zorgt dat zijn hele lichaam uit ogen bestaat, ogen die het onmogelijke zien. Zodat hij met zijn hele lichaam kijkt en kijkt, zonder dat te durven, niet bevattend wat hij ziet. Starend naar taferelen binnen en buiten hem, taferelen met alle kenmerken van een onmogelijke droom. Beseffend dat de realiteit zich vaak niet van dromen, hallucinaties en nachtmerries onderscheidt.

En misschien is dat ook wel de manier waarop je Can Xue’s verhalen moet lezen: vol verbazing starend naar het onbegrijpelijke, zonder te willen snappen wat je ziet. Ook de andere verhalen in deze bundel zijn namelijk onuitputtelijk vol van grilligheid. Die soms gruwelijk is en grotesk. Maar soms ook euforiserend: “The cicada’s […] sang from an excess of enthusiasm- because of love, because of the urge to to procreate”. Sommige zinnen zijn bijna haiku- achtige verdichtingen van mijmerend mysterie: “The spider behind the wooden window frame inclined ites head, thinking about this mystery, and reached no conclusion”. Naast alle soms overweldigende verrotting, verval en groteske vervorming is er bovendien vaak onverwacht glanzende schoonheid: “Ordinarily, the sewage looked terrible, and it stank, but when it formed ice it turned beautiful- like an icy black beauty”. En in elk verhaal word je tientallen keren volkomen verrast door dingen die je ook later nooit gaat begrijpen. Soms gebeurt dat zelfs meerdere keren in één zin. Geweldig!

"I live in the slums" geldt als een prima kennismaking met Can Xue. En inderdaad, na deze heerlijk grillige en ongrijpbaar rijke bundel ben ik benieuwd naar haar andere bundels en romans. Helaas zijn die (nog?) niet in het Nederlands vertaald. Maar gelukkig wel in het Engels. En die vertalingen wil ik allemaal lezen, zonder ooit te begrijpen wat ik lees.

[Irene]

No entendí una mierda

[Kimberly Ouwerkerk · Rating 3 out of 5]

What is life like for the rodents, birds, shadows, and trees that share their world with human beings? That must have been the question Can Xue asked herself when she wrote the stories in this collection. The stories show the good and the ugly that happens in the world around us from a different point of view. What all stories in I Live in the Slums have in common is a rich fantasy. You read about swamps of the past, people jumping into holes and disappearing (at the lightning speed of two sentences), and buildings without doors.

My favorite stories are Swamp, I am a willow tree and Our human neighbors. The first one is a fascinating story that I won’t even try to recount. I am pretty sure I only understood part of it, but as I said, it was fascinating. I am a willow tree is about a tree’s survival and its neverending struggle against its lifelong tormentor, the gardener. The willow tree and its thoughts about the gardener’s intentions felt more ‘real’ and human than many human characters in other books. An impressive feat.

Our human neighbors is a fresh and lovely short story that felt light but hits you out of nowhere with references to death. For example: “Could it be that people who were near magpies were all fond of killing? My father said that this woman ‘clearly understood the profound mysteries of the natural world.’ In Father’s eyes, she was almost an irresistible spirit. And so Father sacrificed himself early.” Still, compared to the gloomy story before it (Story of the Slums), it was bright and refreshing.

This also brings me to my only negative point about I Live in the Slums: the first (novel-length) story, Story of the Slums, was such a drag to get through. The story had its moments; I like the dry humor (the ‘wicked goat’ and ‘ruthless mice’) and the descriptions of the slums are so good that I could imagine myself exploring the slums. The events are both intriguing and weird and you just go with the flow without any idea about where the story would lead you next. I would have liked this story collection more if it had started with another story or if this first story had been published as three separate parts.

Of all the stories in this collection, I felt most connected to Shadow people. “Where had the people gone? We hadn’t gone underground, nor were we hiding inside the hollow walls. If you carefully investigated the foot of the bed, the back of the bookcase, the corners of the room, the backs of the doors, and other similar places, you would discover pale shadows flexing and twisting. That’s us, the cowards. Worms hide in the earth. We hide indoors. It seems an odd way to live.” It must be the spur of the moment, but aren’t many of us like shadow people right now? I sure feel like one.

Which brings me to another observation: I think the stories in I Live in the Slums will have a very different meaning for every reader, depending on that person’s point of view and state of mind at the moment they read the story. After many of the stories in this collection, I pretty much sat there realizing I didn’t get them at all, which was fine. Maybe all of them are perfectly clear for someone who knows more about Chinese myths and legends.

In short
I Live in the Slums by Chinese author Can Xue is a mesmerizing short story collection featuring stories from a different perspective with elements from the Chinese culture. Every single story is both mysterious and beautiful in its elegance and descriptions of daily life. It is not a story collection I would recommend to most people, just to a select few that want to experience what else is out there. To whoever decides to read this book: skip the first story and come back for it in the end if you like the other stories.

Many thanks to Yale University Press and NetGalley for a digital ARC of this novel in exchange for an honest review.

[Woraphol Thawornwaranon · Rating 4 out of 5]

ปัญหาคืออ่านเกือบจบเหลืออยู่สองสามเรื่องแล้วเว้นวรรคไปเป็นปี อะไรๆ ที่เคยทดไว้ในหัวมันเลยลืมไปหมด จำได้แค่บรรยากาศครีปๆ เวียร์ดๆ ที่ชอบ ความเซอร์เรียลที่ไม่อินังขังขอบกับพื้นที่และเวลา แล้วก็ธีมร่วมของบางเรื่อง

สองเรื่องสุดท้ายนี่ไม่เข้าใจอะไรเลยสักอย่างเพราะพอกลับมาอ่าน มันปรับตัวตามการเล่าแบบดรีมไลก์ของคุณฉานเสว่ไม่ทันแล้ว รับรู้แต่เรื่องราว เรื่องราวนำไปพบอะไรก็ตามไปพบไปเห็น แต่ภายในหัวไม่สามารถตีความ

แต่งานเขียนของฉานเสว่ก็เป็นอย่างนี้มั้ง เต็มไปด้วยสัญญะ หรือคล้ายเป็นสัญญะหาก (/อาจจะ) ไม่ใช่สัญญะ เป็นเพียงจินตนาการแปลกพิลึก ไม่ก็ภาพความจริงที่เหมือนเหนือจริงซึ่งถูกส่งให้ผู้อ่านอย่างต่อเนื่อง ไม่มีปรานีปราศรัย เวลาที่รู้สึกเหมือนจะจับความหมายไว้อยู่มือ ความหมายก็บินหายไปจากเราซะก่อน

พอจำได้ว่าในเรื่องแรกๆ เราจับได้ถึงธีมของการพลัดถิ่นฐาน ความคิดถึงรากเหง้า ความทรมานจากการเป็นคนนอก มันทำให้ไพล่นึกถึงประวัติของฉานเสว่ซึ่งเคยผ่านยุคนารวม การต้องพลัดบ้านไปอยู่ในที่แปลกต่าง พบเจอธรรมเนียมปฏิบัติแปลกต่าง ตัวเอกในเรื่องชีวิตสลัมจึงไม่ใช่คนไม่ใช่หนู เป็นแค่ตัวอะไรที่คล้ายหนู อาศัยอยู่ในสลัมของเมืองประหลาด ถูก 'ความปกติ' ของที่นั่นทำให้ลำบากทุกข์ยาก และเขาก็โหยหาบ้านอยู่ตลอด

[Josep · Rating 3 out of 5]

La edición de Aristas Martínez de Bajos Fondos aparentemente selecciona 5 historias del original (según entiendo hay más) y las ordena en una especie de unidad. Así pues puede ser una experiencia diferente que leerlo en otros idiomas.

Aunque es una prosa fácil de leer, me ha costado bastante hacerlo. Hay muchas metáforas e imágenes que crean una atmósfera de violencia, desconfianza, inestabilidad, y no soy capaz de entenderlas. No sé muy bien si esto se debe a la distancia cultural, a que es una novela experimental o que yo debería hacer una lectura más esforzada.

Aún así las imágenes muy sugerentes: humanos deshumanizados y animales humanizados, canibalismo que no es, la suciedad, dos pupilas en un ojo… las interpreto subjetivamente, pero no puedo no pensar que seguramente me pierdo algo que la autora quiere transmitir, por desconocimiento y distancia cultural.

Lo dejo en un 3 por estas dificultades. Un 3 a mí mismo, más que a la obra, seguramente inmerecido.

[Justine Kaufmann · Rating 3 out of 5]

International Booker Longlist Book #5

I almost always find rating and reviewing short story collections challenging. Often there are certain stories that work better than others, and sometimes a story or two will drag down the whole experience. That being said, I Live in the Slums by Can Xue (tr. Karen Gernant and Chen Ziping) is probably the most challenging one to rate on this longlist. In addition to being a short story collection, it is also just plain difficult. Xue is one of those authors who demands so much of you and guarantees you won’t understand what is going on:

“Can Xue’s stories observe no obvious conventions of plot or characterization. That is the only rule they follow. Instead, they tend to limn a disordered and poetic state given structure by philosophical wonder and emotional rigor.”

In addition to different elements of Chinese culture (some I guarantee you that I missed amidst all the mystery and confusion), there are also clearly elements taken from Kafka and Dante—a vaguely rat-like character who doesn’t identify as a rat, narrators who know less than everyone around them, journeys through the different layers of the slums.

The collection as a whole is often bizarre and disorienting, propelling you through it at a relentless pace. Sometimes it’s gruesome, sometimes it’s whimsical, hell, sometimes it’s whimsically gruesome. But Xue’s writing also has an elegance and tenderness to it that helps you embrace the journey.

Favorite story: The Swamp

3.5 stars

[Kaiden Aibhne · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really did not like this collection of stories. The title story was horrible. The rest, well, if they were trying to be allegories for something I don't get it. They just seemed needlessly bizarre and pointless.

I'm lieu of a review, here are some of the notes I took before I gave up. Enjoy!

What the fresh hell is going on?? Is the protagonist a rat? Some kind of weird animal. Why are they obsessed with stoves? Also why is this story so disgusting?

This story is about magpies.

A story about cicadas. Wtf did he just die and regrow a new body?

A man is exploring a swamp for some reason. Or he wants to go to the swamp but can't find it?

There is a box that no one has opened. It gets thrown away without being opened. What was the point of this?

A story about a tree planted in barren soil. Somehow it's growing even though no one waters it.

TW for mention of suicide.

[Travis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Can Xue has excellent ominous moody short fiction. I felt I did a disservice to a few of these by reading them in the summer with my office lights on and they would be much better enjoyed someplace a little dimmer and gloomier. But still several others the mood still broke through and managed to really dig its roots in. At first I thought this collection would be entirely told from non-human POVs since the collection starts out with several just like that: the first story seems to be told by a dog-like creature (it's called Rat and Snake among other things but treated like a stray dog), the second one was told by a magpie, and the third is about an old cicada (tho not told from its strict POV) but then we go back to largely human-centric POVs although with a great one about Shadow People and another told from the perspective of a tree.

[Claudia Vallejos · Rating 3 out of 5]

I went into this book expecting some sort of narrative thread. I understand that absurdism is at the core of it, but I was a bit disappointed by the ending.

At the beginning, my attention was caught impressively well. I had read other books with sentient rats as characters, so I was ready for more surrealist action. The setting is eerie, absorbing. The human characters were intriguing and, honestly, the only thing that kept me reading.

Don't get me wrong. I enjoyed the story until it was approaching the end. It felt like it kept dragging on the same themes, situations and emotions. How many times did the rat pass out? There must be other literary devices to accomplish the same thing... I just ended up trying to read the story as a writing exercise/experiment.

Good prose, good images and good setting. It had so much potential though.

[Nuha · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thank you Yale University Press and NetGalley for the Advanced Reader's Copy!

Available May 19 2020

An anthropomorphic collection of tales, renowned Chinese author Can Xue's "I Live in the Slums" is a dreamlike subversive exploration of China's many slums. This English translation reads like Animal Farm or other metaphorical tales with simple, yet disturbing, turns and twists. Whether it is a rat who is fending for themselves in neighborhood of hungry butchers or a magpie's obsession with cleanliness, these tales are by turn amusing and horrifying. They work both as individual stories taken at face value or deeper critiques of the Chinese regime and its inability to provide for its people.

[Dree · Rating 3 out of 5]

Booker International 2021 Longlist. My 8th read of 13 from the longlist.

This book consists of unusual short stories. Some are weird and almost nonsensical (I Live in the Slums). Others don't really go anywhere, and there is no resolution (Venus). A lot of them are based in nature and have flora/fauna narrators, rather than human. My favorites were all toward the end of the book, my favorite two being Her Old Home and I Am a Willow Tree.

I don't know that I would consider these stories unique in any way other than often being confusing. I don't know why this made it onto the longlist, but the longlist and shortlist are both so strange and disappointing this year this is actually one I have enjoyed more.

[Alicia Guzman · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of 13 short stories focusing on myriad unnamed Chinese characters from both rural and urban backgrounds whose bodies are embodying some form of statelessness The characters in her stories seek belonging, inclusion and survival.

The narratives themselves have an elusive feeling to them often blurring the boundaries of time and space.

Although I personally enjoyed most of the collection, I have to say right off the bat this collection of short stories will not be for everyone. Can Xue is an experimental writer. She plays with form, writing style and adds a touch of magical realism to the text. For readers who prefer structured narratives this collection could feel jarring and messy.

[Paulambkh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another Booker Prize long-listed book. I usually really love the books chosen for this award, but this year, I have read two books for which I cannot give five stars! This translation started with a short story told from a rat's POV, and it almost made me abandon the whole thing. The next story was from a magpie's POV, and the prose was better. I like the stories, but am not sure if it is the translation that is not fully effective for me. This book of short stories is good tho - and I do recommend it.

[Valerie · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. This short story collection was a challenge. To be honest, I think most of it went well over my head. The stories are very absurdist, experimental, diaphanous, dreamlike and with no real plot or linear narrative. Individually, I didn't 'get' any of the stories. However, there is a distinctive feel to the collection as a whole which somehow makes it work. The stories have some common themes and moods to them, such as disembodiment, selfhood, liminality and urbanity. It was an interesting book but I wouldn't say I particularly enjoyed the reading.