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Blue Light in the Sky & Other Stories
A selection of harsh, sometimes violent, and often surreal stories by the premier young avant-garde Chinese woman writer.
A couple moves with their young daughter to the seaside, only to be terrorized by hostile townsfolk, predatory seabirds, and the persistent sound of the waves. Two old friends spend their waning days traipsing amongst ruined walls, imagining bubbling brooks and lush marshland. An old man lives atop a bizarre wooden building in the clouds, where he is served pancakes by a hostile youth.
These are the scenarios of just some of the stories in this generous new collection by Can Xue. Although rooted in the folk traditions of Chinese literature and the real conflicts of contemporary Chinese life, Can Xue's stories exist in a separate space and time where dreams and reality coalesce: tenderness quickly turns to violence, strange diseases are caught, and quaint landscapes become phantasmagorical. Can Xue's literary world is inhabited by ghosts, dying old men, street urchins, cobblers, farmers, cats, rats, and stray dogs. Much influenced by Borges, Kafka, and Bruno Schulz, this new collection of Can Xue's surreal stories confirms The New York Times' assessment that "reading Can Xue's fiction is like running downhill in the dark; you've got momentum, but you don't know where you're headed."
A couple moves with their young daughter to the seaside, only to be terrorized by hostile townsfolk, predatory seabirds, and the persistent sound of the waves. Two old friends spend their waning days traipsing amongst ruined walls, imagining bubbling brooks and lush marshland. An old man lives atop a bizarre wooden building in the clouds, where he is served pancakes by a hostile youth.
These are the scenarios of just some of the stories in this generous new collection by Can Xue. Although rooted in the folk traditions of Chinese literature and the real conflicts of contemporary Chinese life, Can Xue's stories exist in a separate space and time where dreams and reality coalesce: tenderness quickly turns to violence, strange diseases are caught, and quaint landscapes become phantasmagorical. Can Xue's literary world is inhabited by ghosts, dying old men, street urchins, cobblers, farmers, cats, rats, and stray dogs. Much influenced by Borges, Kafka, and Bruno Schulz, this new collection of Can Xue's surreal stories confirms The New York Times' assessment that "reading Can Xue's fiction is like running downhill in the dark; you've got momentum, but you don't know where you're headed."
192 pages, Paperback
First published June 27, 2006
4 people are currently reading
274 people want to read
About the author
Can Xue
92 books417 followers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)
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)
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
December 6, 2019
Không sao bày tỏ hết sự ghê tởm của tôi đối với loại văn chương lơm cổ, vô nghĩa, đáng khinh này. Tào Tuyết Cần dưới mồ chắc cũng không yên nghỉ nổi khi biết thế hệ con cháu mình là một đống quái thai như vậy.
Khi tôi ghét cái gì, tôi luôn cố gắng thử lần hai để chắc chắn là nó đáng ghét. Đây là lần thứ hai tôi đọc Tàn Tuyết và cũng là lần cuối. Văn học Trung Quốc đương đại liệu còn gì đáng đọc không nhỉ?
Khi tôi ghét cái gì, tôi luôn cố gắng thử lần hai để chắc chắn là nó đáng ghét. Đây là lần thứ hai tôi đọc Tàn Tuyết và cũng là lần cuối. Văn học Trung Quốc đương đại liệu còn gì đáng đọc không nhỉ?
February 26, 2017
The easiest way to review Can Xue's style is by mere, lazy comparison: she's the David Lynch of fin-de-sickly literature, that is, the disturbing and weird nightmarish writing that so many try and have tried their hand at over the centuries and usually fail.
Since they're translations (with her seal of approval) you're always going to come away at a loss, but even then, she's so intrepid that you don't mind so much that you probably don't understand half of what you're seeing on the page. Unlike many authors of this type, she sticks to certain tropes, almost the same way Lovecraft did, but with greater success (I found Lovecraft, in the end, plodding and repetitive). For Can Xue, her dominant symbols are mountains, blindness, blindness on mountains, mountains of blindness, surreal shifts in families, and a kind of horrid faculty of apprehension for animals and children. There are weird holes in things and whispers out of floors, you know, all those things that are hard not to love.
Recommended, but only with the caveat that there are no explanations and no expanded cinematic universes on offer.
Since they're translations (with her seal of approval) you're always going to come away at a loss, but even then, she's so intrepid that you don't mind so much that you probably don't understand half of what you're seeing on the page. Unlike many authors of this type, she sticks to certain tropes, almost the same way Lovecraft did, but with greater success (I found Lovecraft, in the end, plodding and repetitive). For Can Xue, her dominant symbols are mountains, blindness, blindness on mountains, mountains of blindness, surreal shifts in families, and a kind of horrid faculty of apprehension for animals and children. There are weird holes in things and whispers out of floors, you know, all those things that are hard not to love.
Recommended, but only with the caveat that there are no explanations and no expanded cinematic universes on offer.
April 30, 2020
In stories that are indescribable Can Xue marks out a territory that is singular. I read the first story, for which the collection is named, and felt as though it were crawling inside my skin. The words that get used in reviews are so worn out that when a writer like her comes along you have to shake them up and wake them up and remind yourself that calling a writer unique should be a rare thing, calling a writer phenomenal should mean that you get goosebumps when you read. Her fiction is like this. It is difficult to speak of them in normal terms - she makes ideas like plot, character, logic, all irrelevant. Of course her stories each have a plot but how do you talk about them? One feeling transforms into its opposite, a landscape that appears familiar becomes suddenly supernatural, people behave oddly but in a way that appeals to the instinct. Meaning grows so large in these stories that it defies statement. I am grateful to have encountered these (intense, unprecedented, fantastic, unbelievable) stories. Kafka meets Flannery O'Connor while Borges sits on the sidelines. And that description is only a sketch.
March 18, 2011
I can't be sure if it was all writing style or simply awful translation, but these stories were not only disappointing, they were altogether unbearable to read. The stories didn't read as very surreal to me; mostly, it just seemed as though all the characters were idiots and the progression of most events completely non-sequitur. None of the characters cooperate with one another, and most are jerks who behave in a totally outlandish manner, making any interactions between them painful and exasperating, even to read - sort of like Curb Your Enthusiasm, if Larry David was Chinese instead of Jewish and not at all entertaining. Can Xue's afterword, meditating on her own writing, was the most interesting part of the book. She had some very valid arguments about the value of art, but there was nothing to back up her statements in the work, which wasn't nearly as eloquent. The stories themselves were rambling, repetitive and pointless. The voice rarely varied from story to story and at all points was rife with trite colloquialisms, so even the style got on my nerves. While I recognize that this probably has a lot to do with translation, there only seemed to be a few stories in the entire collection that could have been helped by a more dynamic rendering.
July 29, 2007
A chinese equivalent of Kafka, Dante, or Bruno Shultz..beautiful but very savage.
November 25, 2017
spare, menacing dream-tales
January 22, 2023
Each of avant garde author Can Xue’s short stories is like a fever dream; one that you awaken from sweaty, confused, and unable to shake from your mind, yet whose narrative you are equally unable to explain in words.
Like in a nightmare, the stories in Blue Light in the Sky follow their own impenetrable logic. Protagonists’ attempts at communication and understanding are thwarted; efforts to either reach or escape someplace inevitably get nowhere; psychological and social sickness interacts with physical injury and disease; relationships traditionally reliable and safe (such as those of family) are marked by unnerving shifts to violence, manipulation and abandonment; all events are underscored by a sense of disorientation, menace and impending doom.
Stories frequently feature desolate, harsh landscapes, such as ocean cliff faces, islands, deserts and mountains. Nature is hostile to protagonists, with vision often obscured by clouds, darkness, fog, or sand (the last of which calls to mind Abe Kōbō’s similarly kafkaesque ‘The Woman in the Dunes’). Other common themes are fruitless searches, atemporality (often accompanied by insomnia), confusion between life and death, and being denied help or information by secretive, insular communities. Characters are kept, both literally and figuratively, in the dark.
Highlights include Blue Light in the Sky, Helin, Night in the Mountain Village, Scenes Inside the Dilapidated Walls, Top Floor, and My Brother. I found these stories to generate the most vivid images and to best embody what the author describes as “manmade, blind atmosphere”, while promoting the reader to reflect on the meaning of existence and human relationships. Other stories, such as A Negligible Game on the Journey, I personally found too confusing in their narrative to elicit much meaningful reflection.
I found the translation at times clumsy (“raising vegetables”? a “tuft of light”?) and inconsistent in tone; it maintains for the most part a fairly deadpan voice, but random bursts of casual language (“sat his ass down” ; “I was scared shitless”), as well as the use of some obscure regional Americanisms (“loblollies”, anyone?) were jarring within the surreal, otherworldly atmosphere generated by the stories’ content. I also have not encountered these shifts in register while (admittedly as a non-native speaker) reading some of her other stories in the original Chinese, hence my impression that this is a feature of the translation.
Overall, a haunting collection of experimental stories probing the human condition, but probably best, if possible, read in its original language.
Like in a nightmare, the stories in Blue Light in the Sky follow their own impenetrable logic. Protagonists’ attempts at communication and understanding are thwarted; efforts to either reach or escape someplace inevitably get nowhere; psychological and social sickness interacts with physical injury and disease; relationships traditionally reliable and safe (such as those of family) are marked by unnerving shifts to violence, manipulation and abandonment; all events are underscored by a sense of disorientation, menace and impending doom.
Stories frequently feature desolate, harsh landscapes, such as ocean cliff faces, islands, deserts and mountains. Nature is hostile to protagonists, with vision often obscured by clouds, darkness, fog, or sand (the last of which calls to mind Abe Kōbō’s similarly kafkaesque ‘The Woman in the Dunes’). Other common themes are fruitless searches, atemporality (often accompanied by insomnia), confusion between life and death, and being denied help or information by secretive, insular communities. Characters are kept, both literally and figuratively, in the dark.
Highlights include Blue Light in the Sky, Helin, Night in the Mountain Village, Scenes Inside the Dilapidated Walls, Top Floor, and My Brother. I found these stories to generate the most vivid images and to best embody what the author describes as “manmade, blind atmosphere”, while promoting the reader to reflect on the meaning of existence and human relationships. Other stories, such as A Negligible Game on the Journey, I personally found too confusing in their narrative to elicit much meaningful reflection.
I found the translation at times clumsy (“raising vegetables”? a “tuft of light”?) and inconsistent in tone; it maintains for the most part a fairly deadpan voice, but random bursts of casual language (“sat his ass down” ; “I was scared shitless”), as well as the use of some obscure regional Americanisms (“loblollies”, anyone?) were jarring within the surreal, otherworldly atmosphere generated by the stories’ content. I also have not encountered these shifts in register while (admittedly as a non-native speaker) reading some of her other stories in the original Chinese, hence my impression that this is a feature of the translation.
Overall, a haunting collection of experimental stories probing the human condition, but probably best, if possible, read in its original language.
April 3, 2019
รวมเรื่องสั้นหลอนๆ ของฉานเสว่ นักเขียนหญิงชาวจีนคนที่ซูซาน ซอนทากบอกว่าควรจะมียี่ห้อโนเบลห้อยท้ายชื่อนะเธอจ๋า
ชอบความพิลึกพิลั่นของเรื่องราวที่มันไร้เหตุผล คาดเดาไม่ได้และไว้ใจไม่ได้มาก หลายเรื่องของฉานเสว่มักมีองค์ประกอบคล้ายๆ กัน คือมีตัวละครเอกที่ต้องไปยังที่แปลกๆ เพื่อทำอะไรสักอย่าง เจอเรื่องประหลาด เจอคนแปลกหน้าที่รู้จักตัวเองและกุมความลับบางอย่างไว้ และมักจะมีชาวบ้านชาวช่องที่ทำตัวเป็นฝั่งตรงข้ามกับตัวละครเอกรวมทั้งมุ่งร้ายอย่างไร้เหตุผล ซึ่งอ่านไปจนจบเรื่องบางทีเราก็ยังไม่รู้ว่าความจริงคืออะไร แต่สิ่งที่เห็นได้อยู่เสมอคือจิตใจของตัวละครเอกที่ถูกฉีกทึ้งเป็นชิ้น ด้วยความรู้สึกผิดที่ตัวเองก็ไม่แน่ใจนักว่ามีต่อเรื่องไหน ไอ้ความน่าระแวงและความคลุมเครือเสมอต้นเสมอปลายชวนงุนงงมันทำให้รู้สึกขนลุกซู่อยู่เป็นระยะๆ
ชอบความพิลึกพิลั่นของเรื่องราวที่มันไร้เหตุผล คาดเดาไม่ได้และไว้ใจไม่ได้มาก หลายเรื่องของฉานเสว่มักมีองค์ประกอบคล้ายๆ กัน คือมีตัวละครเอกที่ต้องไปยังที่แปลกๆ เพื่อทำอะไรสักอย่าง เจอเรื่องประหลาด เจอคนแปลกหน้าที่รู้จักตัวเองและกุมความลับบางอย่างไว้ และมักจะมีชาวบ้านชาวช่องที่ทำตัวเป็นฝั่งตรงข้ามกับตัวละครเอกรวมทั้งมุ่งร้ายอย่างไร้เหตุผล ซึ่งอ่านไปจนจบเรื่องบางทีเราก็ยังไม่รู้ว่าความจริงคืออะไร แต่สิ่งที่เห็นได้อยู่เสมอคือจิตใจของตัวละครเอกที่ถูกฉีกทึ้งเป็นชิ้น ด้วยความรู้สึกผิดที่ตัวเองก็ไม่แน่ใจนักว่ามีต่อเรื่องไหน ไอ้ความน่าระแวงและความคลุมเครือเสมอต้นเสมอปลายชวนงุนงงมันทำให้รู้สึกขนลุกซู่อยู่เป็นระยะๆ
July 5, 2021
My first Can Xue work was her 2011 short story collection Vertical Motion, and after that, this collection was not quite what I expected. It's undoubtedly the work of the same author, but Blue Light in the Sky and Other Stories is... I'm not sure the right word. More conventional? I hesitate to call anything written by Can Xue conventional, but these stories, unlike the ones in Vertical Motion, all have well-defined human main characters and settings. In typical Can Xue style, the stories follow no conventional structure and read like dreams (or, alternately, nightmares). She cites Kafka as an influence, and that was very evident to me here.
The big downside to the collection is lack of variety. Can Xue repeats settings and motifs; there are lots of creepy little girls and unhinged old men. Most of the stories concern a main character travelling somewhere unsettling and bizarre, usually a rural or seaside town. Can Xue has a fascination with living on the top floor of a high-rise building, so there are a couple of stories like that here as well (at least one appears in Vertical Motion). None of the stories feels quite as inventive as those in Vertical Motion; in fact, some could be given realistic explanations (e.g., a character suffering from dementia). Still, they all have that uncanny and dreamlike atmosphere that makes Can Xue's talent evident.
Ultimately, I can't fault the writing, and while at times this felt a bit repetitive, Can Xue is still a unique voice in avant-garde literature and worth reading. As a collection, I think I would recommend Vertical Motion over this one.
The big downside to the collection is lack of variety. Can Xue repeats settings and motifs; there are lots of creepy little girls and unhinged old men. Most of the stories concern a main character travelling somewhere unsettling and bizarre, usually a rural or seaside town. Can Xue has a fascination with living on the top floor of a high-rise building, so there are a couple of stories like that here as well (at least one appears in Vertical Motion). None of the stories feels quite as inventive as those in Vertical Motion; in fact, some could be given realistic explanations (e.g., a character suffering from dementia). Still, they all have that uncanny and dreamlike atmosphere that makes Can Xue's talent evident.
Ultimately, I can't fault the writing, and while at times this felt a bit repetitive, Can Xue is still a unique voice in avant-garde literature and worth reading. As a collection, I think I would recommend Vertical Motion over this one.
February 4, 2019
Leer estos cuentos es como asomarse a los sueños de otra persona. Todo muy raro y desconcertante. Me gustó.
April 10, 2025
Good short stories, a few more engaging than others. Mostly like a journey of learning something, and coming to accept a particular quality - maybe of experience. Almost exhausting to finish reading.
August 15, 2012
This book was kind of reminiscent of my childhood. For the most part it was very funny to read and enjoyable. It takes place during traditional China time-period. It is a collection of tales mostly about children causing mischief and ending up with some sort of resolution. My favorite one was the "Blue light in the Sky" the first story in the novel. It's my favorite because it reminded me of when i was little. My siblings and I would play around in all sorts of shenanigans. Then one day i remembered stepping on a piece of glass because a bottle had been broken near by and I didn't noticed. At first i didn't feel the pain in my foot until i saw the floor with blood. Similarly in the story, Sumei, had stepped on a piece of glass and cut her foot. She was scared to tell her father because she was going to get sculled. In my situation it was quite similar. I didn't want to tell my mother that i stepped on the glass when i wasn't suppose to be there. I cried on in another room and my brother saw my foot. I knew i was going to get yelled at because he was going to tell. However he walked with me to our mother and told her what had happened. It ended up being okay my mother didn't yell at me as much as i had expected. In Sumei's case it ended in similar results.Her sister was had told her father was had happened to her foot and the father went to find Sumei. He wound up carrying Sumei back after a long day of traveling alone trying to find medicine for her foot. Everything went back to normal, life as it once was. I enjoyed this book because it reminds me much of my childhood as a kid and not know much of life and experiences that influence us as children.
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August 14, 2024Can Xue is regularly in the rumor mill to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. She probably won't. Despite going against the socialist realism grain she's no dissident. The last time the Nobel committee chose a mainlander (Mo Yan) the supposedly apolitical open-minded and nonpartisan Western literati ground their teeth into dust over the fact he wouldn't slander the Chinese government. Can Xue won't do that either. To the work itself, to Americans new to Can Xue's writing I describe it as like a David Lynch movie put to prose. She's heavily influenced by Borges. Think Borges placed in China's rural countryside. Can Xue has also spent a decent amount of time in Iowa's countryside (like many Chinese heavyweights such as Xi Jinping and his father).
May 15, 2013
The most narrative oriented of the collections, which I favor, though there's also bunch of filler here. Also, afterword on technique! Highlights: "The Bizarre Wooden Building," "Helin," "The Lure of the Sea," "Night in the Mountain Village," and "Top Floor." "Snake Island" might be my favorite of hers: a lost home marked by the combat between ghosts and the living. That's the avant-garde writer's China, alright.
July 7, 2012
Amazing, disturbing, gorgeous writing...--narrative becomes so lithe in her hands
February 15, 2011
Not very interesting, and poorl written and/or translated. I only made it through about half the book, but I couldn't convince myself to go on.
December 7, 2016
Apparently beautiful in the original Chinese, but not a great translation.
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews