21st Century Literature discussion

Bio/Background
- Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Can_Xue
- Paper Republic: https://paper-republic.org/pers/can-xue/

Reviews
- New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-...
- Harvard Review: https://www.harvardreview.org/book-re...
- World Literature Today: https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/...
- Music & Literature: https://www.musicandliterature.org/re...

Interviews
- Asymptote Journal: https://www.asymptotejournal.com/inte...
- MIT: https://web.mit.edu/ccw/can-xue/inter...
- The Booker Prize: https://thebookerprizes.com/can-xue-c...
- AAWWTV: Stubborn Dirty Snow with Can Xue and Porochista Khakpour https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulFdr...

Theses/Dissertation
- Can Xue's Spatialized Vision: Buildings & the Exploration of the Soul https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlu...

Translators (Karen Gernant & Chen Zeping)
- Three Percent Interview: https://www.rochester.edu/College/tra...
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Potential Tips for Reading Xue
- Thinking of her writing as a type of performance
- Her family was persecuted by the communists and barred from formal education
- She emerged during the literary flowering of the 1980s known as the "High Culture Fever" as a member of a pack of fiction writers (including Su Tong, Mo Yan, Yu Hua, to name only a few) whose works challenged the orthodoxies of social realism through formalist experimentation and vivid imagery of the body
- Admires and influenced by the likes of Kafka, Borges, and Calvino
- May employ rapid shifts in space and narrative logic
- Considers her "ideal" reader to be "those who have read some works by the modernist writers and who love metaphysical thinking and material thinking"
- Likes to explore polarities/boundaries (city & country, border & frontier, living & dead, reality & dream, etc.)

Let us know if you'll be joining us for this dicussion and whether you've read any Can Xue before.

For those wanting to read along and comment, there'll be a thread for every 5 chapters. Otherwise, just jump in on the last and final thread.

NOTE: I think we may have approached the folder limit GR allows per group, so we'll have to do a little admin work before I'm able to put multiple threads in a folder for this discussion. I'll delete this message once completed.

I'll be participating and this will be a re-read for me.

Glad to have you on board, Lark.

I have only read three very short stories collected in Purple Perilla by her.

I'm in . Have to say I wouldn't have read this on my own as I found Love in the New Millennium baffling and dnf'd . But I'm intrigued by the experimental nature of her output and am hoping , having others to hold my hand , I will rise to the challenge .... might be influenced by listening to Ligeti this week (as the Ligeti Quartet are coming to my town next week) and this artistic drive to explore , break rules and question the very foundations of an art form after enormous suppression and tragedy fascinates me . For me it's another way of listening to the cataclymic effects of the past ...Might be a bit late to scheduled discussion as just ordered book in paper form

Prepping for the read with multiple art forms--I love it, Hester!

I'll be reading this on the Archive.com 1-hour checkout system, so we'll see how that goes. Not in any local librarys apparently.

I have not read any Can Xue before, and will be joining the group read.

Minor note: Can Xue is a pseudonym meaning something like dirty/leftover snow. There's really no last/first name in the usual sense.

@Hester: very envious you'll be seeing the Ligeti quartet. What will they be playing?

Monday 4 December 2023
Ligeti Quartet
György Ligeti  String Quartet No 2 (1968)
Various    Selections from Nouvelles Etudes (2023)
Richard Steinitz  Quartet in Memoriam (1981)
Lukas Ligeti  Entasis (2023)
György Ligeti  String Quartet No 1, Métamorphoses nocturnes (1952-54)

Here's the programme Bill. Huddersfield Music Society (in case you're anywhere close ) .

For those who haven't any experience with Xue, I suggest first reading the very short story, "Hut on the Hill," (or some variation of those words in the title depending on translation) and check some of the online analysis. You should be able to find a copy on the web. From that story the reader can see what Xue is trying to do more easily than from her novels I think and there is almost universal agreement in critical appraisal for the story while the novels sometimes are a frustration to Western readers resulting in condemnation or DNF's.

For fairly clear reasons, this story reminds me of a 1971 skit by Congress of Wonders, "Flipping on the Hod": https://youtu.be/ujIju5X8RAk?si=y79u2...

I wonder, is there any sense of Can Xue being part of a political context, that anyone knows of?

She is after all from a country where writers are regularly persecuted or need to leave the country for their own safety, depending on what they write...

for example Ma Jian, author of Beijing Coma

Is Can Xue like Shostakovich, subversively critical of her government while hiding her subversion under something else?

Probably not but it does intrigue me who can stay and thrive, and who needs to flee.

Lark wrote: "I wonder, is there any sense of Can Xue being part of a political context, that anyone knows of?

She is after all from a country where writers are regularly persecuted or need to leave the country..."

Did you read this piece?

https://u.osu.edu/mclc/2017/03/15/can...

thank you, Sam. What a great overview, full of information I didn't know, and I wouldn't have made these connections between real life and this novel without some guidance.

Fascinating piece, Sam. Thanks for sharing. This line particularly resonated with me:
"The translators of Frontier, Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping, have taken a different route, opting for short, clear sentences that stand independently of one another through starkness of expression, so that irrationality is primarily found between sentences, not within them."

Lark, it's my understanding that beyond being experimental and breaking with tradition, Can Xue is not overtly political in any sense. The caveat being that this is based on the little I've been able to read/research about her.

Hester, how was the Ligeti performance?

Sam wrote: "Lark wrote: "I wonder, is there any sense of Can Xue being part of a political context, that anyone knows of?

She is after all from a country where writers are regularly persecuted or need to leav..."

Thanks for sharing this very interesting piece.

I'm not sure where to put this comment but I just read Owlish by Dorothy Tse and, maybe because of its reading-proximity in my timeline to Frontier, it felt like Can Xue lite. I enjoyed it very much. It had the same slippery mix of concrete and surreal, but more narrative connection between the sentences.

Marc wrote: "Fascinating piece, Sam. Thanks for sharing. This line particularly resonated with me:
"The translators of Frontier, Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping, have taken a different route, opting for short, cl..."

Sorry for the late reply, but i was upended a couple of weeks ago , in the same week as the Ligeti performance , when my son was suddenly taken ill and eventually admitted to hospital . He is home now and recovering but most plans went out of the window .

To answer , it was fantastic . Ligeti has me in his spell. we also had a very moving moment with this piece

Richard Steinitz Quartet in Memoriam (1981)

as the composer was in the audience and the piece is seldom performed . It was moving to witness the tenderness between composer and performers . Richard Steinitz founded the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival , still going strong each November.

Hester, hope your son is continuing to improve.

Lark wrote: "I wonder, is there any sense of Can Xue being part of a political context, that anyone knows of?

She is after all from a country where writers are regularly persecuted or need to leave the country..."

Extract from Can Xue’s response, in a 2017 interview with Porochista Khakpour, to a question on politics & its relevance to art.

“Yes, I always pay attention to politics. And I feel it matters for art. But as a modern artist, I take a historical perspective to exam events that burst out suddenly. The history of human beings is long; we can’t measure it in a decade or even decades. Historical events are the power source for my creation; I have always been angry or excited for the events. But I think the main duty of an artist is to change the souls and bodies of common people. We must do more work, and enlighten people with our work. Our work is very important to politics in the world—as the events of Trump and Brexit show. Of course an artist is also a common person. If someday people here take to the streets, it’s possible that I would join them.”
https://wordswithoutborders.org/read/...

Hester, echoing Stacia's well wishes for your son's continued/full recovery! Glad to hear the Ligeti performance was excellent.

Lesley, Thanks for the link.