Dialogues in Paradise

by Can Xue, Ronald R. Janssen (Translator), Jian Zhang (Translator), Ronald Janssen (Translator)

Overview

The thirteen stories of Dialogues in Paradise are eloquent in a way the West associates with both the modern and the ancient: the dark oracles of Aeschylus and Sophocles, the paranoid mystery of Kafka, the moving stream of Woolf. The work of Can Xue (a pseudonym of Changsa writer Deng Xiao-hua) renews our consciousness of the long tradition of the irrational in our literature, where dreams and reality constitute one territory, its borders open, the passage back and forth barely discernible. She fuses lyrical purity with the darkest visions of the grotesque and the result is a unique literary experience.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780810108318
Publisher:	Northwestern University Press
Publication date:	06/01/1989
Edition description:	1
Pages:	173
Product dimensions:	5.12(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

CAN XUE (the pseudonym of Deng Xiao-hua) lives in Changsha, Hunan Province, People's Republic of China. Dialogues in Paradise is the first collection of her work in English.

RONALD R. JANSSEN teaches contemporary literature and criticism at Hofstra University.

JIAN ZHANG is a faculty member in the English Department at East China Normal University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Foreword: A Summer Day in the Beautiful South

The Gloomy Mood of Ah Mei on a Sunny Day
Raindrops in the Crevice between the Tiles
Soap Bubbles in the Dirty Water
The Fog
Hut on the Mountain
Dream of the Yellow Chrysanthemum
The Ox
In the Wilderness
The Things That Happened to Me in That World
The Date
Skylight
The Instant When the Cuckoo Sings
Dialogues in Paradise

Afterword: Can Xue's "Attacks of Madness"

Editorial Reviews

"A work of considerable talent, which answers the current interest in China's artists and the spirit of her people." —Booklist


"No other contemporary Chinese writer I know has explored the nightmarish landscapes of the tormented mind as consistently and persistently as Can Xue. . . ." —Kam-ming Wong

From the Publisher

Chinese Can Xue's first book to appear in English radically departs from the realism governing the fiction of her compatriots. ``Because of universal love,'' she declares, ``human beings can detach and sublimate themselves in the realm of art.'' The stories here reflect an interior vision in which conflict is represented impressionistically, symbolically. ``My mother has melted into a basin of soap bubbles,'' begins the confession of a man literally bestialized by his anger; elsewhere, a protagonist suddenly perceives that ``Father . . . has the all-too-familiar eye of a wolf. So that was it! At night he became one of the wolves.'' Other metaphors resist decoding (``The transparent tree is shaking its white canopy'') and some conceits seem coy (``That night she lay down and suddenly realized she had not gone to sleep''). Can Xue's insistence on a set of hermetic referents strains her powers as a storyteller--the narrative yields almost wholly to steadily mutating images. Ironically, the most dynamic of these works is also the most conventional--a poignant autobiographical account of Can Xue's childhood in the late '50s and '60s, the hardships that political upheaval visited upon her family and the circumstances and aspirations that have shaped her writing. (July)

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