An Empty Room

by Mu Xin, Toming Jun Liu (Translator)

Overview

A dazzling cycle of short stories by one of China’s most revered contemporary writers and one of the world’s leading artist-intellectuals.

An Empty Room is the first book by the celebrated Chinese writer Mu Xin to appear in English. A cycle of thirteen tenderly evocative stories written while Mu Xin was living in exile, this collection is reminiscent of the structural beauty of Hemingway’s In Our Time and the imagistic power of Kawabata’s palm-of-the-hand stories. From the ordinary (a bus accident) to the unusual (Buddhist halos) to the wise (Goethe, Lao Zi), Mu Xin’s wandering “I” interweaves plots with philosophical grace and spiritual profundity. A small blue bowl becomes a symbol of vanishing childhood; a painter in a race against fading memory scribbles notes in an underground prison during the Cultural Revolution; an abandoned temple room holds a dark mystery. An Empty Room is a soul-stirring page turner, a Sebaldian reverie of passing time, loss, and humanity regained.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811219228
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	05/23/2011
Series:	New Directions Paperbook , #1190
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	160
Product dimensions:	4.90(w) x 6.90(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Mu Xin, born in 1927 in China, is among the last of his generation to receive a classical education. During the Cultural Revolution he was imprisoned for eighteen months and then lived under house arrest for several years. In 1982 he moved to the U.S., where he lived in Queens, New York, and only recently moved back to his hometown in China. He is the author of several collections of stories, poetry, and essays, as well as being a world-renowned painter.

Toming Jun Liu is a professor of English at California State University, Los Angeles.

Editorial Reviews

Characters occupy a haunting world of ambivalence and moral decay in Mu's English language debut, a collection about people unmoored by the changes that took place in 20th-century China. The author elides most of the horrors of WWII and the Cultural Revolution ("without getting into too much detail, what followed was a long, dark period of feeling neither dead nor alive"), but the psychological scars left by both lie at the heart of these stories: people are murdered, sent to labor on farms, and imprisoned for "decadent thoughts," offering context for the small but lacerating sorrows at the forefront of each story. A small boy loses a cherished object in "The Moment Childhood Vanished," an event that is both trivial and darkly ominous. Petty slights lead to shocking violence in "Eighteen Passengers on a Bus." Perhaps the most telling work is "Fong Fong No. 4," in which a young girl reinvents herself to suit the whims of history, becoming an intellectual, then a farm laborer, then a businesswoman, in the process shedding her identity, her sentimentality, and, finally, some of her humanity. These stories have an exquisite, crystalline quality ably captured by Liu's flawless translation. (May)

Publishers Weekly

"Mu Xin’s elegant, noble prose style is rooted in the Chinese literati tradition and has rejuvenated the Chinese language for our times."

Beijing Daily - Li Jing

"Mu Xin is a solitary, an aesthete who resembles those Chinese artists of long ago who, exiled from the turbulence of their own times, studied earlier art and dreamed of a better past. Like those figures, Mu Xin cultivates the whispering power of reverie."

New York - Mark Stevens

"Mu Xin is best known as a writer and not a painter. He sustains the Chinese mode of returning to the art of the past and refreshing it for the present. He came to the United States in 1982, has written a dozen books here, and is a literary cult figure in Taiwan and among intellectuals in the Chinese diaspora."

The New York Times - Holland Cotter

With 20-plus books published in Taiwan and China, writer/painter Mu finally makes his English debut with a collection of 13 stories he chose from three previous titles. The result is, in a word, uneven. Standouts outshine the less than memorable, perhaps making the latter seem that much more lackluster in comparison. "The Moment When Childhood Vanished" is a koanlike reminder of bewildering loss, "Xia Mingzhu: A Bright Pearl" challenges family bonds, "Eighteen Passengers on a Bus" shockingly pushes the boundaries of patience, and "Halo" captures the holy in humanity. The highlight is "Fong Fong No. 4," which, in a few controlled pages, translates half a century of China's tumultuous, wrenching past through the protagonist's metamorphosis (in four phases) from girlhood to middle-aged womanhood. VERDICT Although recent notable collections such as Ha Jin's A Good Fall, Paul Yoon's Once the Shore, and Daniyal Mueenuddin's In Other Rooms, Other Wonders might prove more consistent, readers who appreciate spare, elliptical stories that last long after the final page will find considerable satisfaction here.—Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC

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