Dialogues in Paradise - Softcover

Can, Xue

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0810108313 ISBN 13: 9780810108318

Publisher: Northwestern University Press, 1989

Synopsis

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.

About this title

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.

Reviews

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.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Northwestern University Press
• Publication date: 1989
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0810108313
• ISBN 13: 9780810108318
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 173