Dialogues in Paradise

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.

Thic Collection includes: The Gloomy Mood of Ah Mei on a Sunny Day Raindrops in the Crevice between the Tiles Soap Bubbles in 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 Sialogues in Paradise

Publishers Weekly

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)

Can Xue ; Translated By Ronald R. Janssen And Jian Zhang. Translated From Chinese From Various Sources.