Snow and Shadow by Dorothy Tse

Abstract

70 WLT JANUARY/ FEBRUARY 2015 of the Bercea family, as other tales tell other families, “who we are.” They are—the narrator, Trajan, and his sister Miruna—the great-grandchildren of Constantine Bercea, who fought in the Romanian war of independence in the late nineteenth century and earned, through his service, the first land to be owned by anyone in his family. He also brought the first clock to the village of Evil Vale, paid for the first newspaper subscription, and imposed his will on land and beasts, ignoring the other villagers who lived “in thrall to the forest,” dependent on spells to protect them and on stories of fays to explain madness and disorientation. Although Constantine is clearly a transitional figure from the unchanging past to a world caught in print and technology, he also becomes a kind of mythic figure in the stories told by his son, Niculae, who does not soften events or endings the way that storytellers for children often do. Niculae’s granddaughter, Miruna, absorbs both the content and the spirit of the tales, while her brother narrates—from the point of view of a child but in the language of an adult—in ways that bridge the gap between traditional and modern. Later in the book, the stories turn to Niculae’s life, less mythic but very much in the spirit of the stories about Constantine. As the young siblings listen, they come to understand intuitively the way in which, as Suceavă writes in the afterword, “facts tend to become transformed into either rumors or ballads or legends.” When the grandfather dies, the children feel that they have been banished from paradise, that “the real world began, that we took our first steps on the earth.” Yet all is not lost. Miruna has a dream in which “the Angel of the Story” fends off “the Angel of Silence,” or Death, allowing her to encounter her grandfather in imagination. There is loss, but all is not lost, for as the narrator says in the last lines, “if the tale were not true, I wouldn’t have told it to you.” Robert Murray Davis University of Oklahoma Dorothy Tse. Snow and Shadow. Nicky Harman, tr. Hong Kong. Muse. 2014. isbn 9789881604606 Dorothy Tse’s collection of short stories transports the reader through a series of shocks and revelations into a complex realm pendulating between the known, the obscure, and the horrific. Many of the stories seem to twist together several layers of both temporal and spatial dimensions. The reader is lost and confused, sliding between the surreal and grotesque. There is no thread connecting us to the emotive response. Even so, the characters seem ready to withstand whatever comes their way; they are out of compass guidance yet not out of flexibility. In “Woman Fish,” the feminine character undergoes a Kafkaesque metamorphosis . The husband witnesses his wife’s transformation into a fish and seems to make the necessary changes to accept their new relationship until delivering her to the river. A similar dual tension can be found in “Leaf and Knife,” where a couple’s coordinated dance steps turn into an amputation contest. In all of Tse’s stories, there is always the possibility of global destruction as death breaks into our dimension: “the overcast sky opened its toothless mouth, spattering faces with rain.” Another common theme in Tse’s writing is confused states of mind, the constant shift between reality and dreamlike states. Several stories refer to the subconscious world of dreaming. In “Black Cat City,” people are slaves of their own imagination. The characters named Recall and Memoria seem to get either closer or separated, based on what they remember or forget about their life together; they experience revelations of the absurd and a disintegration of their conscience. The same disorientation brings characters to states of imprisonment. In “Bed,” a girl leaves her small house in search of a place to rest; eventually, somebody takes advantage of her primordial need for sleep and takes away her virginity. Yet, separating two worlds, the bed becomes the point of transformation from a temporary resting place of sleep into death and entering the cycle of life. world...