Vertical Motion by Can Xue

Abstract

march–april 2012 | 65 an article for a gaming magazine. But from the moment he returns to the resort—whose attractive, long-serving manager, Frau Else, barely recognizes him—Udo experiences life as something alien and unsettling. His best-laid plans and past experiences fail to prepare him for what happens during more than a month of selfimposed exile in the Del Mar hotel. Udo’s inability to rely on the schemata he develops around the game that obsesses him puts him in the same boat as many of Bolaño’s characters, not least the circle of literary critics in 2666 (2008). In Bolaño’s novels, conceptual frameworks —whether developed by gaming communities, scholars, or poets—tend to founder when they clash with the daily emotional grind of desire, boredom, and fear. Writing presents the only opportunity for escape. As is typical of Bolaño’s work, Reich succeeds by detaching itself ironically from the same characters and events that compel readers to continue turning the book’s pages. Udo is hardly sympathetic, but Bola- ño’s style deftly negotiates the path between his protagonist’s maudlin self-absorption and his gradual emancipation from a longstanding and cloying malaise. Ryan Long University of Oklahoma Can Xue. Vertical Motion. Karen Gernant & Chen Zeping, tr. Rochester , New York. Open Letter. 2011. isbn 9781934824375 In just a few short years, Open Letter Books, based out of the University of Rochester, has quite impressively staked a claim of literary territory. Not unlike New Directions, Open Letter has made its reputation by finding and publishing some of the best foreign-language writers in the world. Can Xue, the pseudonym of Deng Xiaohua, is the latest writer to contribute to Open Letter’s quick ascension. In her collection Vertical Motion, Can Xue establishes a trippy and surreal world: apartments float high in the air, and large owls and men with lacquer-black skin haunt troubled people. There’s a common thread between Can Xue and Japanese writer Haruki Murakami in that both writers use the surreal to expound the oddness of human experiences; but where Murakami’s is a kind of hipster existentialism, Can Xue roots her existentialism in folklore . In many ways, Can Xue’s place is between Isaac Bashevis Singer and Franz Kafka. For instance, in “Red Leaves,” a story about death and memory, an old man wanders the hallways of a hospital with an old friend, searching for the source of a meowing sound that’s been pestering him. The old man’s contemplation of whether a leaf turns red from the stalk out or gradually throughout the entire leaf becomes a larger metaphor for mortality . In “An Affectionate Companion ’s Jottings,” a dark and mysterious visitor calls upon a man afflicted with symptoms of manic depression. The lacquer-dark stranger is a symbol for the manic-depressive’s melancholia . In “Cotton Candy,” a young child becomes obsessed with an old woman’s technique for spinning cotton candy, often seeing her at her candy machine when no one else can see her. For Can Xue, reality seems to be unnecessary: it’s in fantasy that truth is revealed. A brief note must be made about the translation. While, for the most part, the translation is solid, there are a few moments where occasional cliché slips through—for example, “come hell or high water” or “when all is said and done.” Because the colloquialisms are odd against the language, slipups like these tend to break the dreamlike trance that the author is trying to create. Minor flaws aside, however, Can Xue’s Vertical Motion enhances the reputation that Open Letter has been deservedly earning. Armando Celayo Norwich, United Kingdom Margaret Drabble. A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman: Complete Short Stories, José Francisco Fernández, ed. New York. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 2011. isbn 9780547550404 The fourteen stories in A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman are arranged chronologically from 1964 to 2000. This order displays the change in Margaret Drabble’s approach to fiction in the 1970s: a willingness to extend her subject and structure, to ...