“It turned out that all along he had been surrounded by mysterious beautiful things, yet in all these years he had never been aware of them.” From an old beggar who comes from a mysterious mountain and appears to be on the verge of death, a boy learns a strange secret, but subsequently he sees the man as hale and hearty. The secret gradually seems to be something that everyone around is already aware of; only the boy imagines it to be a secret. The boy’s father is happy that the old man is willing to teach his son to “become a genuine mountain man,” but the boy is not as excited about this prospect as he might once have been, assuring his father, “Living here is about the same as living in the mountains.” This is more or less the upshot of “Mountain Ants,” the second of three stories that make up Can Xue’s Purple Perilla. (Purple perilla, as Wikipedia informs me, is another name for a variety of the herb that I know as shiso when it turns up on a Japanese menu.) Can Xue is one of the best known Chinese writers, widely translated, but I’d never read anything of hers until now. But this little book was irresistible (and not only because keeping this diary weekly has unfortunately biased me toward brief books). It’s the third publication in a new series called isolarii, whose format (small paperbacks, palm-of-your-hand-sized) reminds me of the great Hanuman Books of the late 1980s-early 1990s. The aesthetic stance of the series is not yet clear but its range is intriguing: a text by the London-based art duo Cooking Sections, tied in to their show at Tate Britain, followed by an anthology of Russian feminist poetry, and now Can Xue. By reputation she is an experimentalist or avant-gardist, but the three stories in Purple Perilla don’t bear that out. Or maybe to be anything other than a realist in the China of the 1980s, when she started out, was to be an experimentalist? I’d call her a fabulist with a free-flowing sense of narrative possibility; the outcomes of her set-ups are unpredictable, yet feel inevitable—eerie but not exactly fantastic, especially when (as in two of the three stories) they are seen through the eyes of a child who does not yet know just what should be considered strange, what should be thought natural. “You have to believe your eyes: this isn’t a hallucination; this is real”—that could be the book’s slogan. Can Xue claims Kafka as an influence, and has written a book about him, which makes sense, but these tales wander freely along their paths in ways that Kafka never allowed himself. (In an interview, she explains that Kafka was diminished by the Western idea of original sin, whereas “my worldview, which combines the cultures of the East and West, enables me to regard the mundane world with an open mind and to endure this profound black comedy.”) The tales’ wandering quality put me in mind of César Aira, if only the Argentine writer had been more influenced by Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav. And an artifice of timelessness has been applied. True, the first story, “An Affair,” includes a bus, a primary school, and a factory, placing it in modern times however unspecifically; but the other two mention nothing that could not have occurred in a story written centuries ago. Is the author speaking of modern China using the means of indirection and circumspection that have been the perennial tools available to writers in repressive societies? If so, her equivocations are too successful for a foreigner to decode. Or is it that she has esoteric lessons of a different sort to convey, ones that may have a bearing on the present but on which the present has no bearing? Or finally, maybe the point is just the pleasant discombobulation of feeling that buried somewhere is a deeper meaning that will never be found but shines a light on life’s mysterious unseen beauty.
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Can Xue, Purple Perilla, translated by Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping, is published by isolarii, no place of publication listed, 2020.
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BARRY SCHWABSKY is art critic for The Nation and co-editor of international reviews for Artforum. Along with many books on contemporary art, he’s published three books and several chapbooks of poetry as well as a collection of mainly literary criticism, Heretics of Language (Black Square Editions, 2017). His new book of poetry, A Feeling of And, will be published next year by Black Square.