A round-up of reviews of works in translation from Chinese, including fiction, story collections, poetry, biographies, classics and philosophy. Click on the title for the review.
Novels
The Wedding Party by Liu Xinwu, translated by Jeremy Tiang
It is somewhat inexplicable that it has taken more than 35 years for Liu Xinwu’s The Wedding Party to show up in English. The book was serialized in 1984 and published the next year, winning the Mao Dun Prize and adapted into an 8-episode series for television. Popularity can be the result of hitting a particular zeitgeist that may not always translate across periods, cultures and languages, but The Wedding Party is a marvelous story of a single December day in the life of an atmospheric Beijing compound populated by sprawling cast of quirky and all-too-human characters, all-written with style and wit. All it was missing was a pitch-perfect translation by Jeremy Tiang.
Whisper by Chang Yu-Ko, translated by Roddy Flagg
Wu Shih-sheng is a taxi driver, sinking in debt and living in a cockroach-infested metal shack in the outskirts of Taipei with his wife, Hsiang-ying. When she dies in a mental hospital, after claiming to have been hearing the voice of a ghost threatening her life and that of their daughter, Shih-sheng decides to dig deeper. His journey will lead him to consult with a deranged Taoist priestess, and eventually to embark on a dangerous hike on the top of Mount Jade, in central Taiwan, with the purpose of destroying the evil creature.
Strange Beasts of China by Yan Ge, translated by Jeremy Tiang
The unnamed narrator of Yan Ge’s novel Strange Beasts of China, a former zoology student-turned-fiction writer, resides in the fictional city of Yong’an, somewhere in southern China, described as “a huge, filthy, ungovernable city, full of all sorts of beasts of unknown origin, and secrets, likewise.” Yong’an perhaps resembles the concrete jungles of nearly every provincial Chinese capital, save for the fact that it is also home to a number of exotic creatures, each species of which resembles homo sapiens, save for certain afflictions and anomalies.
Asian Review of Books for more