{"id":286496,"date":"2011-08-05T20:30:00","date_gmt":"2011-08-05T20:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2011\/08\/05\/latest-review-vertical-motion-by-can-xue\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T14:09:55","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T14:09:55","slug":"latest-review-vertical-motion-by-can-xue","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2011\/08\/05\/latest-review-vertical-motion-by-can-xue\/","title":{"rendered":"Latest Review: "Vertical Motion" by Can Xue"},"content":{"rendered":"

The latest addition<\/a> to our Reviews Section<\/a> is Lily Ye’s review of Vertical Motion<\/em>, this week’s Read This Next<\/a> title. Vertical Motion<\/em> is coming out next month from Open Letter, and is translated from the Chinese by Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping. <\/p>\n

For an “experimental” Chinese writer, Can Xue has received a good deal of attention in the U.S. She’s had books published by New Directions, Northwestern, Yale University Press, and Henry Holt. Additionally, her stories appear in Conjunctions<\/em> on a regular basis.<\/p>\n

Here’s the opening of Lily’s enthusiastic review of her latest collection:<\/p>\n

\n

The word that continues to come to mind as I read Can Xue\u2019s short stories in Vertical Motion<\/em> is uncanny.<\/em> Her stories summon the feeling of the familiar as unfamiliar, of the known as unknown. The uncanny, Freud\u2019s unheimlisch<\/em>, is often described as having to do with a return, a repetition of the known which reveals an unknown element. Oftentimes, uncanny objects are those which return from childhood, and indeed in Xue\u2019s stories we find familiar elements from childhood stories, such as intelligent cats, children exploring a secret garden, and a couple with a mysterious plant, as in Rapunzel. But Xue does not tell bedtime stories\u2014the reader is never allowed to get settle in and get comfortable.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

Xue\u2019s style has a counterintuitive effect: it creates unease by being simple and straightforward. In Alain Robbe-Grillet\u2019s writings, his technique of exhaustive description is applied with the intended end of eliminating all external significations for the objects in his work, to create a system of internal signification in which narrative is formed through the transformations and mutations of these objects. But Xue accomplishes this, very successfully, through a completely opposite tactic, by offering just enough information to allow the reader\u2019s imagination to start working, but never enough to complete the picture we so desire. We become trapped in a world of her making because we are determined to understand it, because we feel as if we should understand it. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Click here<\/a> to read the entire review. And click here<\/a> to read three of the stories. <\/p>\n

\n<\/a>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The latest addition to our Reviews Section is Lily Ye’s review of Vertical Motion, this week’s Read This Next title. Vertical Motion is coming out next month from Open Letter, and is translated from the Chinese by Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping. For an “experimental” Chinese writer, Can Xue has received a good deal of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67456],"tags":[19366,20856,7456,20846,41416,28166,1646,37746],"class_list":["post-286496","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-review","tag-can-xue","tag-chen-zeping","tag-chinese-literature","tag-karen-gernant","tag-lily-ye","tag-open-letter-books","tag-review","tag-vertical-motion"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/286496","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=286496"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/286496\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":311896,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/286496\/revisions\/311896"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=286496"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=286496"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=286496"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}