I Live in the Slums by Chinese author Can Xue is a mesmerizing short story collection featuring stories that are both mysterious and beautiful in its elegance.
Location: set in China
I Live in the Slums: synopsis
In Can Xue’s world the superficial is peeled away to reveal layers of depth and meaning. Her stories observe no conventions of plot or characterization and limn a chaotic, poetic state ordered by the extreme logic of philosophy.
Combining elements of both Chinese materiality—the love of physical things—and Western abstract thinking, Can Xue invites her readers into an immersive landscape that blends empirical fact and illusion, mixes the physical and spiritual, and probes the space between consciousness and unconsciousness. She brings us to a place that is both readily familiar yet unmappable and can make us hyperaware of the inherent unreliability in our relationship to the world around us. Delightful, enchanting, and full of mystery and secrets, Can Xue’s newest collection shines a light on the forces that give contours to the visible terrain we acknowledge as reality.
Book review
What is life like for the rodents, birds, shadows, and trees that share their world with human beings? That must have been the question Can Xue asked herself when she wrote the stories in this collection. The stories show the good and the ugly that happens in the world around us from a different point of view. What all stories in I Live in the Slums have in common is a rich fantasy. You read about swamps of the past, people jumping into holes and disappearing (at the lightning speed of two sentences), and buildings without doors.
My favorite stories are Swamp, I am a willow tree and Our human neighbors. The first one is a fascinating story that I won’t even try to recount. I am pretty sure I only understood part of it, but as I said, it was fascinating. I am a willow tree is about a tree’s survival and its neverending struggle against its lifelong tormentor, the gardener. The willow tree and its thoughts about the gardener’s intentions felt more ‘real’ and human than many human characters in other books. An impressive feat.
Our human neighbors is a fresh and lovely short story that felt light but hits you out of nowhere with references to death. For example: “Could it be that people who were near magpies were all fond of killing? My father said that this woman ‘clearly understood the profound mysteries of the natural world.’ In Father’s eyes, she was almost an irresistible spirit. And so Father sacrificed himself early.” Still, compared to the gloomy story before it (Story of the Slums), it was bright and refreshing.
This also brings me to my only negative point about I Live in the Slums: the first (novel-length) story, Story of the Slums, was such a drag to get through. The story had its moments; I like the dry humor (the ‘wicked goat’ and ‘ruthless mice’) and the descriptions of the slums are so good that I could imagine myself exploring the slums. The events are both intriguing and weird and you just go with the flow without any idea about where the story would lead you next. I would have liked this story collection more if it had started with another story or if this first story had been published as three separate parts.
Of all the stories in this collection, I felt most connected to Shadow people. “Where had the people gone? We hadn’t gone underground, nor were we hiding inside the hollow walls. If you carefully investigated the foot of the bed, the back of the bookcase, the corners of the room, the backs of the doors, and other similar places, you would discover pale shadows flexing and twisting. That’s us, the cowards. Worms hide in the earth. We hide indoors. It seems an odd way to live.” It must be the spur of the moment, but aren’t many of us like shadow people right now? I sure feel like one.
Which brings me to another observation: I think the stories in I Live in the Slums will have a very different meaning for every reader, depending on that person’s point of view and state of mind at the moment they read the story. After many of the stories in this collection, I pretty much sat there realizing I didn’t get them at all, which was fine. Maybe all of them are perfectly clear for someone who knows more about Chinese myths and legends.
In short
I Live in the Slums by Chinese author Can Xue is a mesmerizing short story collection featuring stories from a different perspective with elements from the Chinese culture. Every single story is both mysterious and beautiful in its elegance and descriptions of daily life. It is not a story collection I would recommend to most people, just to a select few that want to experience what else is out there. To whoever decides to read this book: skip the first story and come back for it in the end if you like the other stories.
Translated from Chinese by Karen Gernant and Zeping Chen.
Interested?
You can buy your copy of I Live in the Slums from Amazon.
Many thanks to Yale University Press and NetGalley for a digital ARC of this novel in exchange for an honest review.
