
A chimpanzee bites the hand of a man who has no face. A gardener muses that a cypress tree "seemed to hear my thoughts." A man's body dissolves while walking. These are some of the avant-garde touches, from the delightful to the scary, in the stories of Mother River, a mesmerizing collection by Can Xue, translated from the Chinese by Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping. Aside from cats, the most frequently recurring characters here are shadows, starting with the title story, set in a fishing village where, as a fisherman tells a protégé, "a huge dark shadow would rise in the Wu River and it would motionlessly occupy half the sky." Equally eerie silhouettes appear in "The Neighborhood," where a woman peers through a telescope and sees "surging shadows" outside her flat. This occurs after she meets the building's electrician, who has developed "a black hole in the back of his head."
These plotless pieces may seem devoted to the surreal by mere gossamer strands, but a closer look reveals them to be far more allegorical. Consider "Stone Village," where "stones of all sizes sprouted continuously from the earth," or "Smog City," with a haze so thick that residents "couldn't make out the faces of people only six or seven meters away," and it's easy to detect political parallels. Even less overtly political pieces, such as "At the Edge of the Marsh," in which a young boy's uncle teaches him to commune with nature, have an infectious resonance. For those unfamiliar with Can Xue, Mother River is an excellent introduction to the work of one of China's most distinctive authors. --Michael Magras, freelance book reviewer