Synopses & Reviews
Five Spice Street tells the story of a street in an unnamed city whose inhabitants speculate on the life of a mysterious Madam X. The novel interweaves their endless suppositions into a work that is at once political parable and surreal fantasia. Some think X is 50 years old; others that she is 22. Some believe she has occult powers and has thereby enslaved the young men of the street; others think she is a clever trickster playing mind games with the common people. Who is Madam X? How has she brought the good people of Five Spice Street to their knees either in worship or in exasperation? The unknown narrator takes no sides in the endless interplay of visions, arguments, and opinions. The investigation rages, as the street becomes a Walpurgisnacht of speculations, fantasies, and prejudices. Madam X is a vehicle whereby the people bare their souls, through whom they reveal themselves even as they try to penetrate the mystery of her extraordinary powers.
Five Spice Street is one of the most astonishing novels of the past twenty years. Exploring the collective consciousness of this little street of ordinary people, Can Xue penetrates the deepest existential anxieties of the present daywhether in China or in the Westwhere the inevitable impermanence of identity struggles with the narrative within which identity must compose itself.
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". . . [Xue] blends surrealism à la Dali with a hefty dose of existential angst. Prickly and provocative, Five Spice Street poses penetrating questions about the search for identity and the definition of self." Booklist -- Frances Gage - Renaissance Quarterly
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‘A maverick outsider, the Chinese writer Can Xue described herself in a recent interview as 'an experimental novelist with a strongly philosophical temperament'.True enough, but nothing in that bland label would prepare you for the mind-stretching enchantments of The Last Lover, one of the first of her large-scale works to appear in English. . .Translated by Annelise Finegan Wasmoen with all the hallucinatory clarity that her prose demands, Can Xue guides us through that bewitching place.—Boyd Tonkin, The Independent
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“[A] mind-bending novel . . . Xue succeeds in creating a unique, immersive, tale of ‘intersecting dreamworlds.’”—Publishers Weekly
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“[Can Xue] has found not just a new direction but a new dimension to move in, a realm where conscious beings experience space, time, and each other unbound from the old rules . . . [The Last Lover] is arguably a singular accomplishment.”—Nell Pach, Music and Literature
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“One of the most raved-about works of translated fiction this year”—Jonathan Sturgeon, Flavorwire (“10 New Translated Books to Read Right Now”)
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‘Funny, bizarre, improbable yet oddly moving, her stories in The Last Lover often arise from the mutual fantasies of East and West. They can sometimes bring Kafka, Ishiguro or Calvino to mind. In the end, though, Can Xue commands a truly unique voice.’—Boyd Tonkin,
The Independent.
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The Independent’s Book of the Year, 2014
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“[Can Xue] sheds the constraints of reality for the peculiarly detailed realm of the imagination. The Last Lover is a skillful, enigmatic investigation of love that swells and subverts traditional narratives.”—Alex McElroy, Colorado Review
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Finalist for the 2015 Best Translated Book Award, fiction category -- organized by Three Percent, a resource for international literature based at the University of Rochester.
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Longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2015 given by Booktrust.
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Longlisted for the 2015 American Literary Translators Asssociation, National Translation Prize in Prose.
Synopsis
From the sensational Chinese author who has been called “a new world master,” a Kafkaesque novel set in a fictional Western nation
Synopsis
Winner of the 2015 Best Translated Book Award for fiction, presented by Three Percent, a resource for international literature
In Can Xue’s extraordinary book, we encounter a full assemblage of husbands, wives, and lovers. Entwined in complicated, often tortuous relationships, these characters step into each other’s fantasies, carrying on conversations that are “forever guessing games.” Their journeys reveal the deepest realms of human desire, figured in Can Xue’s vision of snakes and wasps, crows, cats, mice, earthquakes, and landslides. In dive bars and twisted city streets, on deserts and snowcapped mountains, the author creates an extreme world where every character “is driving death away with a singular performance.”
Who is the last lover? The novel is bursting with vividly drawn characters. Among them are Joe, sales manager of a clothing company in an unnamed Western country, and his wife, Maria, who conducts mystical experiments with the household’s cats and rosebushes. Joe’s customer Reagan is having an affair with Ida, a worker at his rubber plantation, while clothing-store owner Vincent runs away from his wife in pursuit of a woman in black who disappears over and over again. By the novel’s end, we have accompanied these characters on a long march, a naive, helpless, and forsaken search for love, because there are just some things that can’t be stopped—or helped.
About the Author
Can Xue, meaning "dirty snow, leftover snow," is the pseudonym of Deng Xiaohua (b.1953), author of many novels and short works of fiction in Chinese. Her publications in English include Dialogues in Paradise (short stories), Old Floating Cloud (two novellas), The Embroidered Shoes (short stories), and most recently Blue Light in the Sky and Other Stories. Formerly a tailor, Can Xue began to write fiction in 1983, publishing her first works in 1985. She lives in Beijing.