From The New Yorker:
“Frontier,” a mesmerizing novel by the Chinese author Can Xue, which was published in translation earlier this year by Open Letter Books, begins with a young woman named Liujin who has decided to make a life for herself in Pebble Town. The area is unusually abundant with animal life: the novel’s first chapter teems with wagtails, willow warblers, geese, horses, snow leopards, wolves, sheep, goats, geckos, and frogs. At first, “Frontier” resembles a fish-out-of-water story; as Liujin encounters new people in the market where she sells cloth, we imagine that she will be tested and changed according to some established narrative laws. The reader quickly abandons this notion, however—along with the expectation that anything like a traditional plot will emerge. This is not to say that nothing happens in “Frontier.” In fact, things are happening all the time. Each chapter is devoted to between one and four of about a dozen characters, many of whom migrated to Pebble Town to work at the mysterious Design Institute. Liujin, we are told, “had never understood anything about the Design Institute—not the people and not the work, either. From the time she was old enough to understand things, she had listened closely and observed. Sometimes, Dad would explain a little to her, but his explanations frequently drew her into deeper, more complicated, and darker entanglements.”
The author, whom the American novelist and editor Bradford Morrow has described as one of the most “innovative and important” in contemporary world literature, revels in such mysteries and entanglements. Can Xue is the genderless pen name of Deng Xiaohua, who was born in 1953, in Changsha City, in Hunan Province. In Chinese, the name means “residual snow,” a phrase, Xiaohua has explained, that is used to describe both “the dirty snow that refuses to melt” and “the purest snow at the top of a high mountain.”
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Can Xue has likened her writing to the pioneering dance of the choreographer Isadora Duncan—a comparison that captures, in “Frontier,” the fresh, unexpected ways in which one moment flows into the next. Now someone is slamming a grocery basket upside down, releasing a bunch of live frogs; now a young woman is encircled by a grove of dead poplars; now snow leopards are descending upon the market in Pebble Town from Snow Mountain. There is also a resplendent garden that grows “in the air”—full of “palms, banyans, and coconut trees, as well as some other unusual plants.” One never knows to whom this garden will appear, or when, or why. Nevertheless, its appearance brings pleasure and momentary enlightenment.
Link to the rest at The New Yorker