MOTHER RIVER

Thirteen offbeat stories from the provocative Can Xue blend the earthy and uncanny.

The fiction of Can Xue (a pseudonym) owes debts to magic realism, surrealism, and the Modernists at their most abstruse, but she’s also consistently determined to make sure that familiar feelings of love and loss emerge through her work. In these stories, narrators are usually observing befuddling acts of nature: strange dark shadows emerging in the title story, stones appearing both in the soil and bodies of a community in “Stone Village,” mushrooms overrunning a field in “Something To Do With Poetry,” an elephant suddenly emerging in “Love in Xishuangbanna.” Sometimes, these unusual events serve as contemporary takes on folklore and allegory: The multiple narrators of “Smog City” describe their pollution-struck town with a diffidence that echoes our collective disengagement from climate change—“People’s windpipes and lungs were getting so used to the smog that they accepted it as ordinary air, and let it pass through their bodies quietly and unimpeded.” But more often, the storytelling is unmoored from big themes and mainly cultivates a mood of strangeness and wonderment, as characters transition from everyday life into something weirder. In “The Neighborhood,” a retiree’s concern about the disruptive construction of a sports facility leads him to a series of shifts: the arrival of feral cats, and growing numbers of Qigong practitioners, thanks to whom “every tree and blade of grass in the garden contained their breath, revealing the traces of communicating with them.” In “At the Edge of the Marsh,” a young man is drawn to a town elder dismissed as “defective,” but through him enters into a more dreamlike and mystical relationship with nature. Translators Gernant and Chen keep the prose simple at the sentence level while allowing the oddness of the storytelling to bleed through.

Mind-bending but warmly delivered domestic tales.