Rouge Street

I read this after reading a review in the NYT and while I don’t always agree with The Times, I appreciate getting exposure to new work and in this case, the review was spot on in my opinion. Words don’t describe how amazing this collection of Novellas is. Thank goodness for the gifted translator who helped to bring this Shuang Xuetao’s amazing talents to the English-speaking world. It helped me to read the Forward, also wonderfully crafted. I rarely read introductions unless I know the Forward author, preferring to absorb a book on my own, but when reading a work rooted in a culture I don’t understand and particularly one that has been translated, it can be helpful and this Forward is a must in my opinion to understand the context of Rouge Street (a very real place in northeastern China). To be clear - the stories themselves are riveting, but it’s the writing, the simple direct language and incredible character development wrought through actions as well as words that made this so amazing. I can imagine that those having grown up in China and native speakers would have much greater insight, however as someone that often reads translated fiction from other cultures, I can say that I found every phrase of Rouge Street exceptional and wished that it would go on for a thousand pages. Rarely do I try to slow down my pace of reading. With Rouge Street, I couldn’t read slow enough and will be re-reading it as I await this gifted author’s next work.

Rouge Street is a collection of three atmospheric novellas originally written in Chinese by celebrated young writer Shuang Xuetao and translated into English. The stories themselves are quite different in nature, but they are all connected by location as each is set in Shenyang, an industrial city in northeast China that has been in serious decline since the time of the Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution. In particular, the focal point is Yanfen Street, an impoverished and crime-ridden district populated by men and women at the fringes of society who are struggling to survive. It is a sector of the city with a surprisingly rich history; for instance, we are told in an introductory note that the street’s name loosely translates to “rouge powder” owing to its bygone role in producing makeup for ladies in the imperial palace. It is also Shuang’s hometown neighborhood, making these tales very personal endeavors for the author.‘The Aeronaut’, the first work in the volume, is a multi-generational saga told from the perspective of two large working-class families. A son of one family, who marries a daughter of the other, has dreams of inventing a flying machine, a poignant metaphor for rising above and escaping the hard, soul-crushing life they all lead. How that escape attempt plays out comprises the story’s resolution. In ‘Bright Hall’, two teenage boys, abandoned by their parents and living at opposite ends of Yanfen Street, are connected by a brutal crime. They eventually find themselves in a secret room at the bottom of a frozen lake being interrogated by a big fish disguised as a man. The final novella, ‘Moses on the Plain’, is essentially a detective story told from myriad perspectives and over a span of many years. It involves multiple unsolved murders, including those of a policeman and two government officials. At the center of things is a young woman who is being raised by her unemployed father after her mother has died.These brief descriptions do not really provide an adequate sense of just how complex and interesting these stories really are. Shuang is a writer with an admirable talent for capturing the feeling of certain place and time, which is useful in this case as the setting and the history will likely be unfamiliar to many Western readers. While unique in their own way, each novella has a distinctly melancholic feel to it, with subject matter that inevitably involves broken families, betrayal, unfulfilled dreams, and death. They are also multi-layered tales in which time frames and points of view shift frequently, providing a backdrop that is at once dream-like and grittily realistic. The author’s work has been compared to that of both Hemingway and Murakami, which is high praise indeed, if somewhat premature. (Shuang’s language, though often direct, is far more convoluted than Hemingway’s ever was and the only real echo of Murakami comes in the fantastical conclusion to ‘Bright Hall’.) Nevertheless, Rouge Street was an affecting and engaging book and this is an author whose work I will seek out in the future.

This is a lovely collection of 3 novellas, set in a working class district in a city in northeast China. The plots are intricate, spanning multiple generations of interlocking families trying to navigate their through 40 years of history. All of the families are broken in some way: missing mothers or fathers, livelihoods destroyed by macro economic forces, alcoholism and despair. The wreckage left by the Cultural Revolution of the 1960's filters down through the generations. Yet the characters make their way; the stories are not oppressive, and even somewhat hopeful.I can't speak to the faithfulness of the translation, but the English is evocative and lyrical.I will certainly seek out more writing by this author.

A savoir : feuillets collés imprimés par amazon, ne vaut pas le prix éditeur original. 5 euro maxi. J'ai demandé le remboursement immédiatement après l'avoir recu.