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Five Spice Street
by
Can Xue,
Karen Gernant , Zeping Chen
<P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt">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 ...more
Hardcover, The Margellos World Republic of Letters, 352 pages
Published
March 24th 2009
by Yale University Press
(first published 2003)
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Alta
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Five Spice Street (Yale UP, 2009) by the contemporary Chinese writer Can Xue is one of the strangest, most original novels I’ve ever read. It also happens to be one of the worst translations. There is a difference between deliberate strangeness—Can Xue is known for her unusual writings—and a strange feeling resulting from a bad translation. Five Spice Street is strange, I’m afraid, in both ways.
The novel’s deliberate absurdness resides in its way of “telling a story” (the novel is...more
The novel’s deliberate absurdness resides in its way of “telling a story” (the novel is...more
low reviews for this book - I liked that nothing quite happens, that it is a book about gossip - Chinese style... and I found it really amusing. I actually didn't put it down for days...
This is a book about the morally upstanding people of Five Spice Street and their unhealthy obsession with "Madame X." No great events occur and there is no riveting action. There are just busy body neighbors who reveal a lot about themselves as they struggle (unbelievablly poorly!) to understand and explain the actions of one woman who fails in every way to be a "normal" member of the Five Spice Street community. Most of my time with this book swayed between shaking my he...more
It might have been a good book, I just couldn't get into it. Didn't care about Madame X after a while.
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Can Xue (translated as "dirty snow" or "slush") is the pseudonym for Deng Xiao-Hua.
More about Can Xue...
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