Then Kafkaesk went downhill: singing and dancing at the University of the University in Beijing in the summer of 1966 the new edition of the “selected works by Mao Zedong”
Photo: dpa
Susan Sonntag already thought Can Xue was the greatest chance of a Nobel Prize for Literature. In 2023 and 2024, she was at the top of the most promising candidates for the English bookmakers. Nevertheless, the Chinese author is still largely unknown in this country.
Can Xue was born in Changha, South China in a family of intellectuals in 1953. During the “big jump to the front” at the end of the 1950s and again during the “Cultural Revolution” at the end of the 1960s, their parents were deported to re -education in the country. Therefore, she only got rudimentary school education, but began to read Western and Russian literature, especially at the suggestion of her father.
The translation of the pseudonym Can Xue means both “dirty, mushy snow” and “pure, white snow”. An ambiguity, from which the stories in Can Xues are also characterized in German. There tells a not more described being that does not feel like a rat or mouse, but is referred to and is treated as such by humans and, above all, treated, of its precarious existence in the houses behind the oven, about the unpredictability of the people who Sometimes loving like a pet, treat as an vermin or both at the same time. If it is thrown out, it is looking for a new house with a oven.
The houses, says the being, “are all connected and arranged in long rows. Did these people have built their houses in this way for fear? ”It quickly becomes clear that many of these stories are allegories. Here China’s recent history and present are processed in fables and fantastic stories. If you also think of reading Kafka (“Josephine and the people of the mice” or “in the construction of the Chinese wall”) or the stories by Jorge Luis Borgenens is correct. Can Xue admires Borges and not only translated Kafka, but also published a book for him. When Elias Canetti from Kafka said he was the only Chinese author of German, then one could say from Can Xue that she was the most Kafkaesque author China.
In the story “in the neighborhood of humans”, an elster tells of a overgrown park, in which she meets a woman on a woman sitting there on a stone bench. »What connection was there between her and the pond? Were your children drowned in it? Or wanted to drown herself in it. Her gaze was always scary to me, but my wife did not share this feeling. She said the stranger was very educated and sensitive. The feeling of my wife never trough. ”But then the woman passes out of the bank. The Elster flies very excitedly to her. When the woman wakes up, she grabs her and keeps her under water for a while. In “The Old House” Zhou Yizhen returns in her forced house because of a serious illness and meets a woman who has not only changed her name in Zhou Yizhen, but her whole life, her entire identity to Zhou Yizhen aligned.
Often only individual elements can be interpreted by Can Xues. As with Kafka or Borges, they remain puzzling as a whole. Perhaps you are fascinated by the reader because of this and involuntarily pull it into the text. There are always bright spots in the dark stories. In “Glück” “Ms. Magister Wen” stands in front of the open window of her room at night as suddenly all possible shadows fly into the half -dark space. Shadows that could also mean the dead of the past, the dead of the Mao and Communist party’s megalomania. “Ms. Wen felt her body sank while the ceiling and the four walls stick apart. But it did not float in the air, but stood firmly on earth, and all things flocked to her all around – but did not suffocate, but on the contrary, gave her a feeling of unimpeded joy. ”It is the joy to live and joy , to be able to give you a voice as an author?
Can Xue: Shadow people. Adchin. v. Eva Schestag. Matthes & Seitz, 366 pages, born, 28 €.