Then they begin speaking about Wei Bo, which feels inside out, but the world already is. Her relatives (who have all become mysteriously mangled and wizened since the last time she saw them) are hardly welcoming. Cuilan treks off mournfully to her ancestral home. Wei Bo appears at her door to say that something has come up and he can’t keep their date.

No … but it’s way more about her lover Wei Bo. At their own inconstancy, their changeability.Īt the outset, you meet Cuilan, a widow, so you think it’s about her. In Can Xue’s Love, all the characters are connected to each other. I also think of Fellini’s Satyricon and its use of the ancient mode of storytelling in which a character begins to speak and the narrative darts swiftly after them down the rabbit hole of the story. Maybe it’s the light of uncanniness that follows our departure from a movie theater during the day, maybe that’s the version of lighting or reality that Can Xue’s book shares with film. We are leaving the earth but that is the earth. The astronaut wanders through the weeds and trees of his dacha before he heads off on his voyage. And I speak as a dedicated and conflicted reader lured hopelessly away from the page by television and the entire history of film available no w on various sites-yet some books drop me nicely in the middle, right in between the modes of reading and watching, to live alongside me in the dilemma.Ĭan Xue’s Love in the New Millennium is lit a lot like Tarkovsky’s Solar is. “Not the whole world-I’m always wandering nearby.”īooks have lighting, I think. “Have you always treated the whole world as your home, Fourth Uncle?”

Zipper Mouth by Laurie Weeks