25 May 2012 12:30:51
Shi Cheng means "10 cities" and reveals the structural concept of this book, one in a series of story collections about groups of cities. The idea of the city as a "character" in fiction or film is very much of our times and conjures up notions of ceaseless noise and activity, the alienation of the individual in the roiling mass. These stories confound such expectations. Not only do they resist the noirish clichés of "urban fiction", they deny us any of the themes we might expect from China; children are not an issue here, nor factory life, and only one story touches on social organisation. The cities remain mostly undifferentiated. Instead, there are strange, glancing portraits of misfits – a man who builds a car from scrap, a woman whose mission is to stop her friend committing murder. Weirdly inconsequential, most of the stories trail off, leaving little impression save that of sad, flattened lives. Some of the writers are well-known in China, but in translation, all are somehow robbed of energy. Perhaps subtleties of humour and pathos don't translate easily.
