Frontier
Can Xue
Oct 2024 · Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by Rebecca Lam
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13 hr
Unabridged
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About this audiobook
New Novel from the Winner of the 2015 Best Translated Book Award
Frontier opens with the story of Liujin, a young woman heading out on her own to create her own life in Pebble Town, a somewhat surreal place at the base of Snow Mountain where wolves roam the streets and certain enlightened individuals can see and enter a paradisaical garden.
Exploring life in this city (or in the frontier) through the viewpoint of a dozen different characters, some simple, some profound, Can Xue's latest novel attempts to unify the grand opposites of life—barbarism and civilization, the spiritual and the material, the mundane and the sublime, beauty and death, Eastern and Western cultures.
A layered, multifaceted masterpiece from the 2015 winner of the Best Translated Book Award, Frontier exemplifies John Darnielle's statement that Can Xue's books are "as if dreams had invaded the physical world."
Frontier opens with the story of Liujin, a young woman heading out on her own to create her own life in Pebble Town, a somewhat surreal place at the base of Snow Mountain where wolves roam the streets and certain enlightened individuals can see and enter a paradisaical garden.
Exploring life in this city (or in the frontier) through the viewpoint of a dozen different characters, some simple, some profound, Can Xue's latest novel attempts to unify the grand opposites of life—barbarism and civilization, the spiritual and the material, the mundane and the sublime, beauty and death, Eastern and Western cultures.
A layered, multifaceted masterpiece from the 2015 winner of the Best Translated Book Award, Frontier exemplifies John Darnielle's statement that Can Xue's books are "as if dreams had invaded the physical world."
New Novel from the Winner of the 2015 Best Translated Book Award
Frontier opens with the story of Liujin, a young woman heading out on her own to create her own life in Pebble Town, a somewhat surreal place at the base of Snow Mountain where wolves roam the streets and certain enlightened indi...
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About the author
Ts'an Hsueh was born in Ch'angsha, Hunan, of Communist party activists who married for love and shared the same ideals. However, only four years after her birth, they were declared Rightists and lost their positions at the New Hunan Newspaper office. Her mother was shipped off to a rural commune, where she suffered from illness and malnutrition. Ts'an Hsueh's maternal grandmother died of starvation in 1961. Ts'an Hsueh's education was cut short a few years later by the Cultural Revolution, when she had just finished primary school. For 10 years she worked at various jobs in iron casting, machine fitting, and light industry. In 1978 she met another rusticated youth who had returned to Ch'angsha and had become a carpenter. They married, had a baby, and decided to begin their own tailoring business. Ts'an Hsueh began writing fiction during the mid-1980s. Either she accidentally stumbled onto a nonreferential style of writing, or she was actively influenced by Western works in translation; at any rate, she is one of the few Chinese writers to carry out experiments in this direction. As Charlotte Innes writes in her foreword to Old Floating Cloud, a book containing two of Ts'an Hsueh's novellas, "to read Can Xue is... like falling asleep over a history book and dreaming a horribly distorted version of what you've just read."Her stories are not allegorical, but there are just enough political phrases sprinkled through them to make one feel that the author's own history and China's destiny are not totally divorced from her surreal world. One cannot approach Ts'an Hsueh's works as one would earlier mainland Chinese fiction. Rather than the familiar conventions of Socialist realism, one finds bizarre, morbid, and scatological imagery that may initially repel but that may also fascinate, if seen as an attempt to render symbolically her vision of a revolution degenerated into a nightmare in which humanity's more noble sentiments have been totally debased. Reading Ts'an Hsueh is a challenge that actively engages the reader in a quest for intelligibility and possible hidden significance.
Ts'an Hsueh was born in Ch'angsha, Hunan, of Communist party activists who married for love and shared the same ideals. However, only four years after her birth, they were declared Rightists and lost their positions at the New Hunan Newspaper office. Her mother was shipped off to a rural commune,...
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