December 2015
Gift of the Dark Mother Earth
by Can Xue
Gift of the Dark Mother Earth, the latest novel by Can Xue, is a profound metaphor of her hometown. It follows her usual magical style in the sense that it vividly unfolds the complex and delicate inner world of the characters. The story takes place in the remote Wuliqu School, with such distinctive characters as Teacher Meiyong, Zhang Danzhi, Yutian, Xiao Man, Uncle Yun and Sha Men presented one after another. The personality and human nature exposed through unique dialogues enable the readers to feel a return to simplicity so that they want to explore human soul and nature and start in-depth reading and thinking. The book depicts petty matters in a great age. The author’s ambition is to create a feeling for the pattern of the whole universe through the structure of an ordinary tree leaf, and to unify the arbitrarily split world through the narration of various folk sundries so that different characters can all become the center of this unity and their performance can have a universality. As the only Chinese writer who has won the Best Translated Book Award in the United States, Can Xue was nominated for the foreign novel prize of The Independent of the UK and shortlisted in the Neustadt International Prize for Literature of the US. As the Chinese woman writer, whose works have been translated and published the most abroad, Can Xue has been called the most creative Chinese writer by overseas critics.
