Dialogues in Paradise

Dialogues in Paradise, Can Xue’s first book to appear in English, opens on a deceptively realist note. “A Summer Day in the Beautiful South” recounts an intimate memoir of Can Xue’s young life: her family’s relocation to rural Changsha in the 1950s amid persecution by the anti-rightist campaign, her adolescence during the Cultural Revolution, and her choice to take up fiction, at the age of thirty, propelled by a sense that, “What I have to say is something beyond ordinary consciousness, beyond ordinary talk.” From there, nonfiction turns to fiction, reminiscences dissolve into lyric flights, memories of hardship mutate into dark hallucinations. Dialogues in Paradise crescendos in the final, title story, imbued with a mythic power. A narrator stands between two figures—but the subject of the story seems to be process itself, the ongoing flow of things beyond stabilized reality. We have arrived in the realm, which Can Xue calls “paradise” in the opening memoir, where understanding itself becomes a creative enterprise.