Classic Chinese Stories by Lu Xun
I love short story collections, but I always find them slightly uncomfortable.
They rush you through ideas and scenes at speed, packing a lot into a small space. For a good chunk of that time I’m often at sea. Where are we now? Who are these people? Why do I care?
With a novel, you often get those bearings in the first handful of pages, then enjoy the rest from that vantage point. With short stories, by the time you know where you are, they’ve ended.
Here the situation was compounded by reading stories from someone I already knew as a “renowned author”. Expectations were high, and the first signs of scrabbling to locate the narrative made me think it was all a sham and that I should go and read something else.
But finishing this short collection reminded me how much there is to be found in persisting.
Across seven stories - from A Small Incident to After Death - the collection builds a set of portraits that linger long after the specifics fade. Deeply humane figures pursue ordinary lives while skirting the edge of destitution. Reading it feels like moving room to room as a ghost, catching glimpses of lives mid-motion. There’s the awkwardness between master and servant who once played together as children. A destitute scholar whose trips to an inn chart a slow collapse. Two lovers whose hopes of forging a new path fade into regret. A mourned grandmother and an emptied life. A childhood night at the opera. A death.
One hundred years later, translated across the world, these stories still pay off in images that feel sharper and stranger than most of what I’ve read in the last few years.
After "Classic Chinese Stories by Lu Xun" I read: The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789–1848
Before "Classic Chinese Stories by Lu Xun" I read: Capitalist Realism