Title: Colossal Disappointment
Review: This book provides an awful snapshot of modern Chinese fiction. With a few notable exceptions--Mo Yan's muscular, hard-hitting story 'The Cure' primary among them--the selected pieces are overwritten to the point of nonsense.Consider this brain-bending sentence from Bi Feiyu's "The Ancestor": "The sky secreted a viscous historical atmosphere."Awkward phrasing and mistranslated phrases make nearly every story in this collection painful to read. I got the sense that the Chinese authors are begging to be taken so seriously that they fill the stories with big words strung together to the point that they end up incomprehensible.How does a sky secrete anything? And how is an atmosphere viscous?Chairman Mao most certainly would not be amused.In fact, he'd probably send Comrade Goldblatt in for some re-education.
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