Tattoo: Three Novellas by Su Tong, Josh Stenberg

WORLD LITERATURE IN REVIEW ^HI^^^l^^^HI^HI I Su Tong. Tattoo: Three Novellas. Josh Stenberg, tr. Portland, Maine. Merwin Asia (St. Johann, distr.). 2010. 204 pages. $45 ($22.95 paper), isbn978-1 878282-80-4 (1-878282-95-8) Su Tong (b. 1963) and fellowmem bers of China's youthful 1980s avant-garde won a global reader ship after the 1989Beijing massacre, thanks to new novels rich in his torical themes and storylines strong enough to inspire great films by China's famed "Fifth Generation" of cinematographers. Su Tong's break out work was Wives and Concubines (1990), filmed by Zhang Yimou as Raise theRed Lantern (1991). In 2009 Su Tong won China its second Man Asian Literary Prize with his novel The Boat toRedemption. Tattoo is the second collection of Su Tong's shorter fiction rendered by JoshStenberg, a talentedwriter, translator, and Chinese opera expert who frequents Su Tong's old haunts along the Shanghai-Suzhou-Nanjing axis. This book is an early offering from Mer win Asia, a two-year-old independent enterprise of Douglas Merwin already known for its trans lations of Chinese and Korean fic tion, like M. E. Sharpe's East Gate Books, an imprint Merwin founded and formerly edited. The three novellas collected here, written in the 1990s, are well selected and expertly translated. Su Tong's 1992 novels Rice and Mi/ Lifeas Lmperor already evidence the turn toward realism and portentous history often noted in post-1989 works by Yu Hua (author of To Live), but Su Tong's longer novels seem possessed by the bizarre, the macabre, the obsessive, the inbred, and the incestuous?in David Der wei Wang's words, "family melo drama with a gothic touch." The novellas here are sparer and not so showy, though they could still be called urban Chinese period pieces. A mystery story in this collection, "The Gardener's Art," is set in 1930s Shanghai. The title story, which clos es the volume, dramatizes primitive violence and the tattoos that served as "colors" for urban gangs of the 1970s just before Mao's death. As always, Su Tong depicts bullying, vengeance, and cruelty, but here he renders these acts deftly and with out sensationalism. The effect is not melodrama but visions of pervasive ugliness, squalor, and malodor. The mystery piece, about a missing hus band, is really a vehicle for exploring verbal harassment, snobbery, and paternal fecklessness in the eternal Chinese family and the neighbor hoods hiding it.That novella contin ues the theme of the opening work, "A Divorce Handbook," which details the rage of a woman scorned, her ability to enlist her birth family and China's mean streets to achieve violent retribution, and the empti ness of her husband's dreams for a better life. The raw passions of Chi nese divorce emerge more quickly and adroitly than in Ha Jin's Wait ing. The tattoos in Su Tong's novella of that name evoke his fascination with fetishes and obsessions, but now with the narrative economy of a master storyteller who has a fine grasp of human psychology. Jeffrey C. Kinkley St. John's University, New York V?ronique Tadjo. Loin de mon p?re. Paris. Actes Sud. 2010. 188 pages. 18. ISBN 978-2-7427-9127-9 In V?ronique Tadjo's Loin de mon p?re, a woman, Nina, returns from France to C?te d'Ivoire for the funeral of her father, to whom as a child she had always felt close. She is shocked by how the civil war has ravaged the country and disturbed by her duties preparing for the funeral, as the customs to which the family adheres are often strange and incomprehensible to her. The father's office has to remain unlocked so that his spirit can come back. The Catholic ceremonies must be postponed because of a village yam festival. She also sees much cor ruption. Petty officials expect bribes, even demanding money for gas while the funeral cortege is headed toward the village. Nina's story is partly memo ries of her childhood, when she was aware that she and her sister, Gabrielle, were living ina privileged universe, but not considered...