Snow and Shadow - Dorothy Tse

There's no doubt that Dorothy Tse's stories exhibit a  wonderful degree of colourful ideas and imagery if they are viewed simply as poetic surrealism. The dream-like quality of the writing is reminiscent of Kafka and Murakami, but there's a specific Chinese perspective and sensibility in their content and their cultural references. If you scratch beneath the surface however and divest the stories of the self-consciously imposed imagery that they have been dressed up in, the technique doesn't really provide any great depth of insight into their situations.

Take 'The Love between Leaf and Knife' for example. That's an evocative title, but essentially all the author has done is dress up what in reality is a dull domestic tale of a couple attempting to gain the moral ground and the upper hand in their relationship by renaming the husband and wife Leaf and Knife, and pushing the lengths they take their animosity to extremes. It doesn't alter the fact the underlying sense of the story and the essential natures that lie behind the dressing are grounded in a recognisable and banal familiarity.

Some larger themes do emerge however as you read through the collection. Family disharmony is evident in many of the stories and dismemberment is the extreme representation of this state  'Head' is another example of this, where a father called 'Wood' gives up his head for the sake of his careless and ungrateful son, called 'Tree'. It sharply marks out the nature of the divide between different generations (in China), but the surreal imagery doesn't really make a difference to the theme one way or the other.

At its best, some of Dorothy Tse's writing (and the translation of it from the Chinese) does spin some wonderful imagery in the mind; romantic ("The girl told him that before he came along, she often felt she was being bowled over and over in the sea, all alone" in 'Blessed Bodies'); and grotesque ("a frog that was not quite dead pulling out Grandma's false teeth" in 'The Traveling Family').  Other stories are less readily matched to a prosaic reality and seem to operate according to a dream-logic of their own.  'Black Cat City' for example wraps itself up in an Escher-like construction of inverted cause and effect that mirrors the amnesiacs whose memories are stolen by a plague of night-time cats. Some of this kind of imagery will stay with the reader, but whether it yields anything more rewarding will probably depend on the individual reader.