Purple Perilla - Can Xue

Published by isolarii
Translated by Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping

148 pages

Can Xue’s Purple Perilla includes three short stories that immerse readers in a world where reality and absurdity collide. In “An Affair,” the peaceful yet bland life of a primary school teacher in her midthirties is suddenly disrupted by an anonymous love letter, and her ensuing adventure turns out to be both physical and spiritual. While the teenage boy in “Mountain Ants” is entrusted by an old beggar to retrieve and safeguard a lost world where humans and ants can live together, the kid in “Purple Perilla,” the title story, encounters five wolves in hallucinations and decides to live in the hills permanently. With Can Xue’s concise, energetic narrative, and the excellent translation by Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping, these stories, in spite of their totally different settings and plots, constitute a relay of spiritual rebellions allowing all the protagonists to reconsider the meaning of life and the possibility of self-redemption.

Text by Siyu Cao
Shanghai International Studies University

isolarii revive an extinct literary genre - the Renaissance "island books" of the same name. Together they form an archipelago of today's avant-garde movements and figures.