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Zhang Xianliang. Grass Soup. Martha Avery, tr. London. Secker & Warburg. 1994. vi + 247 pages, ill. L9.99. ISBN 0-436-20196-8.
It is an irony of contemporary times that many scholars and commentators who have experienced little or no genuine adversity brim with resentment against society or even civilization itself, while writers and statesmen who have endured stints as prisoners of conscience usually eschew polarizing judgments in favor of nuanced and insightful reflections on social and cultural problems. On the one hand, recent conflicts in the Balkans and central Africa illustrate how magnified grievances and political opportunism can drum up dormant ethnic tensions to a fever pitch, while on the other, the peaceful emergence of a society from injustice led by a former political prisoner like Nelson Mandela or Vaclav Havel would seem to bear out the Buddhist idea that wisdom can grow out of vexation. Zhang Xianliang, one of a tiny handful of contemporary Chinese novelists whose fiction has received high marks from Western writers like Josef Skvorecky and John Updike, has explored the creative potential of vexation in his latest book.
Only temporarily stymied by Beijing's ban on his novel Getting Used to Dying (1989; see WLT 65:4, p. 767), Zhang Xianliang has continued to publish semiautobiographical fiction about...