Bird Talk and Other Stories by Xu Xu: Modern Tales of a Chinese Romantic by Frederik H. Green (review)

With a literary career that spans four decades and a varied oeuvre that includes fiction, poetry, drama, and essays, Xu Xu (1908–1980) is undeniably an important figure in modern Chinese literature. While his works were widely popular in mainland China in the 1930s and the 1940s and continued to enjoy popularity in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the Chinese diaspora after his relocation to Hong Kong in 1950, Xu was left out of literary history during the first three decades of the People’s Republic of China. This is because his decisive adherence to liberalism and individualism and his preference for aesthetics over politics were very much at odds with the mainstream leftist ideology that dominated the Chinese literary scene at the time. It wasn’t until the 1980s, when calls for the “liberation of thought” were raised and more concerted efforts were made to fight against the dogmatic and utilitarian understanding of literature and art, that Xu Xu finally began to be included in literary history in mainland China. As interest in his literary legacy has grown, many of Xu Xu’s works have been reprinted and critical scholarship on his life and works has also increased significantly in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Xu Xu, however, remains rather underexplored in English-language scholarship.

The publication of Bird Talk and Other Stories by Xu Xu: Modern Tales of a Chinese Romantic, translated and with commentary by Frederik H. Green, is therefore a much needed and welcome event. A leading scholar on Xu Xu, with several published articles and a dissertation that offers the most (and only) comprehensive study of the writer in English, Frederik Green is committed to introducing Xu Xu and his works to a Western audience. Bird Talk and Other Stories, through five carefully selected and beautifully translated short stories spanning from 1937 to 1965, truly opens the literary world of Xu Xu to English readers for the first time. It is a world that is presented as multidimensional and multifaceted, not only because it exhibits extensive temporal and spatial coverage (ranging almost three decades from Republican-era Shanghai and 1930s Europe to postwar Hong Kong and Taiwan), but also because it responds to, and is in dialogue with, the evolving sociopolitical conditions, the increasing demand for ideological homogeneity, and a multitude of literary trends and philosophical ideas prevalent both in China and abroad. The unique contribution of this book lies also in its engaging “Introduction” that provides enlightening personal and sociopolitical contexts for understanding Xu Xu’s life and works, and in the well-articulated critical essay in its “Afterword” that places Xu Xu in the transnational context of global literary modernity.

In Chinese language scholarship, Xu Xu has been categorized as a “late-romanticist” (houqi langmanpai) by Yan Jiayan, a “late-modernist” (houqi xiandaipai) by Kong Fanjin, and a writer who breaks down the elite/popular cultural divide (yasu zhenghe) by Chen Xuanbo.¹ While these scholars have discussed, to various extents, Xu Xu’s shared sensibilities with Western literary traditions and the impact Western philosophical thought, such as the Bergsonian concept of intuition and the existentialist idea of lived experience, had on his writing, they focus primarily on repositioning Xu Xu properly in the landscape of modern Chinese literary history. Frederik Green, on the other hand, seeks to remap the global literary space by placing Xu Xu in the context of “transnational romanticism” (p. 200) and connecting him to a number of writers, such as the German-born Swiss writer Hermann Hesse and the French-Brazilian philosopher Michael Löwy, who are “associated with a twentieth-century revival of romanticism” (p. 197). Green points out that at the core of these writers’ romantic critiques of modernity is “a sense of metaphysical [End Page 283...