Mon beau cheval noir

A charming short novel, but actually quite complex: Zhang jumps back and forth between time layers quite a bit. It takes a while for the setting and theme to become clear: a boy from the Mongolian steppe who wants to advance his career, goes to university, stays away from his homeland for nine years, and is then overcome by nostalgia and guilt. There's quite a bit of pathetic sentimentality, and the ending is rather artificially positive, but the whole thing is charming as a pastoral tale, suspended on a folk song about a remarkably intelligent horse. The Chinese author Zhang Chengzhi (born 1948) apparently underwent quite a transformation, from a fanatical Maoist with a significant supporting role in the infamous Cultural Revolution to show more an Islamic convert who distanced himself from Chinese culture. This 1981 book dates from what is called his "lyrical phase." show less

I'm always interested in foreign literature, and it's rare to see Chinese authors translated into English, so I picked this up.
I was a bit disappointed. The two stories are good - quite good, in fact. The first, woven around a Mongolian folk song, follows the narrator as he returns to the grasslands of his youth after being at college and sees again the girl he once would have married. In the second, a geography student tries to set down his feelings for the great rivers of China on paper while studying for exams. There is a lot that I liked in these stories - the introspection, the symbolism and imagery of nature, the romanticism. However, I didn't enjoy it as much as I wanted to be able to. It felt like there was some element missing. show more Perhaps there's a bit of a cultural gap, something I didn't understand which caused the writing to feel somewhat distant. I was always aware that I was reading a translation, not because of any stilted language, but because of that missing something which left me feeling that it would make more sense in Chinese. show less