I live in the slums by Can Xue (Yale University Press, 2020)
Title: I live in the slums
Author: Can Xue (translated from the Chinese by Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping)
Publisher: Yale University Press (2020)
ISBN: 9780300247435
This reader’s impression was written and sent to LitNet on the writer's own initiative.
Can Xue’s I live in the slums is an uncompromising, surreal and deeply unsettling meditation on dislocation, instability and the fluidity of existence. To read it is to enter a world that is perpetually shifting beneath one’s feet – a space where the boundaries between human and animal, self and environment, past and present, blur into an oppressive yet strangely hypnotic landscape. The book resists conventional storytelling at every turn, eschewing traditional narrative structures in favour of something more elusive, more disjointed, yet profoundly immersive. Though the book is ostensibly a collection of stories, they do not unfold in a linear fashion; rather, they refract and echo each other, constructing a disorienting, feverish atmosphere that mirrors the existential uncertainty of its characters.
The slums Can Xue describes are not merely physical locations, but conceptual spaces –liminal worlds in which reality is unstable and perception itself unreliable. The opening story, “Story of the slums”, introduces a narrator who may or may not be human – a spectral figure drifting through a world of deprivation and grotesque horror, observing the decay, violence and dreamlike phenomena that constitute daily existence. The inhabitants of this world seem barely human themselves, their lives dictated by inscrutable forces, their interactions governed by an eerie, disconnected logic. Can Xue’s prose does not describe so much as it disorients, offering glimpses of reality that shift and transform without warning. At times, reading I live in the slums feels akin to listening to a story recounted in a dream – everything makes sense within its own internal logic, yet the moment one attempts to impose reason upon it, meaning begins to dissolve.
A recurring motif throughout the book is the presence of animals – particularly rats, dogs and strange hybrid creatures that occupy the same existential plane as humans. The grotesque image of an oversized house mouse gnawing on an old man’s heel – indifferent to whether he is alive or dead – sets the tone for a world where survival is a brutal, instinct-driven process and where the distinction between predator and prey is often ambiguous. At times, the narrators themselves oscillate between human and nonhuman states, as though identity is something porous – something that can be shed or mutated depending on circumstance. This preoccupation with transformation and dissolution lends the book a sense of pervasive unease – no one is fully in control of their form, their fate or their place in the world.
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Can Xue’s writing operates on the logic of dreams, and as such, the experience of reading I live in the slums is one of continuous disorientation.
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Can Xue’s writing operates on the logic of dreams, and as such, the experience of reading I live in the slums is one of continuous disorientation. Time does not progress in any conventional sense; events loop back on themselves, spaces expand and contract, and dialogue is often cryptic, recursive or entirely detached from cause and effect. In “Shadow people”, for instance, a constant, lingering paranoia pervades the narrative – a sense that something unseen is present, shaping the characters’ lives in ways they cannot comprehend. The effect is claustrophobic – there is no escape from this world, no firm ground on which to stand, only the endless uncertainty of shifting perception. Even conversation itself appears unreliable; characters speak, but their words do not always connect, and what is said often seems secondary to the unspoken tensions that underlie their interactions.
Although the book does not explicitly position itself as a political work, there is an undeniable allegorical weight to its depiction of confinement, surveillance and the erosion of personal agency. The slums function as a microcosm of oppression – a space where individuals are subjected to forces beyond their comprehension, where power operates invisibly yet pervasively. There is a Kafkaesque quality to this world – an omnipresent sense that some larger, unknowable system is at work, enforcing arbitrary rules that no one fully understands. At times, even the environment itself appears complicit in this control, as in “The swamp”, where the very land shifts and reshapes itself in ways that feel almost malevolent. Yet, even in this suffocating atmosphere, there is an odd, almost hallucinatory beauty to Can Xue’s descriptions – a poetic quality in her rendering of decay and chaos.
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A Daoist undercurrent runs through her writing – a sense that stability itself is an illusion, that everything exists in a state of perpetual transformation.
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What makes I live in the slums both challenging and rewarding is its refusal to offer the reader any stable ground. There are no resolutions here, no moments of clarity that neatly tie the stories together. Instead, the reader must simply inhabit this fragmented, unsettling world – must feel its shifting contours and its creeping, indefinable menace. Can Xue does not construct narratives in the traditional sense; rather, she builds atmospheres, constructs states of mind, and immerses the reader in landscapes that feel both alien and intimately familiar. Her work has often been compared with that of Kafka, Borges and Beckett, and while those influences are evident, there is something distinctly her own in the way she fuses modernist literary techniques with a sensibility rooted in Chinese philosophical and literary traditions. A Daoist undercurrent runs through her writing – a sense that stability itself is an illusion, that everything exists in a state of perpetual transformation.
Reading I live in the slums is an act of surrender. It requires the reader to relinquish any expectation of clarity and instead embrace uncertainty – to allow the novel’s strange rhythms and disorienting shifts to wash over them. It is not a book that offers easy answers, nor one that fits neatly into any genre or category. Rather, it is an experience – unsettling, at times maddening, but ultimately unforgettable. Can Xue’s vision lingers long after the final page, her images seeping into the subconscious like fragments of a dream one cannot quite recall yet cannot entirely forget.
- Zalman S Davis is a writer, the publisher at Minimal Press and the curator of three literary prizes in South Africa.
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