Insignificance

Here we have stories originally written in English as well as in Hebrew and Russian (and expertly brought into English by a variety of translators) by authors both well known and unknown in the US. These authors imagine apocalyptic wastelands, teleportation via dreams, hyperintelligent mice, a timeless library, and more. Two of the most powerful stories in the collection (“Burn Alexandria” and “A Good Place for the Night”) offer us visions of a fragile hope springing out of the ruins left behind by brutal alien invasion and an unexplained population-killing disaster, respectively. Among the longer pieces in the collection , they are beautiful and devastating. And then there are stories like “The SternGerlach Mice” and “My Crappy Autumn” that attack themes of hopelessness and devastation with the darkest kind of black humor. Magical realism and hard sci-fi, too, populate Zion’s Fiction, with stories of portal-mirrors and disappearing stars, on one hand, and accelerated evolution and spliced timelines on the other. Visions of Jerusalem alleys, orange groves, the Mediterranean , the streets of Tel Aviv, and many others infuse these speculative stories with a uniquely Israeli personality, with references to Yiddish, Arabic, Hebrew, English, and Russian reminding us of the nation’s cultural, religious, and linguistic diversity. Zion’s Fiction is not only an excellent collection of speculative fiction from Israel but also a book that makes us think anew about the real challenges the world must face in the future. Like other recent anthologies of international speculative stories, Zion’s Fiction opens our eyes to the creativity and literary invention happening beyond our borders and makes us long for more. Rachel S. Cordasco Madison, Wisconsin Xu Xi Insignificance: Hong Kong Stories Hong Kong. Signal 8 Press. 2018. 190 pages. In Insignificance, Xu Xi ambitiously claimed that she was doing a little bit of what Dream of the Red Chamber was doing—to create classic images of what a Chinese novel coming into the modern world was like. Insignificance is a collection of eleven short fictions dealing prominently with questions of the identity of Hong Kong people. There are colonial vestiges everywhere , as people in “Coincidence” lament: “when Hong Kong was still British; the economy was thriving.” However, the author is obviously more concerned with the present predicaments confronting the people of Hong Kong. In “Off the Record,” she quotes Chairman Mao while touching on the delicate subject of the Umbrella Movement. In “All about Skin,” the story goes from skin color to racism, which is characterized as an infectious disease like avian flu. In “Doghouse Rhapsody,” this “infection” is ascribed to a wide range of sources including air and noise pollution, cigarette butts, and even to the rat meat sold in shops as lamb. Elsewhere, in “Canine News,” the author puts forward a Swiftian proposal for locking up all racists in a giant structure and treating them like dogs. Readers first looking into Xu Xi may be frustrated with the jumping back and forth in time, the various narrators, and the constant shifting of settings; yet no one can deny that she remains both evocative and efficient as a delineator of character who manages to fit Hong Kong into an eclectic, puzzling, and deeply personal account of her home city. There is also no denying that her engrossing, whirlwind metafictional tales effectively demonstrate the far-reaching effects of politics and culture on the smallest, most personal aspects of Hong Kong people’s daily lives. Xu Xi used to compare herself to Cassandra . Here in this collection, she continues to wonder if Hong Kong’s future looks like its past or if nostalgia is a dangerous indulgence. What seems to perplex her most is whether Hong Kong will be reduced to an insignificance that denies its British colonial genesis—in this sense, watching Hong Kong seems like a lifelong occupation for this ambitious Chinese American novelist and essayist. Yang Jing Nanjing Normal University World Literature in Review 72 WLT SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2018

Alien · Art · Genealogy · Hebrew · Literature · Magic realism · Population · Sociology · Vision · Anthropology · History · Hong Kong and Taiwan Politics