Review: Su Tong – Madwoman on the Bridge

Su Tong, Madwoman on the Bridge, Transworld Publishers, 2008.

Su Tong is a Chinese author who has gained international recognition for his work, recently being nominated for the Man Booker International Prize awarded to Philip Roth in controversial circumstances.  Wives and Concubines, later adapted into Raise the Red Lantern, is perhaps his most famous works in the West.  Madwoman On the Bridge, translated from Josh Stenberg, is a collection of sparse, elegant short stories that hint at a fantastic literary outpouring in contemporary China.    The availability of his works in translation is a source of much delight; these are stories that will sneak into the back of your brain and lurk there long after you are finished reading.

Many of the stories are slightly macabre, and it’s an overall theme in the book as a whole; ‘How the Ceremony Ends’ was a particular favourite of mine that exemplifies the almost playfully grotesque nature of the tales in this collection. A folklorist travels to a rural village to study an unusual tradition, and asks the villagers to enact it for him, finding himself sucked into the narrative. The villagers, caught up in the revival of an old custom, carry it to its logical conclusion and bring the reader along with them. Other characters in the story are surprisingly prosaic about its outcome, treating it as nothing more than an interesting curiosity.

The same unsettling physicality comes up in ‘The Giant Baby,’ which also underscores another theme that runs through these stories, one of poor communication, where characters say one thing and mean another, or operate in entirely different words. The titular character in ‘The Madwoman on the Bridge’ and the girl in ‘The Water Demon’ both appear to be inhabiting a place beyond reality, but to the discomfort of other characters, their world often intersects with the mundane one to reach and touch the people who would deny or exploit them. In ‘On Saturdays,’ the inability to communicate ruptures a friendship and the characters live in a sense of unresolved, lingering regret.

Reading works in translation is always challenging, as it is difficult to determine who is behind particular turns of phrase and style. The overall style and tone in Madwoman On the Bridge remains consist and compelling; if Stenberg’s translation is true to Su Tong’s voice, he has a very unusual and interesting way of playing with words and phrases and excels at the short story format. He sets scenes with a few strokes of a sentence and then lingers in loving detail over something that first appears minor, and later occupies a significant role in the story.

These are stories that should be carefully savored, as they come in layers and they are difficult to peel back if the reader races through the text to the end. The short story is a tricky artform; to say something within the word limit without saying too much, and without boring the reader, is something that not all writers can accomplish. To say something without appearing to say anything at all is perhaps the pinnacle of accomplishment in this genre. Tong’s abrupt style, which often picks up and terminates where you do not expect it, brings another level of complexity to the stories, as readers must fill in or extrapolate with care to get the full benefit of each story.

This is a collection about collisions, metaphorical and literal, in an evolving China where the boundaries of society are shifting. Some characters are left behind while others keep up, and communication gaps loom large between old and new, traditional and radical. Undercurrents of tension run throughout the stories, which are often not about what they appear to be about at first glance. Is ‘Weeping Willow’ about an accident, mistaken identities, a man, or all of these things? What’s really going on in ‘The Private Banquet’?

Madwoman On the Bridge is bizarre, sometimes frustratingly so, and the stories feel like a collection of snapshots that someone has dropped and picked up in the wrong order. Each has its own meaning and can be interpreted, but the reader is also left feeling as though a piece of the puzzle is missing. As a reader, I happen to enjoy this style; it’s reminiscent of some of the more peculiar stories by authors like Haruki Murakami (The Elephant Vanishes), Flannery O’Connor (A Good Man Is Hard To Find), and Terrence Holt (In the Valley of the Kings). Readers who enjoy stories they can sink their teeth into will find something they like in Madwoman On the Bridge, while those who prepare their stories more neat and tidy may prefer to look elsewhere.

Fair warning: when you finish this book, you will be left slightly bereft. This is a book that is rich in narrative and you don’t realise how much you’re been glutting on it until you turn the last page and there are no more stories left. It is also a book that will haunt you. Not just because the stories in the book are sometimes decidedly creepy, but because of their unfinished, vague nature. Your brain will struggle to finish them, filling in the ellipses in the text and wondering what happened next.