A review by paulataua
Rouge Street: Three Novellas by Shuang Xuetao

2.0

‘Rouge Street’ is Shuang Xuetao’s English language debut. It is hard to avoid the hype surrounding these three ‘dazzling’ novellas by the ‘lauded’ Chinese writer who has already been ‘compared to Hemingway and Murakami’. The excitement continues as the foreward dived into setting the context of the dilapidated and gritty city of Shenyang with all its social ills as it was left behind in China’s transformation from communism to capitalism. The stories themselves were, for me, pretty ordinary and I struggled my way through hoping that for some odd reason the publishers were keeping the best of the three stories til last. It was not to be. For me, all three novellas were uninspiring. I can’t help wondering, however, if I might have liked the stories more had they not followed all that hype.