Village of Stone [Import] [Mass Market Paperback]

Xiaolu Guo (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 27, 2005

A bewitching novel about memory, loss and the search for redemption, from one of China’s freshest voices.

Coral and her frisbee-obsessed boyfriend, Red, live in a cramped tower block in the megalopolis that is modern-day Beijing. The epitome of disaffected youth, their already fragile existence is shattered by the arrival of a mysterious fishy package. As the smells of the sea wash over her, Coral is transported back to a traumatic childhood dominated by solitude, fear and shame. Coral was raised by silent grandparents among the stern and superstitious fishermen of the remote village of Stone. Shunned from birth as a bringer of ill fortune, and exposed to the malevolent forces of a closed-off society, she immersed herself in the minutiae of the landscape around her. At fifteen, she escaped to the big city and shut the door on the darkness of her past.

As the narrative darts between the forbidding sprawl of Beijing and the rhythms of a tiny coastal village, our narrator struggles to navigate a path through painful and hidden memories of a time spent helpless, cold and alone. But when a sick old man appears on Coral’s doorstep, the past and present shockingly converge, and she is forced to confront the secrets of her history in order to realize her dreams for the future.

Beautifully poetic, lyrical and haunting, yet infused with a quiet and gentle humour, Village of Stone is a startling and bewitching novel from one of contemporary China’s freshest voices.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Xiaolu Guo was born in a fishing village in the south of China in 1973. She was awarded an MA in Film from the Beijing Film Academy and has worked as a novelist, screenwriter and filmmaker. She now lives in England.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

I

It all started with a parcel of dried eel. A parcel of dried, salted eel posted by some nameless sender from some unknown address in the Village of Stone.

It is a large marine eel, approximately eighty-five centimetres in length, with the dorsal, rear and tail fins still attached. The tail fin is extraordinarily long. I imagine that the eel must have been prepared in the traditional manner of the Village of Stone, which means that it would have been dried in the sun after being salted with two kilograms of coarse sea salt for each five kilograms of eel.You can still see the scar where the blade of the knife sliced into the eel’s silvery-white belly, before being pulled out again to shear the eel slowly from head to tail, shaping it into a pair of long strips connected at the centre.

Such an enormous eel, I decide,must have been caught during the seventh moon of the lunar calendar, when eels are said to be at their plumpest and most delicious.The eel would first have had its entrails pulled out and then been hung from a north-facing window to dry for the duration of the winter fishing season.When it had hardened to the consistency of a knife blade, some hand – whose hand I know not – must have taken it down from the rafters, parcelled it up and mailed it to a city one thousand eight hundred kilometres away, this city Red and I call home.

As I lay the fishy-smelling package on the kitchen table, Red is standing at my side, watching. Red, my best friend in this city and the one and only man in my life, asks me suspiciously where the parcel is from.

‘The Village of Stone,’ I answer absently.

‘The Village of Stone?’The words seem to perplex Red, as if he were hearing the abstruse syllables of some remote antiquity.

The package is heavy. When I draw the enormous eel from its wrappings and set it on the table, Red freezes in shock.The eel is eerily lifelike.With its monstrous tail protruding upwards, it looks poised to swim away from us at any moment.

And in an instant, the salt scent of the East China Sea and the smell of a Village of Stone typhoon come rushing back to me, as if from the body of the eel. Synapses connect, the floodgates are thrown open, the torrents of memory unleashed.They rush through the tunnels of the past, threatening to flood the earth and blot out the sky.

I spent the first fifteen years of my life in the Village of Stone, but I have left it far behind me. I now live one thousand eight hundred kilometres away, with a man who knows nothing about my past, in a city as diametrically opposed to the Village of Stone as any place could possibly be. It has been years since I corresponded with anyone in the village, and yet now I find myself thinking about it, about the things that happened there and the people who lived there – those whose lives I passed through and whose lives passed through me.

Had it not been for that parcel of dried, salted eel sent from a faraway place, I would never have started to remember those events, all the things that happened in the Village of Stone.

That was how the memories began.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 196 pages
• Publisher: Vintage Books; Airport/Export ed edition (September 27, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0099484951
• ISBN-13: 978-0099484950
• Product Dimensions: 6.8 x 4.3 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.5 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #469,062 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Village of Stone, August 18, 2009

By 

Mads Pihl Rasmussen (Sisimiut, Greenland) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Village of Stone (Mass Market Paperback)

One day a dried eel arrives in the mail, at the Beijing apartment where Coral lives with her boyfriend Red. No explanation on the package. Just a giant eel wrapped in paper, filling up the fridge, and feeding the two twenty-somethings for weeks.

The eel comes from the Village of Stone, where Coral grew up. She now lives in the city with the frisbee-obsessed, jobless, someday-a-better-life-than-this dreamer Red, but the eel ignites Coral's memories of her childhood in a village depending on small-scale fishing off a rugged coast beneath steep mountains, which Coral describes this way:

"The sea was all the Village of Stone had, the only nature it possessed. The village was built on a peninsula with no rivers, lakes or farmland, just the craggy, desolate mountain behind it that sloped down to the sea. The inhabitants of the Village of Stone built their houses, row upon row of them, on the lower slopes of the mountain, so that all the streets were at a sharo incline. This was partly to protect the houses from the tide, but, more importantly, to prevent them from being swept away by the frequent typhoons". [p. 11-12].

The Village of Stone is one of those Somewhere On A Remote Coast villages. This is where Coral grew up, without parents, raised by her grandparents in an environment of absolute domestic hostility based on misunderstandings and overzealous pride. Coral tries to negotiate the stairs inside the house separating her grandmother and grandfather, who haven't spoken in years, and who will never reconcile. But ultimately Coral is faced with being just a small girl in a small village who is pushed around by life without being able to ever really push back.

Maybe that is why, looking back from urban life in her twenties, she remembers the fantastical and emphasizes the mythical sides of the Village of Stone. Her former home has now become an "out there", where the villagers lived in fear of pirates marauding through the seawashed streets, and where the neighboring family had nine girls in a row and kept asking for a boy, finally naming their latest girl Boy Waiting. This was a village more in the sea than by the sea, storm torn and wave battered. At least that is how Coral remembers it. Coral. The name of an often beautiful creature hiding beneath the surf.

Or maybe these memories act as a necessary screen fencing her off from the incidents that eventually shaped much of her current being?

Coral's story could be reduced to the teenager's struggle to survive and escape a confined home space. But in her case escape is not just from the mental prison of a seawe(e)d life, it is the actual escape from sexual abuse perpetrated by the village mute. It is escape from village scorn after an affair with the school teacher that got her pregnant and forced her to an abortion. It is, as another reviewer [...]has pointed out, also about the "contrast between the anomie of modern Chinese urban life, and the ancient but fast-vanishing traditional universe of the countryside".

City life for Coral is fundamentally different first of all because it is not village life. The move signifies not only personal change but also social change as it reflects the ongoing global march from rural to metropolitan life. However, Coral and Red struggle to get by, Red searches the city for a proper job, their apartment is run down, the toilet is constantly clogged, and the tone of daily life is not always in contrast to the tone of stories from the village.

China in this novel reminds me of grey skies and the sound of waves on rocks. But my world of references and my knowledge of China will not pay fair tribute to what Xiaolu has done with Village of Stone. With its legends, myths, and rain-soaked setting it is story that reminds me of William Heinesen's "The Lighthouse at the End of the World". But in the end it is just as much a moving story about reconciling with the past and moving on through life written in a simple, beautiful prose that calms the typhoons and keeps the pirates at bay.