RaveFull StopTime operates a little differently, as it tends to do in most of Can Xue’s work. The laws of the universe, space, and time appear ordinary, but the atmosphere is unsettled: there’s an inkling that something’s off, and sometimes the characters notice it too ... Plot isn’t grounding us here. The narratives shift between chapters. Events and sentences repeat. That buoyancy, though, is mimetic of the lives and spaces the novels contain ... This novel is bound, but refillable. Without narrative restraint (like both love and time?), it can’t really end.
Rosmarie Waldrop
RaveFull StopLike the title’s hanky fluttering out of a castle window and settling in some mud, this novel’s narrator flickers about time, space, memory, fact, and conjecture in a playful epistolary form, always stuck on the same thing, or landing there ... Waldrop’s writing is full of surprises, in all of her work, and that is absolutely the case here. I never know how a sentence will turn or what will happen next, despite the narrative being, like memory, quite recursive. Honestly, the novel is a joy to read ... a lovely, lovely object.
