Two novellas by Chinese author Zhang Chengzhi: "The Black Steed" and "Rivers of the North".

I picked this up at the Lafayette Library booksale for 25 cents. (Lafayette Library has the best prices, although not the best selection. But it's a good place to find obscure or forgotten books.) I'm interested in foreign authors, so I thought I would give it a try.

I was a bit disappointed. The two stories are good - quite good, in fact. The first, woven around a Mongolian folk song, follows the narrator as he returns to the grasslands of his youth after being at college and sees again the girl he once would have married. In the second, a geography student tries to set down his feelings for the great rivers of China on paper while studying for exams. There is a lot that I liked in these stories - the introspection, the symbolism and imagery of nature, the romanticism. However, I didn't enjoy it as much as I wanted to be able to. It felt like there was some element missing. Perhaps there's a bit of a cultural gap, something I didn't understand which caused the writing to feel somewhat distant. I was always aware that I was reading a translation, not because of any stilted language, but because of that missing something which left me feeling that it would make more sense in Chinese.