French Concession - Xiao Bai
I picked this up on a whim because I'm coming to the end of my reading journal for the year and the "X" page in the index was empty. There are, perhaps unsurprisingly, a small number of authors whose surnames begin with X, and this was one of the few books I could actually get hold of.
I've been reading (and enjoying) a lot of Honk Kong and Chinese fiction recently thanks to the latest issue of Granta and really enjoying it, and I was hoping that this would continue that trend for me. Unfortunately this was a DNF at around 18%.
Maybe this was a translation issue but I found this hard to follow and couldn't really figure out who anybody was or what was going on. The POV jumps around a lot, sometimes mid-paragraph, and nearly a fifth of the way into the book I just didn't know why I was meant to care or what I was meant to care about.
The opening chapter was really strong and made me excited to read more but that faded quickly and it couldn't hold my attention.