"Five Spice Street" by Can Xue

• Summer Read with Beth
• Chinese author
• Originally published in 2001, translated in 2009
• Quotes:
• p.11..."When foxes can't eat grapes, they say grapes are catfish."...lol
• p.15..."They greatly admired the widow's genius for probing, especially when they went a step further and came up with the term 'eunuch's psychology' to describe the husband.  What joy they felt at having come up so spontaneously with this diagnosis."
• p.18..."The people of Five Spice Street had bitterly despised and feared X's behavior behind closed doors, and they'd come up with a lot of strange ideas:  one said that X was manufacturing dynamite in the house and getting ready to set it off in the public toilet; one said she was raising scorpions and planning to retaliate against the people who had talked about her........".
• p.33..."The older the ginger the hotter".
• p.27..."A crowd's emotions are always subtle, like the colored glass in a kaleidoscope."
• p.45...:How can we be sure about 'character' - this infinitely more complicated issue?  If we can't be clear about it, we won't try."
• p.49..."Men's sexual power is useless; it has no impact on life.  Yet, a woman's sex is her magic weapon for defeating the outside world and revealing the significance of her existence."
• p.50..."Sexual power is unique to women:  it is a kind of self-consciousness about one's bodily functions.  When this consciousness sharpens, a woman becomes like a goddess."
• p.52..."It's only through a woman that man can realize his virtues-and the woman must be strong, filled with the charm of sex.  Otherwise, because of their fragile nature, men are likely to be corrupted by depraved women and become degenerate troublemakers disturbing the tranquility of the world."
• p.67...."Everything they did was done purposely to destroy Five Spice Street's social system.  They desperately wanted to take this hostility to the grave."...X's family
• Notes:
• Madame X's name for her business, "diversion to dispel boredom - or mischief-making"
• Review:  I read a third of this book.  I loved a quarter of this book.  Then it fizzled, and in a rare fit of frustration, primarily with the author, secondarily with myself, put it down and did not finish two thirds of this book.  It started out with such surreal, humorous, profound promise!  Was it just me?  I will never know.  A mystery forever unsolved.  Perhaps the Eighth Wonder of the World?.......Not.  Not that important in the big scheme of life......just disappointing.  Can Xue captured the minutiae of life on one street in a neighborhood of the most human humans you could possibly meet, with the introduction of the dread......wait for it....SOMEONE NEW AND DIFFERENT.  Thus begins the romp of absurd, wonderful gossip, speculation, assumptions, wild postulations.  but then......it stays that way and lost me before I could discover the "outcome", the "point", the anything.  Oh well.