Chinese fantastic stories

CHINESE FANTASTIC STORIES. - Selection and translation of. Yao Ning and Gabriel García Noblejas. Seix Barral. Barcelona. 2000. 190 pags.

Not warned reader can think that the publishing houses recur repeatedly publishing books which qualifications are almost similar. "Chinese stories", "101 Chinese stories", "Chinese fantastic Stories", and it is understandable that some, they even think that it is only a fistful of famous stories that recur repeatedly, of book in book, of publisher in publisher.

Not further at all of the reality. The Chinese wealth as for this literary genre is so overwhelming, that in Occident there has already remained the expression "Chinese story" like synonymous of something wonderful, incredible, which spends the limits of the reason. And that that until now, unfortunately only one small part of the Chinese stories has been given to read us in Spanish.

This book that occupies us is a real delight. A pleasure for the senses. There are stories so brief that scarcely they occupy a few lines, the longest, they do not come to two pages. All of them share a common characteristic: The need to stretch the reality up to deforming the images of the histories, but always supporting a connection with the same, capable one of making them believable, as it was doing them, for the credulous and simple public whom they were destined.

Some of the stories are so delightful that you regret escape from you between the fingers, like the minuscule golden fish typical of this country. You regret without being able to put them in a fishbowl and see as they grow, as they turn into a major history, into a novel, as it has already happened to many teeny-weeny stories, that with the time they turned into voluminous novels of thousands of pages.

It is not a prank, the big Chinese classic novels like "To the shore of the water" or "Romance of Three Kingdoms" they are not but small stories especially loved by the people, that for centuries it has developed, branched out and embellished them up to reaching the dimensions of a masterpiece.

The reader has not left any more remedy to be left to his stories most wanted close to the heart, to imagine them like anything of his, and to help them to grow, embellishing them and they branching out to his taste.

The stories of this book, as its own title it indicates, they assemble all the topics of the universal fantastic genre: flying heads, men who grow or shrink to will, wonderful countries where the time has another dimension, horses so well identical that go out of his pictures, living dead persons, and another marvels endless number. "A strange and beautiful miscellany of poetry, irony, fantasy and eroticism."

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