Silver City

For centuries, the aristocratic Li clan of Nine Ideals Hall have controlled the salt trade in Silver City, China. But financial fecklessness and outmoded mining methods have taken their toll, and, by the 1920s, a real threat appears in the person of Bai Ruide, a thoroughly Westernized mining engineer. (He drives a Ford sedan; the Lis still rely on sedan chairs). Although this beautiful novel is partially about the twists and turns of the Li-Bai rivalry, it is clear from the start that both families are doomed by the Revolution, and the trappings of domestic melodrama (love, betrayal, murder, suicide) are ancillary to the real story: the 20th-century debasement of traditional Chinese literature and sensibility. Readers interested in particulars will find plenty here--a Chinese funeral (white is the color of mourning), a Communist wedding (readings from the Little Red Book)--but it's in the rendering of these particulars that the novel achieves its uniqueness and strength. A waved handkerchief is like ""an egret in hesitant flight""; a character is ""melancholic as a stalk of bamboo""; even a mass execution takes on a kind of horrific grace when ""identical splashes of red-gray muck stained the stone wall until it had the mottled look of a forest in autumn under a settling frost."" This is the novel as scroll painting, translated by Goldblatt with rare delicacy. 20,000 first printing; agent: Sandra Dijkstra. (Nov.) FYI: This is Li's first novel to be translated in English. He is the editor of Shanxi Literature in China.