Teju Cole recommends reading a must-read Chinese classic
The American author says that Pu Songling's 'Strange Tales from the Pavilion of Idleness' is his favorite read of the year.
BarcelonaThis year's favorite Teju Cole read has over 300 years of history.Strange Tales from the Pavilion of Idleness"Pu Songling's The Last Supper is a masterpiece: the stories it tells are brilliant, dark, funny, and terrifying. There's nothing I've read in a long time that can compare." comments the author, who recently visited Barcelona to present his latest book of essays, Black paper (Acantilado, 2025).
Pu Songling (1640–1715) was born into a family of scholars and small rural landowners from Mongolia or Chinese Turkestan. After failing the entrance exams to the mandarinate, he scraped by precariously through writing and working as a tutor for wealthy families. Strange Tales from the Pavilion of Idleness It quickly became a classic in China thanks to its skillful blend of reality and fiction: the everyday lives of the citizens who often star in them often clash with dragons, spirits and other fantastic creatures. In Catalan, Manel Ollé and Chün Chin translated an anthology of some of the author's most notable stories. Cream Notebooks in 2001. The American edition that Cole read arrived a few years after its release in our country. It was the prestigious collection Penguin Classics which was added to the volume in 2006, with a selection of a hundred stories from the almost 500 that have been attributed to the author.
"The voice that writes the stories is that of a provincial Chinese official: in some of the stories he claims to be transcribing what some neighbors have told him, in others he simply lets his imagination flow," Teju Cole continues. "Reading them I have had the suspicion that Franz Kafka I would know them before writing any of my stories."
