2024 NBCC Awards Longlist: Barrios Book in Translation Prize
This superb work of autofiction from Xi Xi (1937–2022), which was originally published in 1992, melds an account of the author’s breast cancer with a reflection on the subjective nature of translation…. Xi Xi’s matter-of-fact prose and in-depth analysis are deeply satisfying. This is a must.
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
Xi Xi’s fascinating imagination and brave avant-garde spirit make her an important and distinctive figure in last century’s Sinophone literature. Her knowledge, experience, and generosity offer unique humanitarian value to her writing. I highly recommend her.
—Mo Yan
[Mourning a Breast] is a genre bender in the tradition of W.G. Sebald, but also a pioneering work of fiction about the body and disease. Ingenious in conception, free and imaginative in execution, the book challenges the conventional form of the novel.
—Ha Jin
The breast is the epicenter, where the complexities of society, literature, translation, personal care, history, art, and identity converge and transmute into a deeply felt and profoundly original narrative. Mourning a Breast is the story of Xi Xi's own experience, translated by Jennifer Feeley with precision and a subtle undertone of celebration, a generous invitation to navigate the depths of womanhood, of cancer, with humor and unflinching honesty.
—Xuan Juliana Wang
This book, as they say, contains multitudes.... Mourning a Breast goes to a number of disparate places, from riffs on other works of literature to puckish asides offering directions to readers who’d prefer to skip around.
— Tobias Carroll Words Without Borders
Mourning a Breast is at times disarmingly ludic and formally inventive, as Xi proceeds through a non-linear accumulation of essayistic chapters. From poetic lists and encyclopaedic entries to long narrative paragraphs and rapid-fire dialogue, each chapter finds a form to suit the book’s wide-ranging content.
— Emma Cohen TLS
Mourning a Breast engages an innovative mix of writing drawn from multiple genres and disciplines, all centered on the exploration of an unwelcome sign—a tumor inside a breast. Xi Xi transports us from the technique of stitching skin to the process of splicing film for an experimental movie, and moves freely between her post-surgery feelings about her renovated bathroom and a public debate on the architectural design of the Hong Kong Cultural Centre. Xi Xi would be delighted to read Feeley’s attentive and even playful translation, especially given that translation is one of the book’s key motifs. A brilliant reader of her own illness, Xi Xi regards a literary work, a person’s body, and the earth itself in need of continuous translation and interpretation.
—Dorothy Tse
As a patient, she will read—and share with her readers—factual accounts of the disease she is afflicted with. As an artist, she will develop intellectual pathways between treatment, recovery, and culture, creatively processing, or pausing from, what is happening to her body.
—Marsha McDonald, Cha Journal
Xi Xi guides the reader through the Hong Kong healthcare system, but her book also has universal themes about health and illness, navigating the unknown on one’s own, and finding community in places one would never expect.
—Susan Blumberg-Kason, Cha Journal
Mourning a Breast resists the conventions of the breast cancer memoir. Rather than plotting a singular, heroic journey between biopsy and remission, punctuated by platitudes and metaphors of war, Xi Xi learns to listen…. She turns to her love of languages and literature, as well as care from friends and community, for support. Along the way, she learns another language — that of the body.
—Mimi Cheng, The Washington Post
Mourning a Breast is a guide: to breast cancer, to grief and joy, to myths and stories; to Hong Kong, to Xi Xi, and to yourself, through the mirror of her life.
—Michelle Chan Schmidt, Full Stop
Newley and elegantly translated by Jennifer Feeley, it offers a refreshing corrective to the tendency in contemporary English language writing- novels and nonfiction alike – to delve relentlessly into the subjective.
—Lily Meyer The New Republic
