The narrator of a story by this author is a rat who tells the reader, “I’m not a rat.” For 10 points each:
[10h] Name this pseudonymous author whose fiction includes I Live in the Slums and Frontier. In a story by this author, a narrator obsessed with desk drawers realizes that there is no hut on the hill behind her family’s house.
ANSWER: Cán Xuě (“tsan shwuh”) [prompt on partial answer; or Dèng Xiǎohuá] (The stories are “Story of the Slums” and “Hut on the Hill.”)
[10e] As part of her self-aggrandizing public persona, Cán Xuě frequently extols the “perfection” of her stories and of her critical work on Kafka, Dante, and this Italian author of Cosmicomics.
ANSWER: Italo Calvino
[10m] Cán Xuě has denigrated the “warped, low character” of violent scenes by this other pseudonymous author. Like Cán Xuě, this author used animal narrators in a novel about a landlord who undergoes repeated reincarnations.
ANSWER: Mò Yán [prompt on partial answer; or Guǎn Móyè] (The novel is Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out.)
<Henry Atkins, World Literature>