books@cc.

A Novel
by Ma Jian (1993)

Every week a wealthy ‘professional blood donor’, Vlazerim, visits his friend, Sheng, a disillusioned, ‘idealistic’ writer, bringing a wide array of food and drink (that ‘cost twice as much as the professional writer’s monthly wage’) they’d gobble down while they ‘pour their hearts out to each other, insult and curse each other’. The writer has been commissioned by the Party to write a propagandistic novel on Lei Feng, tempted by an offer for an entry to The Great Dictionary of Chinese Writers in return, but all that comes to mind are ‘the characters of his unwritten novel: a young entrepreneur who runs a private crematorium; an illegal migrant who writes letters for the illiterate; a father who spends his life trying to get rid of his retarded daughter…’

The novel narrates stories about these characters: a man, along with his mother, successfully turns a pottery kiln into a private crematorium, his love for the dead growing deeper every day while his mother, enchanted by the beauty of immortality, let her son send her to the furnace; a heartbroken actress performs her own suicide (eaten by a tiger) in front of an audience; a writer-turned-editor, eclipsed by his strong wife (a female novelist) discovers the confidence-boosting effects of love affairs, mirroring his wife’s degrading attitude to his most adoring mistress; a street writer, guilt-ridden by ‘his dishonest profession’ where ‘letters he composed revealed nothing of his true character’ believes that (in a manner that readers can sense the doom foreboding) he, too, can fall in love; a well-endowed woman, racked by the leering assumptions on her breasts, run down the street naked; a father, despaired by One Child Policy and the fortune telling that he’ll never have a son, tries to rid himself of his retarded daughter even as he grows aware of the futility of his efforts and his love for her; a painter and his philosophical, three-legged talking dog.

Set right after Deng Xiaoping’s Open Door Policy, these interconnected individuals and lives, caught between the rigid structures of Chinese communism and ‘bourgeois liberalism’, are cleverly woven in the novel, the line between narration inside narration blurred. The result is stories that are funny, compelling, dark, absurd, satirical and surreal all at the same time.

Ma Jian is already hailed as ‘a Chinese Kundera’ by Philip Marsden (and Kundera’s name consciously peppered the book), but those who love Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller… is likely to enjoy this too.

Much thanks to Danny for the recommendation.

Tags:China, fiction
China, Ma Jian, fiction

November 22, 2006 @ 8:39 pm