Review by Kirkus Book Review
The late Chinese writer's (1952-1997) comic take on oppressive regimes, large and small. Wang was a so-called intellectual youth when he was sent from Beijing to rural Yunnan Province during China's Cultural Revolution, which used such rustication to battle perceived bourgeois elements. A similar fate befalls 21-year-old Wang Er, his main character and narrator in this loosely structured novel, originally published as three separate novellas. The book's opening section (which appeared in English in the collection Wang in Love and Bondage, 2007) has him recalling the Yunnan years from two decades later. He works as an ox herder but falls afoul of officialdom mainly for sleeping with a married doctor. Their affair is conveyed with an earthiness that runs throughout the book, including several mentions of Wang's generous endowment (though that's nothing compared to the more than 25 references in five pages to another man's injured member). In the second section, Wang is a 30-year-old college lecturer dealing with academic bureaucracy and pettiness. In the last, he's 40 and recalls one teacher's romance and another's suicide. Coming from a country known for political and cultural censorship, the book is noteworthy for its sexual candor--even amid wonderful euphemisms--and wide-ranging irreverence, abetted by a voice that is variously smart, quirky, or sarcastic. The narrative often has the casual disorder of journal entries, and the narrator sometimes calls to mind the hapless but resourceful hero of Jaroslav Hašek's The Good Soldier Schweik, though he's not so much the faux naif. While entertaining, however, Wang's book suffers from unevenness in the writing, rough spots in the translation by Yan, and an overall lack of cohesion. An unusual writer worth discovering, flaws and all, for his humor and flair. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
