JONATHAN SPENCE on Mo Yan

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发表于 2008-5-5 17:53:09 |显示全部楼层

<p>我在转一些吧。不过有件事情应该提一下。姜戎的书被葛浩文翻译，应该是商业上的操作。</p><p>Call of the Wild <nyt_headline></nyt_headline></p><div class="image" id="wideImage"><img height="275" alt="" src="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/05/04/books/mishra-600.jpg" width="600" border="0" /> <div class="credit">Yuko Shimizu</div><p class="caption"></p></div><script language="JavaScript" type="text/JavaScript">[script]null[/script]</script><script language="JavaScript" type="text/JavaScript">[script]null[/script]</script><div id="toolsRight"><div class="articleTools"><div class="toolsContainer"><ul class="toolsList" id="toolsList"><li class="email"><a id="emailThis" href="http://www.nytimes.com/auth/login?URI=http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/04/books/review/Mishra-t.html"><font color="#333333">Sign In to E-Mail or Save This</font></a> </li><li class="print"><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/04/books/review/Mishra-t.html?ref=books&pagewanted=print"><font color="#333333">

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ublished: May 4, 2008</div><div id="articleBody"><nyt_text></nyt_text><p>Lu Xun, China’s most revered modern writer, was a student of medicine in 1906 when he saw a lantern slide of Japanese soldiers decapitating a Chinese prisoner. It was a particularly low moment in China’s national self-esteem, and what appalled Lu Xun most was the passivity of the Chinese spectators. “The people,” he later wrote, “of a weak, backward country, even though they may enjoy sturdy health, can only serve as the senseless material of and audience for public executions.” Convinced that art could goad his compatriots toward “spiritual transformation,” he presented them in his first story, “The Diary of a Madman,” as hypocritical cannibals. His later work abounded in such pitiless depictions, inaugurating a modern Chinese literature marked by what the critic C. T. Hsia called “an obsessive concern with China as a nation afflicted with a spiritual disease and therefore unable to strengthen itself or change its set ways of inhumanity.” </p><div id="articleInline"><div id="inlineBox"><a class="jumpLink" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/04/books/review/Mishra-t.html?ref=books#secondParagraph"><font color="#666699">Skip to next paragraph</font></a> <nyt_pf_inline></nyt_pf_inline><div class="sectionPromo"><div id="reviewInfo"><div class="story"><h4><p class="nitf">WOLF TOTEM </p></h4><p class="summary">By Jiang Rong. </p><p class="summary">Translated by Howard Goldblatt. </p><p class="summary">527 pp. The Penguin Press. $26.95. </p></div></div></div><nyt_pf_inline></nyt_pf_inline></div></div><a name="secondParagraph"></a><p>Certainly history imposed this tormented self-reckoning on Chinese writers. For much of the 20th century, their country suffered prodigious violence and social trauma: millions were consumed by the civil war, the Japanese invasion and Maoist disasters like the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. In comparison, China in the last decade has known extraordinary stability. The middle class in particular has enjoyed undreamed of affluence — so much so that the great popularity of Jiang Rong’s long, bleak novel about an obscure province inhabited by an ethnic minority is deeply intriguing. </p><p>Set during the Cultural Revolution, “Wolf Totem” describes the education of an intellectual from China’s majority Han community living with nomadic herders in the grasslands of Inner Mongolia. Not much was known about the pseudonymous author on the book’s first publication in 2004; only last year was Jiang Rong revealed as Lu Jiamin, a recently retired professor at one of Beijing’s most prestigious academic institutions. It is also now clear that he was one of the former Red Guards who, following Mao’s advice that urban intellectuals re-educate themselves in the countryside, traveled to Inner Mongolia in the late 1960s.</p><p>Jiang Rong, who invokes Lu Xun’s ambition to transform “national character,” clearly wishes to use a fictionalized account of his life with the nomads to advance an argument. But the author’s preoccupation with his Chinese audience may not be the only source of frustration for foreign readers of Howard Goldblatt’s generally fluent translation. Jiang Rong seems to have barely attempted to transmute his experiences and epiphanies into fiction; his book reads like an extended polemic about the superiority of nomadic people and the dangers of a triumphant but brutishly ignorant modernity. </p><p>The pastoral education of the protagonist, Chen Zhen, proceeds through an awkwardly paced narrative full of set-piece didacticism. Chen learns about the delicate balance of power between nomads and animals on the grasslands; he even raises a wolf cub. But he never assumes much complexity and density as a character. Unlike most memoirs of the Cultural Revolution, “Wolf Totem” omits significant emotional as well as political detail. Out in the Mongolian fastness, Chen scarcely remembers his past life.</p><p>Denied a populous human setting with its diversity of wills and motives, a narrative like this can be quickened by a feeling for mood and landscape. And, especially in its depictions of wolf hunts, Jiang Rong’s novel succeeds in conveying the romantic desolation of the Mongolian steppes. This seems, though, to be due more to his almost photographic memory than to any gift for evocative narration. In the end, “Wolf Totem” engages the foreign reader only in its attempts to diagnose the spiritual malaise of contemporary China. </p><p>The main line of inquiry is announced on the very first page when a suitably old and wise Mongol tells Chen: “You’re like a sheep. A fear of wolves is in your Chinese bones.” As if on cue, Chen is soon “saddened to have been born into a line of farmers” who have “become as timid as sheep after dozens, even hundreds, of generations of being raised on grains and greens, the products of farming communities; they had lost the virility of their nomadic ancestors.” </p></div><p>Jiang Rong tries to defuse Chinese pride in their splendid agrarian civilization, even disparaging Confucius, now belatedly embraced by the Communist Party. There are laments about how timid Chinese peasants fell prey to canny Westerners who, as “descendants of barbarian, nomadic tribes such as the Teutons and the Anglo-Saxons,” have the blood of wolves in their veins. Chen concludes that the Chinese “are in desperate need of a transfusion” of such “vigorous, unrestrained blood.” This sort of parade-ground bellicosity echoes the rhetoric of China’s neocon intellectuals, eager to see their country beat the West at its own game. Yet Jiang Rong, who was jailed as a democracy activist after the Tiananmen Square massacre, also mentions “freedom and popular elections” as among the salutary “traditions and habits” contemporary Westerners inherited from their nomadic ancestors. </p><div id="articleInline"><div id="inlineBox"><a class="jumpLink" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/04/books/review/Mishra-t.html?pagewanted=2&ref=books#secondParagraph"><font color="#666699">Skip to next paragraph</font></a> <nyt_pf_inline></nyt_pf_inline><div class="sectionPromo"><div id="reviewInfo"><div class="story"><h4><p class="nitf">WOLF TOTEM </p></h4><p class="summary">By Jiang Rong. </p><p class="summary">Translated by Howard Goldblatt. </p><p class="summary">527 pp. The Penguin Press. $26.95. </p></div></div></div><nyt_pf_inline></nyt_pf_inline></div></div><a name="secondParagraph"></a><p>As the novel glacially proceeds, however, paeans to the vigorous West are supplanted by warnings about China’s ecological balance, threatened by human greed and hubris. As the old Mongol puts it, “the grassland is a big life”; if it dies, “so will the cows and sheep and horses, as well as the wolves and the people, all the little lives. Then not even the Great Wall, not even Beijing will be protected.” The real heart of Jiang Rong’s vast pedagogical project comes into view as settlers arrive on the grassland. Chen, who has declared his opposition to Han chauvinism, is forced to accompany his compatriots on a wolf hunt. He also witnesses the casual brutality of men forcing marmots from their dens with firecrackers. Toward the end, he must kill his wounded pet wolf, and not even Jiang Rong’s intrusive commentary (“he felt he’d developed a spiritual and emotional dependence on the cub”) deprives the scene of a certain tragic power.</p><p>In an epilogue, Chen travels from Beijing to a grassland that, 30 years later, has been brutally cleansed of wolves. China’s swift and reckless modernization has fulfilled the old Mongol’s grim prophecies as dust storms from an encroaching desert periodically smother Beijing. Jiang Rong now uses Chen to make his strongest protest against Han Chinese treatment of other ethnic groups. “Current government policy has developed to the stage of ‘one country, two systems,’ ” he says, referring to Chinese control of capitalist Hong Kong, “but deeply rooted in the Han consciousness is still ‘many areas, one system.’ ”</p><p>It seems strange that the Chinese censors missed this indictment of Han imperialism. It’s even more remarkable that a novel so relentlessly gloomy and ponderously didactic has become a huge best seller, second in circulation only to Mao’s little red book. This success may be due, at least in part, to its exhortations to the Chinese to imitate the go-getting spirit of the West. However, “Wolf Totem” also captures a widespread Chinese anxiety about their country’s growing physical and moral squalor as millions abandon the countryside in search of a middle-class lifestyle that cannot be environmentally sustained. The novel’s literary claims are shaky; and Jiang Rong’s apparent wish to transform China’s national character through a benign conservationism is compromised by his boy-scoutish arguments for toughness. Yet few books about today’s China can match “Wolf Totem” as a guide to the troubled self-images of so many of its people as they stumble, grappling with some inconvenient truths of their own, into modernity. </p>

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发表于 2008-5-5 17:53:58 |显示全部楼层

Miss Shanghai <nyt_headline></nyt_headline><script language="JavaScript" type="text/JavaScript">[script]null[/script]</script><script language="JavaScript" type="text/JavaScript">[script]null[/script]</script><div id="toolsRight"><div class="articleTools"><div class="toolsContainer"><ul class="toolsList" id="toolsList"><li class="email"><a id="emailThis" href="http://www.nytimes.com/auth/login?URI=http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/04/books/review/Prose-t.html"><font color="#333333">Sign In to E-Mail or Save This</font></a> </li><li class="print"><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/04/books/review/Prose-t.html?ref=books&pagewanted=print"><font color="#333333">

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ermalink</font></a></li></ul></li></ul><script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript">[script]null[/script]</script><script src="http://d.yimg.com/ds/badge.js" ____yb="1" badgetype="text">[script]null[/script]</script><div id="adxToolSponsor"><table height="53" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="93" border="0" style="margin-top:3px;margin-bottom:3px"><tbody><tr valign="bottom"><td width="93"><div style="margin-right:2px"><div align="left"><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/adx/bin/adx_click.html?type=goto&page=www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/books/review&pos=Frame4A&sn2=65994535/89d2fccf&sn1=dec10fe5/e6aed6f3&camp=foxsearch2008_emailtools_810903c-nyt5&ad=UTSM4.2.8&goto=http://www.foxsearchlight.com/underthesamemoon/" target="_blank"><font color="#004276"><img height="20" alt="Article Tools Sponsored By" src="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/ads/fox/article-sponsor.gif" width="62" border="0" /><img height="31" alt="" src="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/ads/fox/2008/UTSM_88x31_6.gif" width="88" border="0" /></font></a><br /></div></div></td></tr></tbody></table></div></div></div></div><nyt_byline type=" "></nyt_byline><div class="byline">By <person idsrc="nyt-per" value="movies::::::http://movies.nytimes.com/person/314036/francine-prose|||arts,automobiles,books,business,college,dining,education,fashion,garden,giving,health,jobs,magazine,movies,multimedia,nyregion,obituaries,realestate,science,sports,style,technology,theater,travel,us,washington,weekinreview,world:::more articles about francine prose.:::http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/p/francine_prose/index.html|||arts,automobiles,books,business,college,dining,education,fashion,garden,giving,health,jobs,magazine,movies,multimedia,nyregion,obituaries,realestate,science,sports,style,technology,theater,travel,us,washington,weekinreview,world:::more articles about francine prose.:::http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/p/francine_prose/index.html"></person><alt-code idsrc="nyt-per" value="prose, francine"></alt-code>FRANCINE PROSE<person></person></div><nyt_byline></nyt_byline><div class="timestamp">

ublished: May 4, 2008</div><div id="articleBody"><nyt_text></nyt_text><p>Midway through Wang Anyi’s extraordinary novel “The Song of Everlasting Sorrow,” its heroine, Wang Qiyao, is on her way to a pawn shop when she runs into Mr. Cheng, a friend she hasn’t seen in 12 years. A portrait photographer, Mr. Cheng had taken Wang Qiyao’s photo in the late 1940s; the picture appeared in a magazine, and she went on to win third place in the Miss Shanghai beauty contest, the pinnacle of her career. By the time they meet again, it is 1960. Tragedy and ill-starred romance have ruined Wang Qiyao’s reputation; she is pregnant with the child of a lover whose identity she refuses to reveal. Food shortages have pushed China to the brink of famine, so Mr. Cheng, taking pity on her, invites Wang Qiyao to share his modest lunch of rice and salt pork. At his apartment, “after her eyes had adjusted to the darkness, she saw that the little world inside had barely changed; it was as if the little room had been encased in a time capsule. ... Wang Qiyao failed to understand that it is precisely this myriad of unchanging little worlds that serves as a counterfoil to the tumultuous changes taking place in the outside world.” </p><div id="articleInline"><div id="inlineBox"><a class="jumpLink" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/04/books/review/Prose-t.html?ref=books#secondParagraph"><font color="#666699">Skip to next paragraph</font></a> <div class="image"><div class="enlargeThis"><a href="&#106;avascript:pop_me_up2('http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2008/05/04/books/Prose-t.html',%20'Prose_t',%20'width=436,height=600,scrollbars=yes,toolbars=no,resizable=yes')"><font face="Arial" color="#004276" size="2">Enlarge This Image</font></a></div><a href="&#106;avascript:pop_me_up2('http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2008/05/04/books/Prose-t.html',%20'Prose_t',%20'width=436,height=600,scrollbars=yes,toolbars=no,resizable=yes')"><font color="#004276"><font face="Arial" size="2"><img height="234" alt="" src="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/05/04/books/prose-190.jpg" width="190" border="0" /></font> </font></a><div class="credit">Yuko Shimizu</div><p class="caption"></p></div><nyt_pf_inline></nyt_pf_inline><div class="sectionPromo"><div id="reviewInfo"><div class="story"><h4><p class="nitf">THE SONG OF EVERLASTING SORROW </p></h4><h5><p class="nitf">A Novel of Shanghai. </p></h5><p class="summary">By Wang Anyi. </p><p class="summary">Translated by Michael Berry and Susan Chang Egan. </p><p class="summary">440 pp. Columbia University Press. $29.95. </p></div></div></div><nyt_pf_inline></nyt_pf_inline><div id="sidebarArticles"><h4>Related</h4><h2><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/04/books/chapters/first-chapter-song-of-everlasting.html?ref=review"><font color="#004276">First Chapter: ‘The Song of Everlasting Sorrow’</font></a> (May 4, 2008) </h2></div></div></div><a name="secondParagraph"></a><p>These observations could stand as an epigraph for this beautiful novel, which considers, among its many themes, the question of what endures and what remains the same — what resists the passage of time and what succumbs to the forces of cataclysmic social change. The scope and sweep of the book, which begins in 1945 and ends 40 years later, as well as its focus on the lives of women, may seem reminiscent of “Wild Swans,” Jung Chang’s memoir of her family’s travails under the draconian policies of Chairman Mao. But in fact the two works are remarkably different.</p><p>Though politics play a role in the deaths of two of the men Wang Qiyao loves, history more often seems to happen offstage. It enters the characters’ consciousness like the gossip — “made up of fragments discarded from serious conversations, like the shriveled outer leaves of vegetables, or grains of sand in a bag of rice” — that dominates the culture of Shanghai. Its residents, we are told, “hewed to the little things of life, which left them stranded on the margins when it came to politics.”</p><p>Throughout the novel, Shanghai, with its distinct and mysterious <span class="italic"><em>longtang</em></span> — neighborhoods circumscribed by narrow alleys — is as powerful a presence as its citizens and provides the occasion for the most poetic writing, as in this description of young girls’ bedrooms, “where anything can happen, where even melancholy is noisy and clamorous. When it drizzles, raindrops write the word ‘melancholy’ on the window. The mist in the back <span class="italic"><em>longtang</em></span> is melancholic in an ambiguous way — it unaccountably hastens people along. It nibbles away at the patience she needs to be a daughter, eats away at the fortitude she must have to conduct herself as a woman. ... Every day is more difficult to endure than the last, but, on looking back, one rues the shortness of the time.”+</p><p>For the young girls who yearn to escape these rooms, history is filtered through the lens of fashion. The advent of Communism replaces their delicately embroidered cheongsams with blue “liberation suits”; the Cultural Revolution tears the curtains from the windows and fuels bonfires with high-heeled shoes. Rebelliousness asserts itself “in the slight curls at the tips of otherwise straight hair, in shirt collars peeping out from underneath blue uniforms, and in the way scarves were tied with fancy shoestring bows. It was remarkably subtle, and the care people put into these details was moving.” We know a more liberal era has begun when clothing stores open along the boulevards, a mania for shopping infects the population, and Wang Qiyao’s daughter and her friends rush to adopt “the hottest fashion on the street.” Meanwhile, the city itself changes almost beyond recognition. By the final chapters, old Shanghai has become a polluted modern metropolis, the maze of its <span class="italic"><em>longtang</em></span> shadowed by high-rises and hideous new construction.</p><p>In contrast, the novel’s characters each possess, for better or worse, a unique and unalterable core that remains unaffected not only by the lessons of history but by those of personal experience. No amount of enforced “liberation” can make Wang Qiyao’s neighbors transcend their conservative mores and forgive her for having lived in sin with the rich and powerful Director Li. When Wang Qiyao’s girlhood friend, Jiang Lili, becomes an ardent Maoist, she wears a military uniform and struggles to substitute self-discipline for her former self-indulgence. Only her soul is resistant to political re-education. Her youthful “odes to the wind and moon had been replaced by devoted words about steely determination and selfless sacrifice. Now, as then, however, the style smacked of theatrical exaggeration and was not entirely persuasive.” And Jiang Lili still adores gentle Mr. Cheng, whose heart has belonged to Wang Qiyao ever since he photographed her in his studio.</p><p>Ultimately, it is Wang Qiyao who suffers the most and changes the least. And it is Wang Anyi’s complex and penetrating portrayal of her heroine that best displays her gifts as a novelist. Michael Berry and Susan Chang Egan’s graceful translation, only rarely marred by jarring Americanisms (“grunt work,” “deal breaker”), helps us understand why Wang Anyi is one of the most critically acclaimed writers in the Chinese-speaking world.</p><p>Though we are told what Wang Anyi’s heroine is thinking and feeling at almost every moment, her essential qualities become apparent to us — if not to her — only as we observe the patterns that reappear throughout her life. She compulsively or inadvertently places herself at the apex of triangulated relationships and fails to see the pain she causes in the process. Resourceful and essentially decent, she is nonetheless unable to fully comprehend the intensity of other people’s emotions. </p><p>The novel is particularly illuminating and incisive on the subject of female friendship, on what draws girls and women together and then drives them apart. Wang Qiyao has less affection for her somewhat plodding daughter than for her daughter’s best friend, whose effortless and original fashion sense recalls the glamour of Wang Qiyao’s youth. </p><p>By the time Wang Qiyao understands and, in some cases, returns the passion her beauty inspires in men, she has hurt them so much they have no choice but to leave her. Yet despite her flaws she is never unsympathetic. An unusually pretty but otherwise ordinary woman, she is too easily dazzled by style, wealth and pleasure, and too slow to recognize the value of loyalty and kindness. As “The Song of Everlasting Sorrow” moves toward its violent, melodramatic and distressingly appropriate ending, readers may feel a Proustian nostalgia for the novel’s lost time, a sadness that mirrors the melancholy that haunts Wang Qiyao and pervades the fascinating, mostly vanished <span class="italic"><em>longtang</em></span> of Shanghai.</p><nyt_author_id></nyt_author_id><div id="authorId"><p>Francine Prose’s most recent book is “Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them.” Her new novel, “Goldengrove,” will be published in September. </p></div><nyt_author_id></nyt_author_id><nyt_update_bottom></nyt_update_bottom><nyt_update_bottom></nyt_update_bottom><nyt_text></nyt_text></div>

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发表于 2008-5-5 17:55:16 |显示全部楼层

Kissing the Cook <nyt_headline></nyt_headline><script language="JavaScript" type="text/JavaScript">[script]null[/script]</script><script language="JavaScript" type="text/JavaScript">[script]null[/script]</script><div id="toolsRight"><div class="articleTools"><div class="toolsContainer"><ul class="toolsList" id="toolsList"><li class="email"><a id="emailThis" href="http://www.nytimes.com/auth/login?URI=http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/04/books/review/Schillinger-t.html"><font color="#333333">Sign In to E-Mail or Save This</font></a> </li><li class="print"><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/04/books/review/Schillinger-t.html?ref=books&pagewanted=print"><font color="#333333">

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ublished: May 4, 2008</div><div id="articleBody"><nyt_text></nyt_text><p>You can’t get better publicity for a book than “Banned in Boston.” But as product endorsements go, “Banned in China” sends a more mixed message, even if it still wins points for piquancy. Seeing this legend on the dust jacket of Yan Lianke’s faux-naif novel, “Serve the People!” — the first of his books to be translated into English — you have to wonder what Chinese officials are banning books for these days. Publishing overly frank air pollution charts? Leaking hints on Olympic gymnasts’ floor routines? Indulging in too much of the wrong kind of self-criticism? Too much lead in the ink or too much lead in the pencil — that is, excessive lewdness?</p><div id="articleInline"><div id="inlineBox"><a class="jumpLink" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/04/books/review/Schillinger-t.html?ref=books#secondParagraph"><font color="#666699">Skip to next paragraph</font></a> <div class="image"><div class="enlargeThis"><a href="&#106;avascript:pop_me_up2('http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2008/05/04/books/Schillinger-t.html',%20'Schillinger_t',%20'width=720,height=600,scrollbars=yes,toolbars=no,resizable=yes')"><font face="Arial" color="#004276" size="2">Enlarge This Image</font></a></div><a href="&#106;avascript:pop_me_up2('http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2008/05/04/books/Schillinger-t.html',%20'Schillinger_t',%20'width=720,height=600,scrollbars=yes,toolbars=no,resizable=yes')"><font color="#004276"><font face="Arial" size="2"><img height="240" alt="" src="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/05/04/books/schillinger-190.jpg" width="190" border="0" /></font> </font></a><div class="credit">Yuko Shimizu</div><p class="caption"></p></div><nyt_pf_inline></nyt_pf_inline><div class="sectionPromo"><div id="reviewInfo"><div class="story"><h4><p class="nitf">SERVE THE PEOPLE! </p></h4><p class="summary">By Yan Lianke. </p><p class="summary">Translated by Julia Lovell. </p><p class="summary">217 pp. Black Cat/Grove/Atlantic. Paper, $14. </p></div></div></div><nyt_pf_inline></nyt_pf_inline><div id="sidebarArticles"><h4>Related</h4><h2><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/04/books/chapters/first-chapter-serve-the-people.html?ref=review"><font color="#004276">First Chapter: ‘Serve the People!’</font></a> (May 4, 2008) </h2></div></div></div><a name="secondParagraph"></a><p>Yan Lianke has spent much of his adult life refining the highly rarefied, not especially transferable skill of being a provocateur who knows how far he can go without having his quill snapped. It’s a challenging job description: cautious troublemaker. Yan Lianke has won two of China’s top literary prizes for previous novels, but he has also been censured for writing books that annoyed the Party hierarchy. And although he admits to censoring himself to avoid censorship by others, this pre-emptive step hasn’t always been enough. His first book, “Xia Riluo,” described in a Washington Post author profile as a send-up of two People’s Army war heroes gone bad, was banned. A Chinese edition of his most recent novel, which takes place in his native province of Henan, was banned once the authorities understood the subversiveness of its subject. Called “The Dream of Ding Village,” it is reportedly a science-fictiony satire in which opportunists export the blood of peasants by pipeline, as if it were oil. </p><p>“Serve the People!,” smoothly translated by Julia Lovell, offers an initial sample of Yan Lianke’s writing to an English-speaking audience. A bluntly drawn, mildly erotic fable, it teases <a title="More articles about Mao Zedong." href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/m/mao_zedong/index.html?inline=nyt-per"><font color="#004276">Mao Zedong</font></a> by poking fun at a true believer who obeys the Chairman’s precepts too literally. To a Western sensibility, the broad strokes of Yan Lianke’s humor would seem to pose little risk of inciting rebellion, whether of the flesh or of the body politic. But then, part of the book’s attraction is that it doesn’t have a Western sensibility. It lets the reader see — or rather, intuit — what jokes Chinese officials don’t consider funny, and how very little it takes for a writer to be branded an incendiary in 21st-century China, more than three decades after the death of Mao, a decade after the death of <a title="More articles about Deng Xiaoping." href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/d/deng_xiaoping/index.html?inline=nyt-per"><font color="#004276">Deng Xiaoping</font></a> and seven years since China entered the <a title="More articles about the World Trade Organization." href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/w/world_trade_organization/index.html?inline=nyt-org"><font color="#004276">World Trade Organization</font></a>, a move that would seem to signal a willingness (however wary) to mingle with the rest of the world.</p><p>Set in 1967, near the outset of the Cultural Revolution and at the height of the Maoist cult of personality, “Serve the People!” tells the story of a docile, doctrinaire peasant soldier named Wu Dawang, whose word-perfect memory of Mao’s sayings (coupled with his excellent kitchen skills) leads to a plum job: cook and general orderly for the commander of his military division. As guileless as a 6-year-old, yet muscular and handy (imagine an Asian Forrest Gump), Wu unquestioningly accepts Mao’s credo that the noblest duty is to “Serve the People!” And he enjoys the slogan’s multiple variations, especially “To serve the Division Commander is to Serve the People!” However, when Wu’s boss departs his residential compound, leaving behind his pretty young wife, Liu Lian, Wu’s Red loyalties slip into a gray area. </p><p>Yan Lianke builds his story speedily and sparely, as if he were raising a barn against the clock — all frame, little décor. “This is just how things were with this love story,” the author baldly states. “Its beginning, middle and end bereft of the intervening complexities one might imagine necessary to an affair of the heart.” In place of complexities, Yan Lianke deploys similes, like a clumsy coquette dropping handkerchiefs. He compares Liu’s breasts to “fluffily perfect bread rolls,” the curves of her shoulders to “large apples hanging in the gentlest of breezes”; he likens Wu’s desire for her to the hunger of a “starving beggar,” to the “nervous, greedy yearning of thieves before a robbery” and to the thirst of a “parched throat” that craves a “sweet, ripe melon.” He describes their liaison as (among other things) a “honeyed trap,” a “tiger-infested mountain” and “a single rose and a hoe left abandoned in a vast, bare flower bed.” </p><p>Liu wants to be serviced, not served; but Wu, who is married (to a cloddish peasant back in his home village, though this is a technicality — a “tinny overture to the grand opera into which his affair with Liu Lian would swell”), has no interest in horseplay. Terrified both of betraying the Division Commander’s trust and of wrecking his hopes for advancement, he tries to put off his succubus lady boss when she summons him to her bedroom. But Liu will not be deterred. Instead, she bullies Wu to do her bidding, unwittingly abetted by Wu’s clueless commanding officer, who scolds him when the lady of the house complains of his fractiousness, reminding him of his responsibilities by making him do penance. Chastened, Wu roars, for all to hear, the principle that must guide him: “To Serve the Division Commander and his family is to Serve the People!” </p><p>You’ve got to ask: what would Mao do? Eventually, patriotism and semantics accomplish what seduction alone cannot, toppling “the Great Wall of hostility that had divided” Wu and Liu, and setting Liu “alight, like a single spark from one edge of a prairie lighting a pile of dry tinder heaped at its other.”</p><div id="articleInline"><div id="inlineBox"><a class="jumpLink" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/04/books/review/Schillinger-t.html?pagewanted=2&ref=books#secondParagraph"><font color="#666699">Skip to next paragraph</font></a> <nyt_pf_inline></nyt_pf_inline><div class="sectionPromo"><div id="reviewInfo"><div class="story"><h4><p class="nitf">SERVE THE PEOPLE! </p></h4><p class="summary">By Yan Lianke. </p><p class="summary">Translated by Julia Lovell. </p><p class="summary">217 pp. Black Cat/Grove/Atlantic. Paper, $14. </p></div></div></div><nyt_pf_inline></nyt_pf_inline><div id="sidebarArticles"><h4>Related</h4><h2><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/04/books/chapters/first-chapter-serve-the-people.html?ref=review"><font color="#004276">First Chapter: ‘Serve the People!’</font></a> (May 4, 2008) </h2></div></div></div><a name="secondParagraph"></a><p>Can fiction be graded on a curve? Are there extenuating factors that ought to be brought to bear? This book is a chapter from living history that the world beyond China is only lately beginning to glimpse. Even now, the window is not fully open, nor is it sure that, if pushed up, the window could be propped ajar. Wu and Liu’s dalliance sometimes reminds the reader (a bit) of Emma Bovary and Rodolphe, playacting at obsession until their game, by accident, turns serious. At other times, Liu’s persistent advances and Wu’s conscience-</p><p>stricken refusals recall the buffoonery of Henry Fielding’s “Joseph Andrews,” in which the title character, a handsome, virtuous young footman, resists the indelicate overtures of his employer — that proto-cougar, Lady Booby. Writing in the permissive 18th century, his path paved by the drollery of Restoration comedy, Fielding mined this subject for every dram of comic potential. But Yan, writing roughly two and a half centuries later, is more guarded: not quite comic, not quite tragic, more earnest than uproarious in tone. His story is memorable and strange, but it feels particular, not universal. </p><p>Yan Lianke was born during China’s catastrophic Great Leap Forward and came of age during the Cultural Revolution. Did he have the opportunity to read Flaubert and Fielding, much less the contemporary Western writers whose humor is more pointed? Or does his satire start from scratch? “Serve the People!” taps the politico-satirical vein of an Orwell or a Zamyatin but leaves their reserves of subtlety untouched. Defending Wu’s simplicity, Yan Lianke argues in “Serve the People!” that complicated characters don’t necessarily exist in real life. “More often than not,” he writes, “psychological complexity exists only in novels, as authors fill in details absent from protagonists’ actual thoughts.” But does he really believe that?</p><p>Lucky for Yan Lianke — who, after all, must make his life in a country of contradictions, possibilities and thin skins — we can’t be sure. Two years ago, responding to a blogger who asked him to explain the deeper story behind his banned book “The Dream of Ding Village,” he said: “I am a person who is almost 50 years old. At this age, I don’t want to argue with anybody anymore. The only thing that I want to do is to write better novels.” He added, “From now on, I will be silent.” As for the deeper meaning of “Serve the People!,” perhaps Fielding said it best, in the opening words of “Joseph Andrews”: “Examples work more forcibly on the mind than precepts.”</p></div>

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JONATHAN SPENCE on Mo Yan

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