The Noodle Maker - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374223076 ISBN 13: 9780374223076

Inhaltsangabe

"One of the most important and courageous voices in Chinese literature." --Gao Xingjian, winner of the 2000 Nobel Prize for Literature

From the highly acclaimed Ma Jian comes a satirical and powerfully written novel about the absurdities and cruelties of life in a post-Tianamen China caught between the provincialism of totalitarian politics and the seductions of Western-style capitalism.

Two men, a writer of political propaganda and a professional blood donor, meet for dinner each week. Over the course of one drunken evening, the writer recounts the stories he would write, had he the courage: a young man buys an old kiln from an art school and opens a private crematorium, delighting in his ability to harass the corpses of police officers and Party secretaries, while swooning to banned Western music; a heartbroken actress performs a public suicide by stepping into the jaws of a wild tiger, watched nonchalantly by her ex-lover. Extraordinary characters inspire him, their lives pulled and pummeled by fate and politics, as if they are balls of dough in the hands of an all-powerful noodle maker.

Ma Jian's satirical masterpiece allows us a humorous, yet profound glimpse of those struggling to survive under a system that dictates their every move.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ma Jian is the author of Red Dust, which won the Thomas Cook Prize in the UK. A former dissident in China, he now lives in England.

Rezensionen

Ma Jian, an immigrant Chinese dissident and author of the acclaimed travel book Red Dust (2001), now turns to mordantly satirical fiction to capture the grim paradoxes of late-twentieth-century China. Western products and attitudes have infiltrated the rigid Communist state, but people are still not free of the party's malignant power, and the only individuals able to get ahead are entrepreneurs pursuing risky, illegal ventures, such as a well-off "professional blood donor" who regularly visits his friend, a poor "professional writer." As the two men eat, drink, and needle each other, Ma Jian mixes in sections of the writer's fragmented yet utterly involving novel, which depicts a cruel and grotesque world. Women are abused and raped. A man runs an unauthorized crematorium where he berates the dead. An actress commits suicide onstage. Echoing Gogol and offering an urban variation on the themes of Nobel Prize winner Gao Xingjian, Ma Jian presents a bleak yet compelling vision of an aberrant society in which people are caught in the grip of a capricious and treacherous power and starved for kindness, beauty, and reason. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Having "boarded the express train of the Open Door Policy," the characters in Ma's (Red Dust) satisfying, satirical novel now find themselves disembarking in a land caught between the "bourgeois liberalism" of the West and the Communist strictures of the East. Here a novelist wears nail polish ("Blood-stained hands!") as Party leaders appoint her the town's first "professional writer," while an entrepreneurial son surreally roasts his willing mother in his busy homemade crematorium. The interlocked stories that make up this work spill out over a Sunday night dinner between two argumentative old friends: Sheng, a blocked writer just one propagandist novel away from an entry in The Great Dictionary of Chinese Writers, and Vlazerim, a wealthy professional blood donor. Sheng longs to write a novel based on the lives of his intimates, but the consequences of defying the Party, including demotion in professional rank and guaranteed literary obscurity, paralyze him. Instead he spends his days vociferously critiquing his neighbors' cooking as he daydreams. In these imaginings, he transforms the lives of those around him into high art, in much the same way a noodle maker turns plain ingredients into nourishing sustenance. Ma's spare meal of a novel provides an excellent counterpoint to the sumptuous lyrical banquet Soul Mountain by Nobel Prize winner and fellow expatriate Gao Xingjian.
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Details zur Ausgabe

• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0374223076
• ISBN 13: 9780374223076
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 181
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar