Barr's sensitive translation, he comes across as an Asian fusion of David Sedaris and Charles Kuralt. "Life is often this way," he writes: "you may start off with an advantage, only to box yourself in over time, or sometimes you may start with a handicap, only to find it carries you a long way." For a plain-writing man, Yu has an exquisite, cosmopolitan sense of irony in Allen H. In China, Yu has been praised for his "plain narrative language" - a product, he jokes, of his desultory education during the Cultural Revolution he simply didn't learn very many Chinese characters. Perhaps the most bewitching aspect of this book is how funny it is, especially in the first few (and most autobiographical) chapters. Things have changed a lot, he explains, but not necessarily in the ways you might think. "China in Ten Words" is a series of linked essays, each of which considers a word whose meaning has evolved over the course of Yu's lifetime, as China transformed itself from a command economy to a market economy. for the novels "To Live" - made into a film - and "Brothers"), Yu has a fiction writer's nose for the perfect detail, the everyday stuff that conveys more understanding than a thousand Op-Eds. "Here," Yu writes of his homeland, "where everything is tinged with the mysterious logic of absurdist fiction, Kafka or Borges might feel quite at home." One of China's most celebrated novelists (he's best known in the U.S. Nothing tells you more about a people than the stories they like to swap: the old peasant patriarch who could not countenance the price of a BMW 760Li until the dealer explained that it took two cows to supply the leather for each of its seats, the female Mao impersonator who spends hours perfecting her makeup and learning to walk in elevator shoes. You'll find a few statistics scattered over these pages, but far more of those peculiar modern yarns that reside in the netherland between gossip and news report.
"China in Ten Words" by Yu Hua, on the other hand, is a slim volume, and a lot of it concerns Yu's childhood in a backwater town during the Cultural Revolution. There's no shortage of books promising to explain the most populous nation in the world to Western readers, fat, solemn tomes crammed with names, numbers, events and predictions.
0 kommentar(er)
