The Chinese Central Propaganda Bureau banned the book in China because it “slanders Mao Zedong…and is overflowing with sex”:...
Satirical novel of love during the Cultural Revolution.
“Serve the people,” a slogan taken from a speech Mao Zedong gave in 1944, plays a paradoxical role in the life of Wu Dawang, an orderly assigned to garden and cook for the Party’s Division Commander in 1967. It’s emblazoned on a sign that decorates the Division Commander’s dinner table, defining the path to advancement in the People’s Liberation Army and in the Party. But then the Division Commander’s wife, Liu Lian, tells Wu Dawang that whenever the sign has been moved from its usual place, he is to stop performing his usual duties and attend to her very specific, very personal needs upstairs. Wu Dawang knows that Liu Lian has the power to destroy his hopes for advancement, and he has also been told—again and again—that to serve the Division Commander and his family is to serve the people. Nor is he unaware that Liu Lian is gorgeous, glamorous and passionate in ways that his peasant wife is not. So naturally, Wu Dawang decides to serve the people by serving Liu Lian. Their affair comes to a terrible end, but before it does the lovers indulge in an orgy that allows them to express long-suppressed physical and emotional needs, including the need to exorcise the exigencies of class in a society where inequality does not officially exist. Lianke’s protagonists bring their debauchery to a climax in a contest to determine which is the greater counterrevolutionary: They rampage through the Division Commander’s house destroying all the Mao-emblazoned furnishings, crockery, cookware and decorative bric-a-brac they can find. There’s no reason to believe, however, that love can triumph over the Party.
The Chinese Central Propaganda Bureau banned the book in China because it “slanders Mao Zedong…and is overflowing with sex”: You couldn’t ask for a better blurb than that.Pub Date: March 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8021-7044-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Black Cat/Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2007
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
A masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience. Send a copy to the Swedish Academy.
An ambitious scientific experiment wreaks horrendous toll in the Booker-winning British author’s disturbingly eloquent sixth novel (after When We Were Orphans, 2000).
Ishiguro’s narrator, identified only as Kath(y) H., speaks to us as a 31-year-old social worker of sorts, who’s completing her tenure as a “carer,” prior to becoming herself one of the “donors” whom she visits at various “recovery centers.” The setting is “England, late 1990s”—more than two decades after Kath was raised at a rural private school (Hailsham) whose students, all children of unspecified parentage, were sheltered, encouraged to develop their intellectual and especially artistic capabilities, and groomed to become donors. Visions of Brave New World and 1984 arise as Kath recalls in gradually and increasingly harrowing detail her friendships with fellow students Ruth and Tommy (the latter a sweet, though distractible boy prone to irrational temper tantrums), their “graduation” from Hailsham and years of comparative independence at a remote halfway house (the Cottages), the painful outcome of Ruth’s breakup with Tommy (whom Kath also loves), and the discovery the adult Kath and Tommy make when (while seeking a “deferral” from carer or donor status) they seek out Hailsham’s chastened “guardians” and receive confirmation of the limits long since placed on them. With perfect pacing and infinite subtlety, Ishiguro reveals exactly as much as we need to know about how efforts to regulate the future through genetic engineering create, control, then emotionlessly destroy very real, very human lives—without ever showing us the faces of the culpable, who have “tried to convince themselves. . . . That you were less than human, so it didn’t matter.” That this stunningly brilliant fiction echoes Caryl Churchill’s superb play A Number and Margaret Atwood’s celebrated dystopian novels in no way diminishes its originality and power.
A masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience. Send a copy to the Swedish Academy.Pub Date: April 11, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4339-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
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