Set between the late 1940s and early 1970s, Yu Hua’s Chronicle of a Blood Merchant (translated by Andrew Jones) tells the story of an ordinary man living in hard times. Xu Sanguan works at a silk factory which usually provides enough income to support his wife and three sons. When times get desperat...
The tragic, the absurd, the comical and the bawdy are all mixed here and shaken up till you cannot quite tell one from the other. I swallowed this (574 pages in Russian translation) in a day and am very impressed, though I don't know if the impression would have been less if I had read any other con...
--Chronicle of a Blood MerchantTranslator's Afterword
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I was surprised to see that Yu Hua wrote this. My first and most lasting impression of Yu Hua is The Past and the Punishments, an excruciatingly gruesome novel with poignant political commentary. Though set against the backdrop of Nationalist and then Communist takeover of China, To Live isn't sur...
I seem to be immersed (ahem) in a sort of fecal attraction of late. Some strange synchronicity has led me to a small eructation of Body narratives: teaching and re-reading (with enormous pleasure) Katherine Dunn's Geek Love, with its carny carnality, its freak-show delight in the grotesqueries of h...
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