Volume 50, Number 4 · March 13, 2003
Looking for Trouble in China
By John Lanchester
K: The Art of Love
by Hong Ying, translated from the Chinese by Nicky Harman and Henry Zhao
Marion Boyars, 252 pp., $14.95 (paper)
One Man's Bible
by Gao Xingjian, translated from the Chinese by Mabel Lee
HarperCollins, 450 pp., $26.95
The Crazed
by Ha Jin
Pantheon, 323 pp., $24.00
Gao Xingjian, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2000, first got into trouble with the Chinese authorities in 1981, when he published A Preliminary Discussion of the Art of Modern Fiction. He was put under surveillance, and the process began which was to end in the banning of his work and his exile from China. The offensive thing about Gao's book was that he advocated the influence of modernist techniques on contemporary fiction. Chinese writing under communism has, by decree, had a heavily social-realist and propagandistic bias; modernist ideas were until very recently seen as decadent, corrupt, and inherently capitalistic.
Review, 3955 words
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