Brothers by Yu Hua

New to China?  Been before but feel a bit lost?  Wondering what’s going on in the heads of the people you see going by in the streets of Shanghai or Wuhan or Shijiazhuang or wherever?

If this is you , then don’t get on the plane again before buying a copy of Brothers by Yu Hua (now available in English translation).  It goes through brutal, harrowing, funny, rude (very), tender and outrageous.  It’s like a weird smoothie of Rabelais, Dickens, Jung Chang’s Wild Swans and a pleasing bit of trashy can’t-put-it-down Jeffrey Archer.   And it starts in a public toilet (where the hero’s father years before drowned in a pool of shit whilst attempting to spy on the women in the adjoining section).  The book takes our eccentric hero and his brother from birth into small town poverty through the bizarrely absurd iniquities of the Cultural Revolution and on into the make-it-up-as-you-go-along market economy era.  This engrossing chronicle of an extraordinary time will bring to anyone unfamiliar with the culture the kind of insider’s view that historical texts can’t match.  Not only that, it’s a best seller in China.  I think it will go down as one of the defining works of the Chinese millenial period.

• 

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 29th, 2009 at 11:03 pm. It is filed under Text, The Review and tagged with featured. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.