Book description
Deep within the Balou mountains lies a small rural town populated by
disabled people. Blind, deaf and disfigured, the 197 citizens of the
Village of Liven have until now enjoyed a peaceful, mutually
supportive life out of sight and mind of the government. But when an
unseasonal snowstorm wipes out that year's crops, a county official
dreams up a scheme that will raise money for the district and boost
his career.
He convinces the villagers to set up a travelling freak-show, to
include Blind Tonghua's Acute Listening Act, Guess the Age of the Old
Man, Deafman Ma's Firecrackers-on-the-Ear and One-Eye's Needle
Threading. With the money, he intends to buy Lenin's embalmed corpse
from an ailing Russia and install it in a splendid mausoleum in the
mountains to attract tourism to this sleepy district. However, as we
all know, even the best intentions can go awry.
Provocative and funny, Lenin's Kisses melds fable, history
and satire into a fantastical cautionary tale about contemporary
China's all-consuming desire for power and wealth.
Lenin's Kisses is a grand comic novel, wild in spirit and inventive
in technique. It's a rhapsody that blends the imaginary with the real,
raves about the absurd and the truthful, inspires both laughter and
tears... The publication of this magnificent work in English should be
an occasion for celebration. Ha Jin, author of Waiting This is a tale of
modern China with all its wonders, marvels and absurdities and ironies
roped together, making it a must-read. It's little wonder that the
author has won both China's equivalences of the National Book Award and
the Pulitzer Prize. Da Chen, author of My Last Empress Sprawling,
sometimes goofy, always seditious novel of modern life in the remotest
corner of China ... Set Rabelais down in the mountains of, say,
Xinjiang, mix in some Gunter Grass, Thomas Pynchon and Gabriel Garcia
Marquez, and you're in the approximate territory of Lianke's latest
exercise in epatering the powers that be ... A satirical masterpiece
Kirkus Reviews The novel's depth lies in its ability to express an
unbearable sorrow, even while constantly making the reader laugh out
loud ... a truly miraculous novel Ming Pao Weekly (Hong Kong) Yan Lianke
weaves a passionate satire of today's China, a marvellous circus where
the one eyed-man is king ... Brutal. And wickedly funny L'Express Yan
Lianke was born in 1958 in Henan Province, China. He is the author of
numerous novels and short-story collections, including
Serve the People!
and
Dream of Ding Village
, which in 2012 was shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize and the
Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and adapted into a film (retitled
Til Death Do Us Part)
. He is the winner of two of China's most prestigious literary awards,
the Lao She, for
Lenin's Kisses,
and the Lu Xun.
