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Title details for Golden Age by Wang Xiaobo - Available

Golden Age

A Novel

by Wang Xiaobo
Yan Yan
ebook
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"Like a Chinese Kurt Vonnegut. By turns lyrical and satirical, Wang Xiaobo's sexual comedies set during the Chinese Cultural Revolution are as improbable as that genre sounds. His long overdue publication in English comes as a gift. Golden Age is funny and brave and profound."
—Chris Kraus, author of I Love Dick
"At the time Wang was writing, novels about the Cultural Revolution tended to be fairly conventional tales of how good people suffered nobly during this decade of madness. The system itself was rarely called into question. Wang’s book was radically different . . .  The idea of how to stand up to power underlies Golden Age."
—Ian Johnson, The New York Times Book Review
Like Gary Shteyngart or Michel Houellebecq, Wang Xiaobo is a Chinese literary icon whose satire forces us to reconsider the ironies of history.
“Apparently, there was a rumor that Chen Qingyang and I were having an affair. She wanted me to prove our innocence. I said, to prove our innocence, we must prove one of the following:
        1. Chen Qingyang is a virgin
        2. I was born without a penis.
Both of these propositions were hard to prove; therefore, we couldn’t prove our innocence. In fact, I was leaning more toward proving that we weren’t innocent.”
 
And so begins Wang Er’s story of his long affair with Chen Qinyang. Wang Er, a 21-year-old ox herder, is shamed by the local authorities and forced to write a confession for his crimes. Instead, he takes it upon himself to write a modernist literary tract. Later, as a lecturer at a chaotic, newly built university, Wang Er navigates the bureaucratic maze of 1980’s China, boldly writing about the Cultural Revolution’s impact on his life and those around him. Finally, alone and humbled, Wang Er must come to terms with the banality of his own existence.
 
But what makes this novel both hilarious and important is Xiaobo’s use of the awkwardness of sex as a metaphor for all that occured during the Cultural Revolution. This achievement was revolutionary in China and places Golden Age in the great pantheon of novels that argue against governmental control.
 
A leading icon of his generation, Wang Xiaobo’s cerebral and sarcastic narrative is a reflection on the failures of individuals and the enormous political, social, and personal changes in twentieth-century China.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    July 26, 2022

  • Formats

    • Kindle Book

    • OverDrive Read

      • ISBN: 9781662601224

    • EPUB ebook

      • ISBN: 9781662601224
      • File size: 1362 KB

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Kirkus

      June 1, 2022
      The late Chinese writer's (1952-1997) comic take on oppressive regimes, large and small. Wang was a so-called intellectual youth when he was sent from Beijing to rural Yunnan Province during China's Cultural Revolution, which used such rustication to battle perceived bourgeois elements. A similar fate befalls 21-year-old Wang Er, his main character and narrator in this loosely structured novel, originally published as three separate novellas. The book's opening section (which appeared in English in the collection Wang in Love and Bondage, 2007) has him recalling the Yunnan years from two decades later. He works as an ox herder but falls afoul of officialdom mainly for sleeping with a married doctor. Their affair is conveyed with an earthiness that runs throughout the book, including several mentions of Wang's generous endowment (though that's nothing compared to the more than 25 references in five pages to another man's injured member). In the second section, Wang is a 30-year-old college lecturer dealing with academic bureaucracy and pettiness. In the last, he's 40 and recalls one teacher's romance and another's suicide. Coming from a country known for political and cultural censorship, the book is noteworthy for its sexual candor--even amid wonderful euphemisms--and wide-ranging irreverence, abetted by a voice that is variously smart, quirky, or sarcastic. The narrative often has the casual disorder of journal entries, and the narrator sometimes calls to mind the hapless but resourceful hero of Jaroslav Hasek's The Good Soldier Schweik, though he's not so much the faux naif. While entertaining, however, Wang's book suffers from unevenness in the writing, rough spots in the translation by Yan, and an overall lack of cohesion. An unusual writer worth discovering, flaws and all, for his humor and flair.

      COPYRIGHT(2022) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Formats

  • Kindle Book
  • OverDrive Read
  • EPUB ebook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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