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Mr. Muo's Travelling Couch
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Mr. Muo's Travelling Couch by Dai Sijie
DAI SIJIE's first novel, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, created something of a sensation when it came out, spending twenty-three weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, one of the first novels by a modern Chinese writer to be a popular success and one of the first books that took a more nuanced, even somewhat romantic, view of the period of Cultural Revolution (if not the Cultural Revolution itself).
DAI SIJIE's second novel, MR. MUO'S TRAVELLING COUCH, has just been released ... in English -- a bit late as usual, given that it won the Prix Femina back in 2003 -- and marks quite a change of tack. The feckless city intellectual who finds himself bemused when confronted with China's reality is back, as is the romanticism, but this time Dai has taken rather a large step into the absurd, not quite so large a step, perhaps, as those taken by Mo Yan in The Republic of Wine and Ma Jian in the Noodle Maker, and certainly considerably gentler in tone -- but something barely hinted at in Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress. The result is a book with much of the charm of Balzac, but which is altogether considerably more intriguing and interesting.
Mr. Muo (as he is always referred to) has just returned from Paris where he was studying Freud, ostensibly to introduce psychoanalysis to modern China (hence the title), but actually to try to free his university sweetheart, who is a political prisoner. The local magistrate, Judge Di, will not sell her freedom for money, but -- shades of Baron Scarpia in Tosca -- for a virgin. So off Mr. Muo goes off to procure one. His odyssey is full of adventures and misadventures, in a morgue, in trains, train stations, under the seats of trains, on bicycles, ferries and trucks. In the process he loses a tooth, a suitcase, his virginity and much else while falling in love more than once while (mostly) staying true to his incarcerated sweetheart.
In MR. MUO'S TRAVELLING COUCH, Dai seems to have both tapped a vein of modern Chinese absurdist and magic realist fiction, but also succeeded in creating a fascinating Sino-French hybrid, rather different from the works of the Chinese diaspora that have settled in English-speaking countries. The literary references are to Baudelaire and Voltaire, the philosophical discourses are on the form the word amour, the artistic inspiration Cocteau, the foreign memories of the streets of Paris. This is perhaps not surprising given DAI SIJIE's residence in France, but it illustrates how much of China and Chinese literature we see through the filter of the English language and Anglo-American assumptions.
Readers expecting another Balzac may be left somewhat disappointed; those wanting something new and challenging will surely be entranced.
Peter Gordon
08/06/2005
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Peter Gordon is editor of The Asian Review of Books. |
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