Purchase
Brothers: A Novel
Yu Hua
Pantheon
February 2009
On Sale: January 27, 2009
656 pages
ISBN: 0375424997
EAN: 9780375424991
Hardcover
Add to Wish List
Fiction
A bestseller in China, recently short-listed for the Man
Asian Literary Prize, and a winner of France’s Prix
Courrier International, Brothers is an epic and wildly
unhinged black comedy of modern Chinese society running
amok. Here is China as we’ve never seen it, in a sweeping,
Rabelaisian panorama of forty years of rough-and-rumble
Chinese history that has already scandalized millions of
readers in the author’s homeland. Yu Hua, award-winning
author of To Live, gives us a surreal tale of two brothers
riding the dizzying roller coaster of life in a newly
capitalist world. As comically mismatched teenagers, Baldy
Li, a sex-obsessed ne’er-do-well, and Song Gang, his
bookish, sensitive stepbrother, vow that they will always
be brothers--a bond they will struggle to maintain over the
years as they weather the ups and downs of rivalry in love
and making and losing millions in the new China. Their
tribulations play out across a richly populated backdrop
that is every bit as vibrant: the rapidly-changing village
of Liu Town, full of such lively characters as the self-
important Poet Zhao, the craven dentist Yanker Yu, the
virginal town beauty (turned madam) Lin Hong, and the
simpering vendor Popsicle Wang. With sly and biting humor, combined with an insightful and
compassionate eye for the lives of ordinary people, Yu Hua
shows how the madness of the Cultural Revolution has
transformed into the equally rabid madness of extreme
materialism. Both tragic and absurd by turns, Brothers is a
monumental spectacle and a fascinating vision of an
extraordinary place and time.
Comments
No comments posted.
Registered users may leave comments.
Log in or register now!
| 
© 2003-2024 off-the-edge.net
all rights reserved Privacy Policy