Humor and tragedy found in Mao's absurdist nightmare

But comedy prevails, just about. Certain phrases recur, as in some kinds of theater aimed at an unsophisticated audience. Time and again Xu sits down in his town's Victory Restaurant and orders fried pork livers and yellow rice wine, nicely warmed. He and the two friends who introduce him to the art of selling blood introduce him to this as well. They eat this meal to celebrate their new-found riches, and in the end Xu eats it anyway when things have gone well, whether he's just sold blood or not. It's both familiar and farcical, both gross and a genuine source of happiness and a feeling of well-being in a society where scarcity, and sometimes even starvation, are the norm.

Few words are wasted in this blunt yet touching tale. Again, the old silent movies are an inevitable parallel. The action is everywhere speeded up so that everyday things seem comic. Then the technology didn't allow for long speeches as they all had to be written out on cards. Now, the speeches are kept short for the comic effect alone. These puppet-like characters think little, but what they do think, and say, is down to earth and very much to the point. They're both comic and pathetic because their situation is so terrible and their reactions to it are so direct.

This, in other words, is popular literature at its best. No one could possibly accuse it of avoiding reality, yet at the same time it's accessible, and in Chinese no doubt very funny, in a way that the most unsophisticated readers can easily understand. It's interesting to learn that Yu Hua started off writing "experimental" fiction, and only switched to this form of popular narrative later.

Pantheon is doing a fine job introducing Chinese authors to a wider readership. This book is translated by Andrew F. Jones, an associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley. His Afterword, however, is a touch too subservient to academic fashion, possibly to compensate for the colloquial and racy nature of his translation.

He writes of "stale humanist verities" and "the stale conventions of realism" when this novel is nothing if not realistic and awash with humanistic values.

It doesn't need defending in such a fashion. It's its own best advertisement, as well as a depiction of the absurdist nightmare that was China 50 years ago. Some readers may have unwittingly encountered the author before, though. His earlier novel, To Live (活者), published in 1992, was filmed to critical acclaim by director Zhang Yimou (張藝謀).