Much of the novel’s comedy springs from the portrait of a society of the newly rich who can’t quite shake off their peasant ways. And the essential style remains cartoon-like, as the names of the characters testify — Popsicle Wang, Success Liu, Victory Zhao, Yanker Yu, Scissors Guan, Writer Liu (who thinks up advertising phrases for his factory) and Poet Zhao (who’s only ever published four lines of verse in a mimeographed cultural center magazine).
Part One covers the boys’ youth during the Cultural Revolution. Baldy Li discovers his sex drive at the age of 8 and finds out about revolutionary Struggle Sessions at around the same age. This part of the story comes to a climax when the brothers’ father has his left elbow dislocated and his home looted before being casually murdered by Red Guards while attempting to buy a ticket to Shanghai. The bravery of his wife is strongly presented, but she doesn’t have much longer to live either.
A comic style would be inappropriate to such nightmares, so Yu veers instead into using the same kind of physical directness, only now to horrific rather than humorous effect.
The book as a whole raises memories of the English 18th
century where Fielding’s Tom Jones (also containing two boys brought up as brothers) and Smollett’s scabrous and racy novels featured sensational, picaresque adventures with frequent punch-ups set somewhere between country inns and fashionable spas. They may not have had characters falling into a cesspit in a public toilet while trying to catch glimpses of women’s buttocks, as here, but their aims and techniques were similar.
There’s now an established tradition in Chinese novel-writing of these garish, shocking, outrageous novels — Please Don’t Call Me Human (千萬別把我當人), by Wang Shuo, (王朔), and the many novels of Mo Yan (莫言) are some other examples. Initially stigmatized as “hooligan literature,” they today constitute part of the mainstream, and contrast with the sophisticated, urbane work of writers such as Wang Anyi (王安憶) and Dai Sijie (戴思杰), whose style perhaps derives from that of Eileen Chang (張愛玲).
Yu’s Chronicle of a Blood Merchant (許三觀賣血記), reviewed in the Taipei Times on Nov. 23, 2003, was very much in the same style as this new book. Brothers, though, is far more impressive. Indeed, it’s a major achievement by any standards. Already published in the US by Pantheon, it will appear from Picador Asia in April.
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