The effect of this repetition is numbing on the reader’s sensibility, and in the end it just becomes boring. Is that really what the book is like in the Shanxi-dialect Chinese, you wonder? It’s clear that what the translator is trying to do is convey some aspect of the original, and that what Cao is himself presumably trying to convey is the terrible narrowness of his characters’ horizons, just humping animals and eating awful food and talking in this endlessly dumbed-down, mind-numbing manner.
The subject matter, too, mostly concerns the repetitive preoccupations of rural life — the castration of animals, the biting of gadflies and the burning of wormwood to ward off mosquitoes. The only pleasant place near the village is rarely visited because it’s believed to harbor ghosts. Against this background, dreams of copulation are never far away.
The Communist Party is portrayed as being just one more cross the poor peasants have to bear. Supposed malefactors, or simple fools, are frequently tied up and beaten by the local Committee for the Dictatorship of the Masses. Apparently this passed China’s censorship because the book is set in the past and not the present.
Balcom is a distinguished translator, incidentally. He’s translated several Taiwanese books including Running Mother and Other Stories (奔跑的母親) by Guo Songfen (郭松棻) [reviewed in the Taipei Times on March 29, 2009] and a version of the Wintry Night (寒夜續曲) trilogy by Li Qiao (李喬).
This collection of bizarre tales is probably intended as a send-up, simultaneously compassionate and farcical, of official versions of the virtuous life of the countryside, to experience which Mao Zedong (毛澤東) sent down a whole generation of young city-dwellers. And it’s perhaps wrong to give the impression that the entire book is depressing — maybe it was unfortunate that I read it so soon after Ackroyd’s dazzling tour de force. Nonetheless, this is certainly not a volume to be recommended unreservedly to the fainthearted. It’s slightly unnerving, too, to learn that the author is, of all things, a police detective in the very province he writes about.
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