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Summary
Summary
From master storyteller Yan Lianke, winner of the prestigious Franz Kafka Prize and a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize, The Four Books is a powerful, daring novel of the dog-eat-dog psychology inside a labor camp for intellectuals during Mao's Great Leap Forward. A renowned author in China, and among its most censored, Yan's mythical, sometimes surreal tale cuts to the bone in its portrayal of the struggle between authoritarian power and man's will to prevail against the darkest odds through camaraderie, love, and faith.
In the ninety-ninth district of a sprawling reeducation compound, freethinking artists and academics are detained to strengthen their loyalty to Communist ideologies. Here, the Musician and her lover, the Scholar--along with the Author and the Theologian--are forced to carry out grueling physical work and are encouraged to inform on each other for dissident behavior. The prize: winning the chance at freedom. They're overseen by preadolescent supervisor, the Child, who delights in reward systems and excessive punishments. When agricultural and industrial production quotas are raised to an unattainable level, the ninety-ninth district dissolves into lawlessness. And then, as inclement weather and famine set in, they are abandoned by the regime and left alone to survive.
Author Notes
Yan Lianke was born in 1958 in Song County, Henan Province, China. He studied politics and education and is a 1985 graduate of Henan University. A few years later he received a degree in Literature from the People's Liberation Army Art Institute. His novels include Serve the People!, Lenin's Kisses, Dream of Ding Village, and The Four Books. Yan Lianke won the Hua Zhong World Chinese Literature Prize in 2013. He has also won two of China's most prestigious literary awards: the Lu Xan Literary Prize (in 1998 and 2001) and the Lao She Literary Award in 2005. In 2014, he won the Franz Kafka Prize.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Yan, a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize, pens a biting satire about Chinese re-education camps during the Great Leap Forward that's as haunting as it is eye-opening. In this tale, intellectuals and dissidents are sent to a labor camp, where they promise to perform impossible tasks in order to gain their freedom. These intellectuals-"the Musician," forced to prostitute herself for food; her lover, "the Scholar"; "the Theologian," who ends up cursing God for his fate; and "the Author," commissioned to write reports on the sins of the others, struggle for survival. Overseeing all of them is "the Child," who is as vulnerable to the whims of his bureaucratic superiors as his prisoners are to him. As the prisoners careen from impossible production quotas to slow death by starvation, the Child eventually offers to sacrifice himself for their freedom, in a stark parody of both Maoist ideals and Christian scripture. Yan has created a complex, epic tale rife with allusion. He effortlessly moves from Eastern to Western references, and even readers without a background in Chinese history and culture will find his story fascinating and immersive. The novel is a stinging indictment of the illogic of bureaucracy and tyranny, but the literary structure is tight and the prose incredibly accessible. Readers will have difficulty putting this down. Agent: Laura Susjin, Susjin Agency. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Yan's rich and complex novel deals with the Great Leap Forward, the official program that was conducted from 1958 to 1961 to transform China's economy. As much an allegory as a realistic work of fiction, the novel is set in a reeducation center where intellectuals have been sent to reform their thinking through labor. Instead of names, the inmates are called by their avocations: the Author, the Theologian, the Scholar, the Technician, the Musician, and so forth. Presiding over the camp is the Child, who, despite his youth and his often infantile behavior, holds the fate of the intellectuals in his hands. The reeducation center strives to meet ever-increasing and unrealistic targets in the production of grain and steel until the policies of the higher-ups result in a nationwide famine, and the inmates begin to starve. Yan, who was awarded the Franz Kafka Prize in 2014, shines a harsh light on a perverse and dehumanizing system, and his novel will be appreciated by readers who are interested in contemporary Chinese fiction.--Quinn, Mary Ellen Copyright 2015 Booklist
Kirkus Review
A searing, allegorical view of Chinese society during some of the darkest moments of the Mao era. Yan (Lenin's Kisses, 2012, etc.) is no stranger to controversy, running afoul of the censors even while taking a sidelong approach to his criticisms. This novel, more straightforward if sometimes absurd, will doubtless earn him a few more pages in the dossier. The titular four books are an echo of the Confucian classic by that name that the Communist state sought to undo, but they are also four fictitious texts that wend their ways through Yan's narrativefour texts that are layered onto still other texts, including the Christian Bible, which exercises an odd power over the story as a whole. The time is that of the so-called Great Leap Forward, the setting a re-education camp along the banks of the Yellow Riveror, at least, where the river once flowed before the state trumped nature and moved it. The denizens of the camp are supposed "rightists," bearing names such as the Scholar, the Theologian, the Technician, the Author and so forth. The Author has been charged with the task of chronicling the activities of the others within the campspying on them, that is, so that the overseer, who bears the name the Child, can present a thorough record to the powers that be. The Child, who "appeared to be omniscient," is a mysterious figure, sometimes sympathetic and sometimes tyrannical. All, guards and prisoners alike, are caught up in a vast, dimly comprehensible machine that slowly grinds them to bits. Writes one suicide, having committed cannibalism before hanging himself, "A person's death is like a light being extinguished, after which it is no longer necessary to worry about trying to re-educate and reform them." And if the Child's charges are reduced to such inhuman acts, his fate is no less terrible in the end, Yan's allegory suddenly made very real. Yan cements his reputation as one of China's most importantand certainly most fearlessliving writers. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Starred Review. Yan (Dream of Ding Village) has built his substantial career on exposing the surreal absurdity of China's 20th-century tragedies. His latest-in-translation features the 99th district of a reeducation camp, where intellectuals controlled by a maniacally cruel yet innocently naive child endure merciless conditions designed to recommit them to communism. Among the Child's prisoners are the Author, the Scholar, the Musician, and the Theologian, who like other inmates must fulfill impossible production quotas in areas from harvesting to smelting, driven by the Child's promises of freedom. Surviving the Great Famine, which experts estimate claimed a staggering 2,043 million victims, has unfathomable costs. Yan's multilayered novel is presented as dovetailing excerpts from the titular Four Books: the Author's Criminal Record, written in exchange for early release; the Author's own Old Course; an anonymous narrative called Heaven's Child; and a philosophical fragment from A New Myth of Sisyphus. The title is also a brilliant evocation of the foreshadowing of death (four and death are homophones in Chinese), Christianity's Four Gospels, and Confucianism's Four Books. Ironically, the Four Books and Five Classics of Confucianism were the foundation of imperial China's civil service exams, which created the intellectual class: communism's enemies. Books remain significant throughout-hidden, beloved, confiscated, burned. VERDICT Like Xianhui Yang's unrelenting Woman from Shanghai and Xinran's gentler China Witness, Yan's new work is vital historical testimony. [See Prepub Alert, 9/29/14.]-Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC (c) Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
When everyone saw the Child arrive, they again started working frantically. One person appeared not to notice, so the Child walked over to him and, knowing that this was an author who had written many books, said, "Your works are pure dog shit." The Author stared in surprise, then nodded and replied, "My works are dog shit." "Repeat that three times." Excerpted from The Four Books by Yan Lianke All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
