As protests swirl in the cities and all foreign faces arouse suspicions, venturesome young Japanese student Aya Goda travels deep into the interior of China. There she falls in love with the charismatic and combative wandering painter Cao, whose work is initially tolerated by the Chinese authorities and then banned, suddenly flipping the couple over onto the wrong side of the law. With the police on their tails, the pair criss-cross the vastnesses of middle China and push up into Tibet, where Cao has been trained as a sky-burial master. By truck and by jalopy, biplane and train, dodging bandits and bureaucrats alike, the pair take a high-speed, high-risk journey through this fast-changing country.Like some East Asian Cassady and Kerouac, Cao and Goda are wild kindred spirits in search of enlightenment and freedom, and Goda's prose - clear and metallic as a Himalayan stream - permits the reader to share their every intrepid step and twist and to taste the tangily different flavours of contemporary China.
Rezensionen / Stimmen
'Good travel books, like travel itself, open the door to new worlds. In the strongest works the author's vision becomes our own: for most of us, northern Russia will forever be defined by Colin Thubron's In Siberia. Antarctica is Sara Wheeler's Terra Incognita. Delhi will always be for me William Dalrymple's City of Jinns. Now, an arresting book is about to take hold of our collective vision of rural China. A dozen film producers would die to adapt this book into an irresistible road movie.' Rory MacLean, Guardian 'A unique memoir. At once naive, tough, stark and sentimental, Tao recounts an 8-month rite of passage in which the reader sees a Japanese art student entering an adolescent dream of love on the road' Colin Thubron
Sprache
Verlagsort
Verlagsgruppe
Maße
Höhe: 198 mm
Breite: 130 mm
ISBN-13
978-1-84627-025-3 (9781846270253)
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Schweitzer Klassifikation
AYA GODA lives in northern Japan, where she works as a painter. This is her first book.
