A FINALIST FOR THE MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE
Deep within the Balou mountains lies a small rural town populated by disabled people. Blind, deaf and disfigured, the 197 citizens of the Village of Liven have until now enjoyed a peaceful, mutually supportive life out of sight and mind of the government. But when an unseasonal snowstorm wipes out that year's crops, a county official dreams up a scheme that will raise money for the district and boost his career.
He convinces the villagers to set up a travelling freak-show, to include Blind Tonghua's Acute Listening Act and Deafman Ma's Firecrackers-on-the-Ear. With the money, he intends to buy Lenin's embalmed corpse from an ailing Russia and install it in a splendid mausoleum in the mountains to attract tourism to this sleepy district. However, as we all know, even the best intentions can go awry.
Rezensionen / Stimmen
Yan Lianke is one of China's most interesting writers and a master of imaginative satire -- Isabel Hilton * Guardian * Lenin's Kisses is a grand comic novel, wild in spirit and inventive in technique. It's a rhapsody that blends the imaginary with the real, raves about the absurd and the truthful, inspires both laughter and tears... The publication of this magnificent work in English should be an occasion for celebration. * Ha Jin, author of Waiting * The award-winning novelist Yan Lianke is one of China's most interesting writers and a master of imaginative satire -- Isabel Hilton * Guardian * Yan Lianke movingly chronicles the price that Communist China's rush to get rich has exacted from its vulnerable majority * Spectator * A hugely ambitious political fable ... a great ripping yarn -- Xiaolu Guo * Independent * Yan's postmodern cartoon of the Communist dream caving to run-amok capitalism is fiendishly clever * New York Times Book Review * Yan, one of China's most successful writers, is still gaining attention abroad, but this story of a village that decides to buy Lenin's corpse is Yan at the peak of his absurdist powers. He writes in the spirit of the dissident writer Vladimir Voinovich, who observed that "reality and satire are the same" -- Evan Osnos * New Yorker, Best Books of 2012 * I read Lenin's Kisses, a fierce, funny, painful and playful novel by a great Chinese writer; Yan Lianke. It is much more than just a poignant, daring political parody: it is also a subtle study of evil and stupidity, misery and compassion -- Amos Oz, New York Times This is a tale of modern China with all its wonders, marvels and absurdities and ironies roped together, making it a must-read. It's little wonder that the author has won both China's equivalences of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. * Da Chen, author of My Last Empress * Lenin's Kisses wickedly satirizes a sycophantic society where money and power are indiscriminately worshiped ... As the traveling circus gains fans across the country, it becomes clear that the officials behind the scenes, not the performers, are the true freaks -- Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore * Wall Street Journal *
Sprache
Verlagsort
Verlagsgruppe
Produkt-Hinweis
Maße
Höhe: 198 mm
Breite: 126 mm
Dicke: 35 mm
Gewicht
ISBN-13
978-0-09-956948-0 (9780099569480)
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Schweitzer Klassifikation
Yan Lianke was born in 1958 in Henan Province, China. He is the author of numerous novels and short-story collections, including Serve the People!, Dream of Ding Village, Lenin's Kisses, The Four Books, The Explosion Chronicles, The Day the Sun Died and Hard Like Water. He has been awarded the Hua Zhong World Chinese Literature Prize, the Lao She Literary Award, the Dream of the Red Chamber Award and the Franz Kafka Prize. He has also been shortlisted for the International Man Booker Prize, the Principe de Asturias Prize for Letters, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, the FT/Oppenheimer Fund Emerging Voices Award and the prix Femina Etranger. The Day the Sun Died won the Dream of the Red Chamber Award for the World's Most Distinguished Novel in Chinese. He lives and writes in Beijing.
