Chaos and All That

This brilliant little novel, set against the backdrop of post-Mao China, juxtaposes recollections of childhood, pet ownership, and marriage with discussions of art, sex, and murder, weaving together an absurdist tapestry that is the inner life of the novel's felicitously named protagonist, Huang Haha. Deftly manipulating language and point of view, author Liu Sola combines a range of different voices from past and present, binding the resulting clash of disparate narrative and linguistic elements together with a rollicking sense of the absurd.