Lenin's Kisses
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
An absurdist masterpiece. A provocative and bitingly humourous tragicomedy of greed and corruption.
Lenin's Kisses is a brilliant novel about modern China. Blind, deaf, and disfigured, the 197 citizens of the Village of Liven enjoy a peaceful lifestyle, spared from the government's watchful eye. But when an unseasonal snowstorm wipes out the grain crops, a county official convinces the villagers to set up a travelling freak-show showcasing their disabilities. With the money, he intends to buy Lenin's embalmed corpse from Russia and install it in a mausoleum in the mountains to attract tourism to the sleepy district.
Lenin's Kisses is a rollicking tragicomedy with a cast of moving characters—a cautionary tale of the all-consuming desire for power and wealth from one of China's most respected and celebrated writers.
Yan Lianke was born in 1958 in Henan Province, China. Text has published his novels Serve the People! and Dream of Ding Village, which was short-listed for the Man Asian Literary Prize. Lianke has won two of China's most prestigious literary awards: the Lu Xan Prize and the Lao She Award. He lives in Bejing.
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'The novel's depth lies in its ability to express an unbearable sorrow, even while constantly making he reader laugh out loud...a truly miraculous novel.' Hong Kong Ming Pao Weekly
'Yan Lianke sees and describes his characters with great tenderness...this talented and sensitive writer exposes the absurdity of our time.' La Croix
'Yan Lianke weaves a passionate satire of today's China, a marvellous circus where the one-eyed-man is king...Brutal. And wickedly funny.' L'Express
'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.' Ha Jin
'Both a blistering satire and a bruising saga, this epic novel by Yan examines the grinding forces of communism and capitalism, and the volatile zone where the two intersect. . . . A heartbreaking story of greed, corruption, and the dangers of utopia.' Publishers Weekly (starred review)
'Set Rabelais down in the mountains of, say, Xinjiang, mix in some Günter Grass, Thomas Pynchon and Gabriel García Márquez, and you’re in the approximate territory of Lianke’s latest exercise in épatering the powers that be . . . A satirical masterpiece.' Kirkus Reviews
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Both a blistering satire and a bruising saga, this epic novel by Yan (Dream of Ding Village) examines the grinding forces of communism and capitalism, and the volatile zones where the two intersect. Liven, a forgotten village located in the mountainous Balou region of China, at the junction of Gaoliu, Dayu, and Shuanghuai counties, and blessed with arable land, is struck by a freakish summer blizzard that destroys the crops and casts the villagers most of them physically handicapped into despair. Learning of their hardship, Liu Yingque, the Gaoliu county chief, visits, hatching a scheme to travel to Russia, buy Lenin's corpse, and install it in a memorial shrine on a Chinese mountaintop. To fund this endeavor, he promises the citizens of Liven untold wealth if they're willing to turn their various handicaps into performances for tourists. Running concurrently with this allegorical farce is the story of Mao Zhi, a former soldier of the Red Army and the de facto leader of Liven, and her battle with Liu for control over Liven's autonomous position in the Communist party. Yan boldly plunges into the psychic gap between China's decades-old conditioned response to communist doctrine and its redefinition of itself as a capitalist power, creating with bold, carnivalesque strokes a heartbreaking story of greed, corruption, and the dangers of utopia.
