Death Fugue
-
- $19.99
-
- $19.99
Publisher Description
Banned in China for its taboo allusions to the Tiananmen Square massacre, Sheng Keyi’s Death Fugue is a lyrical and explosive dystopian satire that imagines a world of manufactured existence, the erasure of personal freedom, and the perils of governmental control.
One morning a nine-story tower of excrement of unknown origin appears in the center of Dayang’s capital, Beiping. The government swiftly scrubs the scene of all evidence and hands down its final word: Do not ask questions; dissent will be punished. But the crowd gathered in Round Square to witness the Tower Incident for themselves only grows and soon explodes in unrest. Poet Mengliu and his girlfriend Qizi join the uprising, but thousands disappear in the brutal crackdown that follows, including Qizi, the newly appointed protest leader. Mengliu abandons poetry and revolution but never gives up hope that Qizi may still be alive.
Years later, on his annual journey in search of Qizi, Mengliu washes ashore in the idyllic country of Swan Valley, a world of dreamlike beauty, perfection, and youth. But the dream becomes a nightmare as he slowly begins to unravel the secrets of Swan Valley, discovering that the perfect society exists at a deep, inhumane cost.
Boldly absurdist yet eerily prescient, award-winning author Sheng Keyi’s Death Fugue barrels out of the void left by generations of state-imposed silence in modern-day China, where it remains banned from publication. It is a rogue artist’s answer to a profound question of our times: What is the role of art after atrocity?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Chinese writer Sheng (Fields of White) delivers an account of the life of a poet-doctor after a violent protest in his home city of Beiping, Dayang, an allegorical version of Beijing. Two decades after the protest, during one of Yuan Mengliu's annual searches for Qizi, the love of his life who went missing during the unrest, Mengliu gets caught in a storm on a boat and reaches land in Swan Valley, a foreign and utopian city that's geographically and culturally isolated from the rest of the world. There, Mengliu becomes a doctor and enters a marriage arranged by the government, an early sign that his new surroundings may be just as repressive as Beiping. The parallels are gradually unfurled with flashbacks to Mengliu's previous life, and it's often difficult to follow the shifts in the timeline or make sense of the plot. Sheng's story evokes the Tiananmen Square massacre and the contemporary Chinese government's control of day-to-day life in the country, though none of these details are explicitly mentioned, and the allegorical style leaves the characters underdeveloped. Ultimately, this feels flat.
