The Fat Years
A Novel
-
-
4.5 • 2 Ratings
-
-
- $14.99
Publisher Description
Banned in China, this controversial and politically charged novel tells the story of the search for an entire month erased from official Chinese history.
Beijing, sometime in the near future: a month has gone missing from official records. No one has any memory of it, and no one could care less—except for a small circle of friends, who will stop at nothing to get to the bottom of the sinister cheerfulness and amnesia that have possessed the Chinese nation. When they kidnap a high-ranking official and force him to reveal all, what they learn—not only about their leaders, but also about their own people—stuns them to the core. It is a message that will astound the world.
A kind of Brave New World reflecting the China of our times, The Fat Years is a complex novel of ideas that reveals all too chillingly the machinations of the postmodern totalitarian state, and sets in sharp relief the importance of remembering the past to protect the future.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In the near future, China the premier world superpower has entered an unprecedented era of prosperity. Successful writer Lao Chen is one of the happy ones, until some old friends start to nag him with a troubling fact: an entire month is missing from history. Between the collapse of the Western financial system and the Chinese ascendance, a month was erased from official memory. With a ragtag band of friends, including the beguiling woman with whom he's fallen in love, Lao Chen gropes toward the brutal truth underlying this government-imposed collective happiness. As Koonchung writes: "Between a good hell and a fake paradise which one would you choose?" Part political thriller, part dystopian nightmare, the journey through 20th-century Chinese history bears misleading comparisons to Brave New World, since these characters are little more than mouthpieces for discussions about politics. As a result, this first English translation of Koonchung's fiction, an underground sensation in China, feels flat, a quality exacerbated by the novel's uneven pace and lengthy digressions into historical and political minutiae. However, Koonchung (founder of Hong Kong's City Magazine) reveals the moral and political perils of contemporary Chinese life, and a better translation may allow this novel to flourish.
