The Seventh Day
A Novel
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- 39,00 kr
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- 39,00 kr
Publisher Description
From the acclaimed author of Brothers and To Live: a major new novel that limns the joys and sorrows of life in contemporary China.
Yang Fei was born on a moving train. Lost by his mother, adopted by a young switchman, raised with simplicity and love, he is utterly unprepared for the tempestuous changes that await him and his country. As a young man, he searches for a place to belong in a nation that is ceaselessly reinventing itself, but he remains on the edges of society. At age forty-one, he meets an accidental and unceremonious death. Lacking the money for a burial plot, he must roam the afterworld aimlessly, without rest. Over the course of seven days, he encounters the souls of the people he’s lost.
As Yang Fei retraces the path of his life, we meet an extraordinary cast of characters: his adoptive father, his beautiful ex-wife, his neighbors who perished in the demolition of their homes. Traveling on, he sees that the afterworld encompasses all the casualties of today’s China—the organ sellers, the young suicides, the innocent convicts—as well as the hope for a better life to come. Yang Fei’s passage maps the contours of this vast nation—its absurdities, its sorrows, and its soul. Vivid, urgent, and panoramic, The Seventh Day affirms Yu Hua’s place as the standard-bearer of modern Chinese fiction.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"I roamed on the borderline between life and death." Yang Fei is late for his cremation. His soul won't be laid to rest until he appears for his appointment with the incinerator. Hua's (Boy in the Twilight) eighth book follows 41-year-old Yang Fei's week of wandering in the afterworld in a powerful testament to alienation that stretches beyond the land of the living. Yang Fei drifts through the afterworld and pieces together how he lost his life and what he lost with it. He visits his ex-wife, who died by suicide after a scandal. He encounters a young woman called Mouse Girl, who killed herself after her boyfriend gave her a fake iPhone and did not answer her angry, melancholic blog tirades. He sees his birth mother, from whom he was separated just after his birth. He searches hardest for his father, a man who raised him alone, forsaking friends, lovers, and the opportunity for a much different life. Hua's prose has a lilting, elegiac quality that is both soothing and distant, but his characters, quite like apparitions, never fully materialize.
