Heart Sutra
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- USD 12.99
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- USD 12.99
Descripción editorial
Multi-prizewinning and internationally acclaimed Yan Lianke -- 'China's most controversial novelist' (New Yorker) -- returns with a campus novel like no other following a young Buddhist as she journeys through worldly temptation
To tell the truth, religious faith is really just a matter of believing stories. The world is governed by stories, and it is for the sake of stories that everyone lives on this earth.
Yahui is a young Buddhist at university. But this is no ordinary university. It is populated by every faith in China: Buddhists, Daoists, Catholics, Protestants and Muslims who jostle alongside one another in the corridors of learning, and whose deities are never far from the classroom.
Her days are measured out making elaborate religious papercuts, taking part in highly charged tug-of-war competitions between the faiths and trying to resist the daily temptation to return to secular life and abandon the ascetic ideals that are her calling. Everything seems to dangle by a thread. But when she meets a Daoist student called Mingzheng, an inexorable romance of mythic proportions takes hold of her.
In this profoundly otherworldly novel, Chinese master Yan Lianke remakes the campus novel in typically visionary fashion, dropping readers into an allegorical world ostensibly far from our own, but which reflects our own questions and struggles right back at us.
'One of China's greatest living authors' Guardian
'His talent cannot be ignored' New York Times
'China's foremost literary satirist' Financial Times
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This intriguing satire from Yan (Hard Like Water) unfolds during a conference involving members of China's five major religions: Buddhism, Daoism, Protestantism, Catholicism, and Islam. Yahui, a young Buddhist jade nun, attends a one-year program at a government-sponsored religious training center in Beijing, where the director, Gong, hopes to write a book on the relationships and contradictions among the various belief systems. Gong arranges tug-of-war competitions between groups and works with a figure known as Nameless to blackmail donors to raise money for the training center. Yahui is on campus to assist her mentor, Jueyu, but after Jueyu suffers a stroke while witnessing a tug-of-war match, Yahui takes her place. Soon, she meets Daoist master Gu Mingzheng, who is searching for his birth father, and the duo form a bond that turns romantic. After Yahui's convent collapses, she sets her sights on buying an apartment in the city, and she and Mingzheng, whose parental search is one of perpetual disappointment, consider starting a secular life together. While Yan's similes are dubious and awkwardly translated ("the sky was as dark as though it were covered in a black cloth"), his barbs against organized religion frequently hit their targets (a Christian claims the Communist Party as one of Jesus's disciples). Despite the rough spots, there is plenty to admire.
