Death Fugue
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Published for the first time in English by Giramondo, Death Fugue is the bold attempt by a prominent Chinese novelist to confront the legacy of protest and suppression which haunts her generation.
Sheng Keyi was born in Hunan province in 1973 and lives in Beijing. Death Fugue is her sixth novel, and the second to be published in English translation, after Northern Girls (2012). It is a brave work of speculative fiction, a cross between Cloud Atlas and 1984, scathing in its irony, ingenious in its use of allegory, and acute in its understanding of the power of writing. The imagination that drives it is exuberant and unconstrained.
In a large square in the centre of Beiping, the capital of Dayang, a huge tower of excrement appears one day, causing unease in the population, and ultimately widespread civil unrest. The protest, in which poets play an important part, is put down violently. Haunted by the violence, and by his failure to support his girlfriend Qizi, who is one of the protest leaders, Yuan Mengliu gives up poetry in favour of medicine, and the antiseptic environment of the operating theatre. But every year he travels in search of Qizi, and on one of these trips, caught in a storm, he wakes to find himself in a perfect society called Swan Valley. In this utopia, as he soon discovers, impulse and feeling are completely controlled, and every aspect of life regulated for the good of the nation, with terrible consequences.
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.
