Pleasure of Thinking
Essays
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
A yet-untranslated essay collection on the importance of critical thought, from one of the foremost Chinese intellectuals of the 1990s.
Wang Xiaobo’s Pleasure of Thinking is an essay collection as riotous as it is contemplative. Between rollicking anecdotes about living between the East and West and serious musings on the intellectual situations at home and abroad, Xiaobo examines modern life with the levity missing from so much of today’s politico-cultural discourse.
In “The Maverick Pig,” he considers the existential differences between humans and livestock. In “Tales From Abroad: Food,” he recounts the culture shock of discovering American diets while studying at Carnegie Mellon. Several pieces focus on literature, with notable essays devoted to Italo Calvino, Bertrand Russell, and Ernest Hemingway, whom Xiaobo admired greatly. Others are more personal in nature, ranging from a meditation on getting mugged, to the consideration of the question: why do I write?
Controversial, hilarious, and inimitable, Pleasure of Thinking is a delightful celebration of Wang Xiaobo’s unique critical perspective.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This stimulating if uneven posthumous anthology from novelist and sociologist Xiaobo (Golden Age), who died in 1997, brings together 35 pieces of his nonfiction, including philosophical musings, book reviews, and personal anecdotes about travel and his upbringing. The title essay details how the author covertly found intellectual stimulation from a contraband copy of Ovid's Metamorphoses during his years in an army-run commune in China, where the only permitted reading material was Mao Zedong's Little Red Book. Selections on sex and sexuality show their age. For instance, Xiaobo's reflection on his 1992 sociological study of gay men centers on the now obvious conclusion that "there is in fact a widespread male homosexual population on the Chinese mainland," and his suggestion that appeasing "radical feminists" would require him to "undergo a sex change and castrate myself" is overwrought. He fares better when meditating on his time studying sociology in the U.S., serving up brief, humorous dispatches on food and clothing ("There were only a few occasions in which you couldn't dress casually"). Not all of the pieces work, but Xiaobo's sharp criticisms of how state censorship constricts intellectual ferment resonate, as when he excoriates state censors for excising discussions of sex from novels ("Could Hemingway write something that would satisfy the ? I think not"). This is worth dipping into.
