The Explosion Chronicles
A Novel
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- $2.99
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- $2.99
Publisher Description
“A rip-roaring Swiftian satire from a contemporary Chinese master” follows a rural community’s transformation from small village to megalopolis (The Economist).
With the Yi River on one side and the Balou Mountains on the other, the village of Explosion was founded more than a millennium ago by refugees fleeing a seismic volcanic eruption. But in the post-Mao era the name takes on a new significance as the community grows explosively from a small village to a vast metropolis. Behind this rapid expansion are members of the community’s three major families, including the four Kong brothers; Zhu Ying, the daughter of the former village chief; and Cheng Qing, who starts out as a secretary and goes on to become a powerful political and business figure. Linked together by a complex web of loyalty, betrayal, desire, and ambition, these figures are the driving force behind their hometown’s transformation into an urban superpower.
Brimming with absurdity, intelligence, and wit, The Explosion Chronicles considers the high stakes of passion and power, the consequences of corruption and greed, the polarizing dynamics of love and hate between families, as well as humankind’s resourcefulness through the vicissitudes of life.
“Yan’s burlesque of a nation driven insane by money is equally a satire of some of the excesses of the Chinese Revolution.” —The Wall Street Journal
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Lianke's novel, a powerful, vividly imagined metafictional tale of a rural community's rapid transformation into an urban metropolis, seeks to portray the "unrealistic reality... non-existent existence... impossible possibility" of life in contemporary China. The small mountain village of Explosion was founded during the Song dynasty; by the late 1970s it is the home of the extended Kong, Zhu, and Cheng families, and bears the marks of the Cultural Revolution. When Kong Mingliang, the second son of farmer Kong Dongde, decides to gain power, his supporters, rejecting the old communist village chief, Zhu Qingfang, literally drown Qingfang in spit. Thus begins the conflict that will define, and ultimately doom, Explosion; Mingliang brings prosperity to the villagers by teaching them how to steal from passing trains, but he is challenged by Qingfang's daughter Zhu Ying, a sex-work entrepreneur who makes sexual shock troops of the young women of Explosion. Explosion's growth is as fantastic, and as violent, as Ying's relationship with the increasingly powerful Mingliang; flowers bloom and wilt according to the city's fortunes, and foreign investment finally arrives thanks to an extraordinary set piece in which the townspeople create a Potemkin-village war-era Vietnam, complete with civilian casualties, to entice American investors. Lianke (The Four Books) notes his affinity with Latin American magical realism and calls his own work "mythorealism," a style capable of "captur a hidden internal logic." Readers will be haunted by the patterns of greed, revenge, and obsession that Lianke's satire makes vibrantly visible.
