Lenin's Kisses - Softcover

Lianke, Yan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099569485 ISBN 13: 9780099569480

Publisher: Vintage, 2013

Synopsis

A FINALIST FOR THE MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE

Deep within the Balou mountains lies a small rural town populated by disabled people. Blind, deaf and disfigured, the 197 citizens of the Village of Liven have until now enjoyed a peaceful, mutually supportive life out of sight and mind of the government. But when an unseasonal snowstorm wipes out that year’s crops, a county official dreams up a scheme that will raise money for the district and boost his career.

He convinces the villagers to set up a travelling freak-show, to include Blind Tonghua’s Acute Listening Act and Deafman Ma’s Firecrackers-on-the-Ear. With the money, he intends to buy Lenin’s embalmed corpse from an ailing Russia and install it in a splendid mausoleum in the mountains to attract tourism to this sleepy district. However, as we all know, even the best intentions can go awry.

About this title

Review:

"Yan Lianke is one of China’s most interesting writers and a master of imaginative satire" (Isabel Hilton Guardian)

"Lenin's Kisses is a grand comic novel, wild in spirit and inventive in technique. It's a rhapsody that blends the imaginary with the real, raves about the absurd and the truthful, inspires both laughter and tears... The publication of this magnificent work in English should be an occasion for celebration." (Ha Jin, author of Waiting)

"The award-winning novelist Yan Lianke is one of China's most interesting writers and a master of imaginative satire" (Isabel Hilton Guardian)

"Yan Lianke movingly chronicles the price that Communist China's rush to get rich has exacted from its vulnerable majority" (Spectator)

"A hugely ambitious political fable ... a great ripping yarn" (Xiaolu Guo Independent)

"Yan’s postmodern cartoon of the Communist dream caving to run-amok capitalism is fiendishly clever" (New York Times Book Review)

"Yan, one of China’s most successful writers, is still gaining attention abroad, but this story of a village that decides to buy Lenin’s corpse is Yan at the peak of his absurdist powers. He writes in the spirit of the dissident writer Vladimir Voinovich, who observed that “reality and satire are the same”" (Evan Osnos New Yorker, Best Books of 2012)

"I read Lenin’s Kisses, a fierce, funny, painful and playful novel by a great Chinese writer; Yan Lianke. It is much more than just a poignant, daring political parody: it is also a subtle study of evil and stupidity, misery and compassion" (Amos Oz, New York Times)

"This is a tale of modern China with all its wonders, marvels and absurdities and ironies roped together, making it a must-read. It’s little wonder that the author has won both China's equivalences of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize." (Da Chen, author of My Last Empress)

"Lenin's Kisses wickedly satirizes a sycophantic society where money and power are indiscriminately worshiped ... As the traveling circus gains fans across the country, it becomes clear that the officials behind the scenes, not the performers, are the true freaks" (Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore Wall Street Journal)

Book Description:

'One of China's greatest living authors and fiercest satirists' (Guardian)

Winner of the 2014 Franz Kafka Prize

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0099569485
• ISBN 13: 9780099569480
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 512