Cat Country (Penguin Modern Classics) - Softcover

She, Lao

3.63

955 ratings by Goodreads

9780143208129: Cat Country (Penguin Modern Classics)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0143208128 ISBN 13: 9780143208129

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 2014

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When a traveller from China crash-lands on Mars, he finds himself in a country inhabited entirely by Cat People. Befriended by a local cat-man, he becomes acquainted with all aspects of cat-life: he learns to speak Felinese, masters cat-poetry, and appreciates the narcotic effects of the reverie leaf - their food staple. But curiosity turns to despair when he ventures further into the heart of the country and the culture, and realizes that he is witnessing the bleak decline of a civilization.

Cat Country, Lao She's only work of science fiction, is both a dark, dystopian tale of one man's close encounter with the feline kind and a scathing indictment of a country gone awry.

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Review:

Fascinating . . . a work fuelled by specifically Chinese concerns (the leaves function in Martian history much as opium did in China's) and shaped by China's literary past (the Chinese canon includes tales of travelers to distant lands encountering curious customs and marvelous sights), yet written by a worldly author fond of Conrad and Swift . . . makes an ideal companion piece to George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four . . . in Cat Country, the greatest fear is of a culture and people being annihilated as a government too divided and weak to stand up for itself proves unable to protect a land from brutal invaders (Jeffrey Wasserstrom The Times Literary Supplement)

A biting satire (Jasper Becker)

About the Author:

Ian Johnson is a Pulitzer Prize winning correspondent for The New York Times and The New York Review of Books. He has spent about half of the past thirty years in China, first as a student and then as a correspondent. He is also an advising editor for The Journal of Asian Studies and teaches on religion in China. He is the author of two other books that also focus on the intersection of politics and religion: Wild Grass: Three Stories of Change in China, and A Mosque in Munich: Nazis, the CIA, and the Rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in the West. He splits his time between Beijing and Berlin.

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