Talk:Wang Xiaobo

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Material moved here[edit]

The following I took from the main page because it was unencyclopedic and rather messy there. It's here now and I plan to summarize & paraphrase it for the main page later. The Sound and the Fury (talk) 22:50, 17 August 2011 (UTC) Editorial Reviews[reply]

From Publishers Weekly

Reading popular, irreverent Chinese essayist and novelist Wang, who died in 1997 at 44, can feel like being held upside down—particularly during the zingy sex scenes. Characters cultivate an artful irrelevance to circumvent official stricture, and fail most every time. In the first work, "2015," the narrator's uncle, Wang Er, is a painter without a government permit to paint; his paintings are so stridently fractal that they make people dizzy. Sent for re-education, he readily admits his stupidity, but is undone when a female guard takes a very twisted interest in him. "The Golden Age" concerns another Wang Er: a 21-year-old, well-endowed Beijing student sent to the Yunan countryside during the Mao period. There, he runs off with a married doctor. Told to confess on returning, Wang, ironically, becomes a writer, as his superiors insist on more and more pornographic detail in every revised version of his confessions. The slighter final story, "East Palace, West Palace," relates a story about a policeman who falls in love with a bisexual cross-dresser. Wang's deeply convincing novellas will certainly please the readers who have enjoyed recent Nobel Prize–winner Gao Xingjian's novel, Soul Mountain.(Mar.)

From Booklist

Starred Review* Wang (1952-97) has a large following among Chinese university students but isn't at all popular with the literary establishment. Blame the matter and attitude of his work, not its literary merit. China has a history of heavy-handed prudishness that the sex in these three novellas flouts big time. They're wry social-realist exercises demonstrating that in a repressive society, whether of the future, the Cultural Revolution, or post-Mao but still policed 1990s China, sex affords the only excitement worth risking slander or prison for. And if it weren't for imagination, sex might be drab. If the narrator of "2015" weren't obsessed with being an artist, would he so ardently follow his artist uncle's misadventures, which eventuate in being a luscious policewoman's sex toy? If they could redeem their reputations, would the lovers undergoing forcible "re-education" in "The Golden Age" breath so heavily? Would the handsome cop in "East Palace, West Palace" discover his homosexuality if he weren't such a socially determined straight arrow? Not sex but sensation, with the possibility, however slight, of transcendence, becomes the supreme value for these stories' characters--a predicament not unlike that of Jake Barnes and company in Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. Ray Olson

From the Back Cover

Acclaimed as one of the most important writers of twentieth-century China, the late Wang Xiaobo (1952-1997) is known for his frank, often antic treatment of sex and his gift for reveling in human absurdity and provoking laughter from horror. Composed of three novellas, "The Golden Age," "East Palace, West Palace," and "2015," this book is the first English translation of his work.

"East Palace, West Palace," one of the first contemporary Chinese fictional works dealing with male homosexuality, is an S/M-oriented love story between a masochistic gay writer and a handsome policeman unaware of his sadistic tendencies. In "The Golden Age," for which Wang Xiaobo is perhaps best known, the protagonist, Wang Er (literally, Wang number two) is a city student sent to the countryside for rustification during the Cultural Revolution. There he meets a lovely young doctor whom he encourages to live up to her undeserved reputation as "damaged goods." In "2015," another Wang Er, after being put into a labor camp for practicing painting without a license, becomes the love object of a sadistic policewoman.

Although the sexual and social roles of Wang Xiaobo's characters intertwine, sexuality functions not as protest but as an absurd metaphor for state power and the voluntary, even enthusiastic, collaboration of those subject to it. Full of deadpan humor and oddball sex, Wang Xiaobo's novellas allow us to see, through a subtly shifting kaleidoscope, scenes from the elaborate dance the individual must do with the state in twentieth-century China.

"Wang's deeply convincing novellas will certainly please the readers who have enjoyed recent Nobel Prize-winner Gao Xingjian's novel, Soul Mountain." -- Publishers Weekly

"The late Wang Xiaobo is not known in the West. However, this fine collaborative translation of Wang's unconventional and engaging novellas will change that, and call into question any stereotypical views of contemporary Chinese fiction." -- Howard Goldblatt, University of Notre Dame