Review by New York Times Review
LATE-LIFE LOVE: A Memoir, by Susan Gubar. (Norton, $25.95.) The influential literary critic blends tales of her marriage, her cancer treatments and her husband's age-related infirmities with discussions of works whose meaning has changed for her over time; her rereadings confirm her talents as a teacher. MORTAL REPUBLIC: How Rome Fell Into Tyranny, by Edward J. Watts. (Basic, $32.) By the second century B.C., the proud Roman Republic had been brought low by inequity, corruption and populist politicians. Since America's founders modeled it on the Roman example, Watts, a historian, warns that it behooves us to understand what went wrong over 2,000 years ago. MUHAMMAD: Prophet of Peace Amid the Clash of Empires, by Juan Cole. (Nation, $28.) Cole offers an ambitiously revisionist picture of the father of Islam, replacing the idea of a militant leader with one of a peacemaker who wanted only to preach his monotheism freely and even sought "multicultural" harmony. INSURRECTO, by Gina Apostol. (Soho, $26.) Set in the Philippines, this novel raises provocative questions about history and hypocrisy as it follows two women with dueling modern-day film scripts about a colonial-era massacre. MY BROTHER'S HUSBAND: Volume 2, by Gengoroh Tagamé. Translated by Anne Ishii. (Pantheon, $25.95.) A sweet satire of Japan's taboo against gay marriage, this manga-style graphic novel is a sophisticated investigation into the nature of love, marriage, divorce, bereavement and nontraditional child-rearing. IN OUR MAD AND FURIOUS CITY, by Guy Gunaratne. (MCD/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, paper, $16.) Gunaratne's striking, Bookerlonglisted debut unfolds over a few restless days in a workingclass Northwest London suburb. Despite the rush of drama indicated by its title, the book should be read for its quieter details - Gunaratne, with a gift for characterization, presents the kinds of Londoners not often seen in contemporary fiction. THE DAY THE SUN DIED, by Yan Lianke. Translated by Carlos Rojas. (Grove, $26.) This brutal satirical novel takes place on a single night, when a plague of somnambulism unleashes a host of suppressed emotions among the inhabitants of a Chinese village. The ensuing chaos is promptly struck from the official record. TELL THEM OF BATTLES, KINGS, AND ELEPHANTS, by Mathias Énard. Translated by Charlotte Mandel. (New Directions, paper, $19.95.) In this intoxicating novel, set in 1506, Michelangelo sets up shop in Constantinople to design a bridge connecting Europe and Asia. SLEEP OF MEMORY, by Patrick Modiano. Translated by Mark Polizzotti. (Yale, $24.) The Nobel laureate's dreamlike novels summon elusive, half-forgotten episodes. Here, that means Paris in the '60s, love affairs, a flirtation with the occult and a shocking crime. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [January 31, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
Everyone believed in dreams, but didn't believe in reality. It was all quite odd. Lianke (The Years, Months, Days, 2017) , winner of the prestigious Dream of the Red Chamber Award for Chinese-language novels and the author of dozens of novels, novellas, and short story collections, tells a dark and sinister story set in the Balou Mountains. Li Niannian sits with his father outside of his family's funeral parlor one evening when Uncle Xia arrives seeking funeral materials for his father, who drowned while dreamwalking. Then Li observes Uncle Zhang dreamwalking, going to the field to thresh wheat in his sleep. Soon, in one increasingly bizarre night, the entire town begins to slip into manic dreamwalking, as people put their thoughts into practice and carry out what is engraved in their bones. As chaos ensues, Li and his parents try to save the town from this waking nightmare before sunrise. In his unflinching satire, Lianke shows an incredible mastery of words, both brilliantly humorous and offbeat, making this novel a gripping read.--Emily Park Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Yan (The Years, Months, Days) trains his fantastical, satiric eye on China's policy of forced cremation in this chilling novel about the "great somnambulism" that seizes a rural town. Horrified to learn that the bodies cremated by his brother-in-law in accordance with the mandate to "save farmland" from being wasted on graves leaves behind residual "corpse oil," a funerary shop owner named Tianbao agrees to buy and hide the oil rather than let it be shipped to factories ignorant of its origin. His son, Niannian, helps with this grim task, considering himself "like a tree that had grown up at the entrance of the underworld." That threshold is breached one midsummer night, when the townspeople begin "dreamwalking." Reports arrive of accidental drownings involving the dreamwalkers, then of a murder with an iron rod. Looting and violence spread as more people begin dreamwalking, until the town is "engulfed in the sounds of screams and murderous beatings." The interweaving of politics and delusion creates a powerful resonance that is amplified by Tianbao's borderline mythical plan for how to "drive away the darkness," leading to an unforgettable ending. This is a riveting, powerful reading experience. Agent: Laura Susijn, the Susijn Agency. (Dec.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Satire meets sci-fi, horror, and social criticism in the prolific Chinese novelist Yan's latest concoction.Something is always happening in Yan's villages: They're booming in The Explosion Chronicles (2016), turning into Red Disneylands in Lenin's Kisses (2012), imploding under the weight of profiteers' schemes in Dream of Ding Village (2011). Our narrator here is 14-year-old Li Niannian, nicknamed "Stupid Niannian," who laments, "My own reputation is as minuscule as a speck of dust lost in a pile of sesame seeds, or a flea nit hidden on the back of a camel, an ox, or a sheep." The child of morticians, he lives across the way from a writer named Yan Lianke in Gaotian, a village that, Niannian believe, lies at the center of the world. When we meet him, Niannian is imploring the celestial beings to protect Gaotian, his family, and Yan from decidedly weird eventsfor the people of Gaotian have turned in for the night, but they cannot sleep, and as they "dreamwalk" they do untoward things: Uncle Zhang goes off to work a field, waking in a start, only to chide himself: "You are truly fucking debased! Your wife ran away with someone else while you were busy working, yet you still come here to thresh grain for her." More dangerously, Zhang Mutou, sure that his wife is messing around, finds her supposed lover while sound asleep and cracks his skull. Other dark mischief and many deaths539, preciselyensue, so that the village's busiest enterprise is the crematorium, producing a gusher of icy-smelling "corpse oil": "Most of this coldness was produced from people's hearts, and without it the barrel would simply have been an ordinary barrel of oil." It's as if to say that the official dream of "capitalism with Chinese characteristics" is capable of producing only deatha message that surely won't cheer the Politburo, for which reason Yan's work is often banned in his native country.As dreamscape realized, however horrible, Yan's novel belongs in the company of Juan Rulfo's Pedro Pramo and even James Joyce's Ulysses. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
