Review by Booklist Review
Ma (The Dark Road, 2013) has forged an impressive literary career by criticizing the government of the country of his birth, from which his work has been banned for 25 years. His latest novel presents his sharpest and most intimate vision yet, one that delves into the everyday lives of the wealthy elite. Ma Daode, director of the China Dream Bureau, intends to implant a microchip in the head of every Chinese to ensure they are united as one and gathered together into an invincible force. His phone constantly abuzz with sexy text messages from one of his many mistresses, Ma Daode's biggest concerns are deciding whom to sleep with next and helping his wife hide the gifts he illegally receives for political favors. In the midst of his success, he's revisited by disruptive memories of his family and the violent battles he fought in during China's Cultural Revolution. When he's sent to a village where he spent several years in his youth to negotiate for the people's removal from their land for government purposes, he's forced to reconcile his humble past with his ambitions for the future. In his startling and irreverent parody, Ma finds compassion amid the sex and violence that shape a history of injustice and a nation's vulnerability.--Jonathan Fullmer Copyright 2019 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Exiled Chinese writer Ma's satirical novel (after The Dark Road) is a bold, searing indictment of present-day China and a lyrical exposé of the false utopia created by the Communist Party and its current leader-for-life, Xi Jinping. Written "out of rage" according to Ma's foreword, the fable subverts the propaganda of Xi's Chinese Dream and chronicles the descent into madness of the louche, corrupt government functionary Ma Daode. Having played his part in the nasty factional violence of the Cultural Revolution, Ma has risen to become director of the China Dream Bureau, charged with replacing all private dreams with the collective, great China Dream. But he is increasingly unable to control his own dreams: dreams of fallen comrades, a martyred girlfriend, and the pitiful demise of his parents after he himself denounced them. After a disastrous appearance at an antigovernment demonstration during which his neighbors throw chicken bones and condoms to protest the razing of their neighborhood, and having made a fool of himself in a speech at a Golden Anniversary Dream ceremony in which his dreams overcome him, Ma is suspended from his position. He goes on a desperate search for a cure, extracting the recipe for the miraculous Old Lady Dream's Broth, a hare-brained concoction of blood and tears he hopes will eradicate not only his, but all undesirable dreams. The book will surely be banned in China, as has Ma's other works. This is an inventive yet powerful confrontation of China's past and present. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
How do you make sure everyone's on board with the program in a totalitarian state? In Ma's (The Dark Road, 2013, etc.) imaginative telling, you make sure they share the same dream.Ma Daode has it easy: Director of the China Dream Bureau, he has a bathroom off his office, gets suggestive texts from multiple women, makes good money, and sports a "pot belly compressed into large rolls of fat." He's got big plans to insinuate the "China Dream" into the minds of everyone in a provincial city and then into the nation at large, replacing private dreams with a shared Party-approved vision. Yet, as the author lets us know from the start, Ma Daode is subject to memories that trouble his sleep and come faster as his plans for dream domination take shape. Ma Daode, it develops, was a young conscript in the Cultural Revolution, a teenager who got caught up in violence and trouble that soon settled on his own family. As the China Dream project takes its twists and turns, melding Chinese traditional thought with Marxism, it seems increasingly absurd. Yet, swamped by memories from the past, Ma Daode urges himself to "hurry up and make the China Dream Device so that all these bloody nightmares can be erased," though a wise interlocutor warns of one particular turning point in the struggle, "Well, if you want to forget that night, you'll have to wipe out the entire Cultural Revolution, I'm afraid." That seems just fine to Ma Daode, and though his colleagues think it a pipe dream, he presses on with his dream device while remembering the sight of long-ago corpses that "lay there for days, growing purple and swollen like rotten aubergines." As Ma, a dissident writer living in exile in London, makes plain, there's no escape from the past, and trying to do so guarantees a messy future: "utopias always lead to dystopias, and dictators invariably become gods who demand daily worship."A masterwork of political satire, meaningful without heavy-handedness. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
