Review by Booklist Review
The story begins with Yahui, a young Buddhist jade nun, who is one of the youngest arrivals at the Religious Training Center, auditing classes on behalf of her ailing shifu (mentor), Jueyu. On the campus of the National Politics University in Beijing, the Training Center is widely attended by masters of the most popular religious groups in China: Buddhists, Daoists, Protestants, Catholics, and Muslims. The students pass one another daily in the halls of the school buildings, but they come together each year to compete in an intense tug-of-war competition. Distrusting the competitive game, Yahui attempts to resist worldly temptations and instead works on elaborate paper cutouts of religious figures and scenes. Meeting Mingzheng, a young, charismatic Daoist student, sparks a romance that causes Yahui to question her true calling. With beautiful papercut illustrations, satirical humor, and allegorical prose, Lianke's (Hard Like Water, 2021) brilliantly reimagined campus novel showcases the author's masterful storytelling, which uses realism and fantasy to explore the intersection between religious and secular beliefs.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
This intriguing satire from Yan (Hard Like Water) unfolds during a conference involving members of China's five major religions: Buddhism, Daoism, Protestantism, Catholicism, and Islam. Yahui, a young Buddhist jade nun, attends a one-year program at a government-sponsored religious training center in Beijing, where the director, Gong, hopes to write a book on the relationships and contradictions among the various belief systems. Gong arranges tug-of-war competitions between groups and works with a figure known as Nameless to blackmail donors to raise money for the training center. Yahui is on campus to assist her mentor, Jueyu, but after Jueyu suffers a stroke while witnessing a tug-of-war match, Yahui takes her place. Soon, she meets Daoist master Gu Mingzheng, who is searching for his birth father, and the duo form a bond that turns romantic. After Yahui's convent collapses, she sets her sights on buying an apartment in the city, and she and Mingzheng, whose parental search is one of perpetual disappointment, consider starting a secular life together. While Yan's similes are dubious and awkwardly translated ("the sky was as dark as though it were covered in a black cloth"), his barbs against organized religion frequently hit their targets (a Christian claims the Communist Party as one of Jesus's disciples). Despite the rough spots, there is plenty to admire. Agent: Laura Susijn, Susijn Agency. (Mar.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
Located at the National Politics University in contemporary Beijing, the Religious Training Center is a place of study for disciples of China's five main religions--Buddhism, Daoism, Protestantism, Catholicism, and Islam. Here, Buddhist nun Yahui and Daoist master Gu Mingzheng draw close even as an official competition among the religions is being arranged. From the Franz Kafka Prize-winning Yan, two-time finalist for the Man Booker International Prize.
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Subversive satire of the collision of Chinese state bureaucracy, academia, and religion. Yan turns from the village settings of many of his earlier novels to a campus in the heart of Beijing. In the heavens above the National Politics University, his allusive yarn opens with a pointed exchange between deities: Buddha asks Jesus whether he'd like help coming down from the cross, the Dao asks whether he'd like to go higher, and Jesus responds, "I am at this location that is neither high nor low, and when people see me, they see the suffering people must endure." That life involves suffering is a point on which all can agree, and so, too, do the proponents of China's five major (read "approved," or perhaps better, "tolerated") religions, engaged in a perpetual round of tug of war. The only real winner there, Yan notes, is the political machine behind the religious training center, just as the house always wins at gambling. They should be battling along with their peers, but Gu Mingzheng, a young Daoist, and Yahui, an 18-year-old Buddhist nun, are smitten with each other. Alas, star- and doctrine-crossed, things don't go easily for the two, especially when a shadowy god--perhaps Old Scratch himself--called Nameless starts tinkering with mortal affairs, driving one principal character to suicide and Yahui to the point of madness, about which she says, "My shifu always said that religion is the domain of the mentally ill, and whoever is perceived as being mentally ill on account of their religious belief is a true disciple." It's no hallucination when the assembled gods come calling with an offer to transcend earthly travails, but instead Yahui settles down with Gu in a nondescript Beijing neighborhood. Notes Yan in an afterword, "I hoped to write a small self-aware novel about how, when holiness and secularity meet, they have no choice but to kiss." And so they do. Picaresque, but with serious matters of faith, love, and political wrangling at its fast-beating heart. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
