Finally, alone and humbled, Wang Er must come to terms with the banality of his own existence.īut what makes this novel both hilarious and important is Xiaobo’s use of the awkwardness of sex as a metaphor for all that occured during the Cultural Revolution. Later, as a lecturer at a chaotic, newly built university, Wang Er navigates the bureaucratic maze of 1980’s China, boldly writing about the Cultural Revolution’s impact on his life and those around him. Instead, he takes it upon himself to write a modernist literary tract. Wang Er, a 21-year-old ox herder, is shamed by the local authorities and forced to write a confession for his crimes. In fact, I was leaning more toward proving that we weren’t innocent.”Īnd so begins Wang Er’s story of his long affair with Chen Qinyang. I said, to prove our innocence, we must prove one of the following:īoth of these propositions were hard to prove therefore, we couldn’t prove our innocence. “Apparently, there was a rumor that Chen Qingyang and I were having an affair. Like Gary Shteyngart or Michel Houellebecq, Wang Xiaobo is a Chinese literary icon whose satire forces us to reconsider the ironies of history. Ian Johnson, The New York Times Book Review The idea of how to stand up to power underlies Golden Age." The system itself was rarely called into question. "At the time Wang was writing, novels about the Cultural Revolution tended to be fairly conventional tales of how good people suffered nobly during this decade of madness. Golden Age is funny and brave and profound." His long overdue publication in English comes as a gift. "Like a Chinese Kurt Vonnegut. By turns lyrical and satirical, Wang Xiaobo's sexual comedies set during the Chinese Cultural Revolution are as improbable as that genre sounds.
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