Xianliang, Zhang

New York. 1988. August 1988. Norton. 1st American Edition. Very Good in Dustjacket. 0393025861. Translated from the Chinese by Martha Avery. 285 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Lizzy Rockwell/Kenneth Alcorn. keywords: Literature China Asia. FROM THE PUBLISHER - As the Cultural Revolution rages, a gulag of labor camps in China's remote, harshly beautiful countryside teaches ‘capitalist roaders' and criminals alike ‘reform through labor.' There Zhang, a ‘rightist' poet, meets and (alls in love with Huang, a beautiful peasant woman jailed for promiscuity. In the jargon of the time, they are a ‘calamity couple,' and their relationship becomes the lens through which we see, and feel, the warping effects of the Cultural Revolution on ordinary people. Separated for years, the lovers reunite in another outpost of the gulag. But for the poet Zhang, years of imprisonment and forced labor have meant a loss of self: he is impotent, he cannot write. Words, like human relationships, have been turned upside down. They no longer have any purpose except to make up the empty ‘thought reports' by which prisoners ‘rectify' themselves. The struggle of the novel is to regain possession of the self, and to reclaim the endeavor that has defined it. Written in an ironical prose, which combines a spare, humorous toughness, surrealism, and a lyrical feeling for the Chinese landscape, this brilliant, moving account of lives at the mercy of politics introduces a literary voice of world importance. The first novel of China's gulag to appear in the West, it was published in China late in 1985 to great popular enthusiam, and much controversy because of its unaccustomed frankness about sex. Since then the book and its author, Zhang Xianliang, have figured prominently in debates about the extent of liberalization in China. inventory #27577 ISBN: 0393025861.