CITY OF FICTION, by Yu Hua; translated by Todd Foley
Lin Xiangfu, the hero of Yu Hua’s latest novel, arrives in the town of Xizhen in a blizzard. He hammers on doors and begs strangers for milk for his infant daughter, who is strapped to his chest. He doesn’t know it yet, but he has arrived in the place where he will spend the rest of his eventful life.
Yu Hua has been publishing stories and novels since the 1980s, when he came to prominence as part of a new wave of avant-garde Chinese writers, including Can Xue and Mo Yan (his old college roommate, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2012). Now one of China’s best-selling authors, Yu often writes about the country’s past: His 1993 novel “To Live” encompasses the civil war, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.
In “City of Fiction,” translated by Todd Foley, he reaches back further still, to the end of the Qing dynasty, which lasted nearly 300 years before it was overthrown by rebels in 1911. The resulting power vacuum was filled by rival warlords who battled for control, while gangs of bandits roamed the land.
This is the China that Lin Xiangfu must navigate. But while fate will bring him into uncomfortable proximity with bloodshed and barbarous, ax-wielding men, all he really wants to do is find Xiaomei, the mother of his child. Lin Xiangfu fell in love with her after she and her brother turned up in his village one day, and when her brother left, she stayed. But just a year after giving birth to their daughter, she disappeared with a bagful of Lin Xiangfu’s gold bars.
Xiaomei’s brother had said the pair came from the town of Wencheng, “far away in the south,” across the Yangtze in the Jiangnan region. Lacking any other clues, Lin Xiangfu sets off on his hunt, but no matter how far he goes, no one he meets has ever heard of any Wencheng. Chance leads him to settle in Xizhen, where he forms a partnership with a sawyer and sets up a carpentry business. It becomes hugely successful, knitting him into the fabric of the community, but the collapse of law and order leads to a series of disasters: murder, kidnapping and robbery.
Yu is unsparing when it comes to describing these crimes. The outlaw gangs who haunt the countryside perpetrate horrific gang rapes, cut off the ears of hostages when ransoms are not paid, and devise cruelly inventive ways of torturing them whenever boredom sets in (sharpened bamboo often being the instrument of choice).
Readers of Yu’s other books will know that he doesn’t shy from depictions of extreme behaviors, especially violence. “I think it might have had something to do with my childhood, growing up during the Cultural Revolution,” he told The Paris Review. “I would see people getting bloodied with sticks and beaten to death in the streets, getting pushed off three-story buildings.” If his aim here is to recreate a world in which calamity and depredations are so endemic as to numb us, he has succeeded.
“City of Fiction” is a picaresque novel, and a long one at that. The way it values event above psychology sometimes makes its litany of one thing after another exhausting to read. And the way Yu widens the story’s focus beyond Lin Xiangfu, not just to his daughter, but to numerous other inhabitants of Xizhen, can feel haphazard.
Equally unpredictable are the book’s tonal shifts: Some episodes are grittily realistic, others have the tint of fable, still others exhibit the brazen unlikelihood of a children’s adventure story. Yu’s writing, or perhaps its translation, can also be clumsy: “A thick northern accent was the only clue to his past,” one passage reads, “leading people to determine he had come to Xizhen from somewhere in the north.”
Much as these elements might bog it down, “City of Fiction” does have the capacity to delight. A change of perspective in the last quarter of the book fills in many of the blank spaces in Lin Xiangfu’s story. Armed with this knowledge, I turned back to earlier scenes with new understanding. This maneuver on Yu’s part, as well as the haunting idea that we are all hunting for a destination that will forever prove elusive, productively deepens the world of a book that at times threatens to fly apart, so hectic is it with messy events, unlikely coincidences, bursts of violence and acts of kindness. It’s breathlessly exciting at times, deathly dull at others. If “City of Fiction” isn’t lifelike in the way of realist novels, it isn’t unlike life — actual life — in all its uneven, ungainly weirdness.
CITY OF FICTION | By Yu Hua | Translated by Todd Foley | Europa | 427 pp. | $28
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