YAN LIANKE

DREAM OF DING VILLAGE

Again banned in China. Already published in France to great reviews:
‘His lyricism of despair, full of frenzied life, even when there is foam on lips, gives this novel of Yan Lianke it’s atrocious grace.’ Le Monde

‘Yan Lianke denounces an alarming situation… his novel is a true revelation’ Rolling Stone

‘With great humour, Lianke describes the group of ‘nearly-deads’ reviving the heart of the school, where they have gone to avoid contaminating their nearest and dearest, a collectivist enterprise that is a revealing mirror of Chinese society. An archaic, gangrened society where the absurd goes hand in hand with the tragic, where one does business in marriages between the dead while respecting the local bureaucracy’s orders, where making love before dying seems to recreate utopia. A tender story that cuts to the bone’ Transfuge

Based on the true story of the infection with Aids of millions of Henan peasants through blood donation, this stunningly beautiful novel is about greed, passion, pain, betrayal, human nobility in the face of death and irrepressible life force, is one of the most powerful ever written. Deeply moving, life affirming with humour in unlikely places, only fiction like this can do justice to the horrible reality beneath.

Material: Chinese text, French edition (238pp) 100 pages of English translation, full English translation delivery June 09
Sales: Constable UK; Editions Philippe Picquier France; Text Australia; Editora Record Brazil; Ullstein Germany; Font Forlag Norway; Grove Atlantic USA.

SERVE THE PEOPLE

Serve the People! is the sexy, satirical sensation chronicling a love affair between the wife of a powerful Communist army commander and her household’s servant – a remarkable, profound and deliciously comic satire on Mao’s famous slogan and the political and sexual taboos of his regime, by one of the most important authors writing from inside China today. Liu Lian, the young, pretty wife of a powerful Red Army Division Commander is left to idle at home while her husband furthers the revolution. In her boredom she begins to toy with the household servant – Wu Dawang, a conscientious and exemplary soldier – and decides to set a new rule. Whenever the household’s SERVE THE PEOPLE! sign is removed from it’s normal place on the dinner table and placed elsewhere, Wu Dawang is to stop what he is doing and attend to her needs upstairs. He dutifully vows to obey her instruction.

As life is breathed into the illicit sexual affair, Yan Lianke brilliantly captures how the model soldier becomes an eager collaborator with the restless and demanding Liu Lian, their actions inspired by primitive passions that they are only just discovering. The short affair culminates in three days of ravenous lovemaking, the peak of which is an evening in which the lovers compete to see who can prove themselves the most counterrevolutionary by destroying the compound’s most sacred Communist icons.

This fetishistic love story and insolent variation on the official History may have been banned in China but managed to find a huge audience on the internet, and gained praise as a subversive critique of official corruption, leadership hypocrisy and the insanity of the Cultural Revolution.

‘On est en plein Ionesco.. et et les dernières pages du livre, mélancoliques et mystérieuses, permettent de mesurer la variété du talent du romancier.’ Figaro

‘Drips with the kind of satire that can only come from deep within the machinery of Chinese communism. Eschewing broad comedy, Yan barbs the text with enough social criticism to receive a priceless blurb from the Central Propaganda Bureau.’ Financial Times

‘Crackles with sexual tension as Yan Lianke peels back Mao’s revolution to reveal the broad vein of humanism that overcame the revolution.’ Patrick Tyler, former Beijing bureau chief, New York Times

‘A savagely funny satire of revolutionary politics and corruption, written in prose as crisp and lovely as its barbs are sharp. A red hot love story that also offers real insight into the Chinese language and imagination, Yan’s new book is a festive banquet of old-school sloganeering and modern temptation.’ Rachel Dewoskin, Author of Foreign babes in Beijing

" Lianke spares no one . . . "Serve the People!" is a wonderfully biting satire, brimming with absurdity, humor and wit . . .the novel is exuberantly drawn in several shades of revolutionary red." LA Times

“This passionate satire of clandestine, intimate privilege in an ostensibly classless, egalitarian society is exceedingly carefully written, so that it is at once funny, sad, and bitterly ironic on nearly every page. Oh, and sensual, too.” —Ray Olson, Booklist (starred review)

‘A very funny, and sexy, satire’ Independent on Sunday

Material: Finished copies of English, French and many more (228pp).

Sales: Claassen Germany; Stilo Libro (Einaudi) Italy; Japan & Taiwan (all Yan’s books published); Editions Philippe Picquier France; Podium NL; Constable UK; Text Publishing Australian & New Zealand; Grove Atlantic USA; Record Brazil; Kinneret Israel; Imprimatur Serbia; BB Art Czech; Editura Historia Romania; Teorema Portugal, Maeva Spain; Font Forlag Norway; Aschehoug Forlag Denmark; Ucila International Zalozba Slovenia.

Yan Lianke was born in 1958. He is the author of a huge number of novels and story collections, all remarkable for both their subject matter and their style. He has received many literary prizes, the most prestigious of which have been the Lu Xun in 2000 and the Lao She in 2004.