Golden Age (Penguin Modern Classics)

This is a really brilliant translation of a absolutely fascinating book. It is definitely subversive, contradictory and all the more interesting for it.

This book came out in a time I was living in China. At the time it felt like a time of openings, but looking back now from the more regressive Xi JinPing era, it looks like a time of lost cultural flowering. My recollections are that it was a time of relative equality, with all the hope and optimism that life was going to get better. This novel is set during the Cultural Revolution, as the protagonist is sent to Yunnan Province, in the far south west of China, on the border with Thailand and Laos. It revolves around a series of affairs as the character negotiates the political storms of the time. What's distinctive about this novel is that it isn't typified by the scars/misery of that time. The focus is not on the negatives of the Cultural Revolution, but on the freedoms it offers, notably in the sexual freedom of the protagonists. I loved the first third of this... it had a lightness that was refreshing, and was stylistically very interesting in the way it switched between past and present, where the two blend in the same monologue. But the book got increasingly less interesting and compelling as it went along, and it lost narrative tension to more episodic style of storytelling. A shame, but good enough that i bought Wang Xiao's collection of essays - 'The Pleasure of Thinking'.

I suppose this is a significant work in literary terms, but there is random, nasty, cruelty to animals just a few pages in, not essential to any plot line; there should be a warning about this. I find such things unbearable, and will have to return the book because of it.

Read great reviews and hoped this would be an insight into China during this period. Unfortunately, the translation is poor and all tension or engagement for me was missing.