The Four Books

by Yan Lianke, Carlos Rojas

Overview

From master storyteller Yan Lianke, winner of the prestigious Franz Kafka Prize and a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize, The Four Books is a powerful, daring novel of the dog-eat-dog psychology inside a labor camp for intellectuals during Mao’s Great Leap Forward. A renowned author in China, and among its most censored, Yan’s mythical, sometimes surreal tale cuts to the bone in its portrayal of the struggle between authoritarian power and man’s will to prevail against the darkest odds through camaraderie, love, and faith.

In the ninety-ninth district of a sprawling reeducation compound, freethinking artists and academics are detained to strengthen their loyalty to Communist ideologies. Here, the Musician and her lover, the Scholar—along with the Author and the Theologian—are forced to carry out grueling physical work and are encouraged to inform on each other for dissident behavior. The prize: winning the chance at freedom. They're overseen by preadolescent supervisor, the Child, who delights in reward systems and excessive punishments. When agricultural and industrial production quotas are raised to an unattainable level, the ninety-ninth district dissolves into lawlessness. And then, as inclement weather and famine set in, they are abandoned by the regime and left alone to survive.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802191878
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	03/03/2015
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	354
Sales rank:	132,239
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Yan Lianke is the author of numerous short story collections and novels, including Serve the People!, Lenin's Kisses, and Dream of Ding Village, which was shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and adapted into a film (Til Death Do Us Part). He is the winner of two of China's most prestigious literary awards, the Lu Xun prize and the Lao She award, and he was a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize.

Read an Excerpt

When everyone saw the Child arrive, they again started working frantically. One person appeared not to notice, so the Child walked over to him and, knowing that this was an author who had written many books, said, “Your works are pure dog shit.”

The Author stared in surprise, then nodded and replied, “My works are dog shit.”

“Repeat that three times.”

Editorial Reviews

01/26/2015
Yan, a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize, pens a biting satire about Chinese re-education camps during the Great Leap Forward that’s as haunting as it is eye-opening. In this tale, intellectuals and dissidents are sent to a labor camp, where they promise to perform impossible tasks in order to gain their freedom. These intellectuals—“the Musician,” forced to prostitute herself for food; her lover, “the Scholar”; “the Theologian,” who ends up cursing God for his fate; and “the Author,” commissioned to write reports on the sins of the others, struggle for survival. Overseeing all of them is “the Child,” who is as vulnerable to the whims of his bureaucratic superiors as his prisoners are to him. As the prisoners careen from impossible production quotas to slow death by starvation, the Child eventually offers to sacrifice himself for their freedom, in a stark parody of both Maoist ideals and Christian scripture. Yan has created a complex, epic tale rife with allusion. He effortlessly moves from Eastern to Western references, and even readers without a background in Chinese history and culture will find his story fascinating and immersive. The novel is a stinging indictment of the illogic of bureaucracy and tyranny, but the literary structure is tight and the prose incredibly accessible. Readers will have difficulty putting this down. Agent: Laura Susjin, Susjin Agency. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

PRAISE FOR THE FOUR BOOKS

"An original work of art . . . The Four Books shows Yan in top satirical form." — Malcolm Forbes, The National

"[ The Four Books ] can be read as a culmination of the longer project in which Lianke is engaged: criticizing the foundations of the Chinese state and the historical narrative on which it is built, while still somehow remaining one of its most lauded writers." — Jacob Mikanowski, New Republic

"Arch and playful. . . . [Yan] deploys offbeat humour, anarchic set pieces and surreal imagery to shed new light on dark episodes from modern Chinese history. . . . [A] brave, brilliant novel." — David Evans, Financial Times

"[ The Four Books ] is driven by a cold fury at the events it recounts, its satire edged with Swiftian moral disgust. It is unsparing in its picture of the ways in which totalitarian habits of thought seep deep into personal relations, and it is smart in its depiction of how intellectuals get co-opted by the system . . . [Yan’s] fiction of ideas feels hard won and genuine, an expression of sorrow, bafflement, anger, and love." — Robert Anthony Siegel, The Rumpus

"No other writer in today's China has so consistently explored, dissected and mocked the past six and a half decades of Chinese communist rule. . . . An extraordinary novel, one that both commemorates the state’s victims and defies China's state-sponsored amnesia." — Isabel Hilton, Guardian

"[ The Four Books is] a Chinese novel hailed across the planet as a masterpiece, and I’m normally the first to resist such an imposition before I've even opened the thing—but for once, the hype doesn’t go far enough. . . . Stupendous and unforgettable . . . a devastating, brilliant slice of living history." — Kate Saunders, The Times (UK)

"A satirical tale about abuse of power and the vicious survivalist psychology of people who have been robbed of their moral and intellectual compass . . . brilliantly chilling . . . The Four Books captures an aspect of Chinese life which is hard to imagine and understand for a foreigner, and Yan’s skilful depiction reaffirms why he is China’s most heralded and censored modern writer." — The South China Morning Post

" The Four Books should be celebrated for its originality. . . . A fascinating approach to a daring and interesting subject." — The Harvard Crimson

"One of contemporary Chinese literature's richest, wittiest, most seductive and powerful novels. . . . A joy to read." — The Saturday Paper (Au)

"A searing, allegorical view of Chinese society during some of the darkest moments of the Mao era. . . . Yan cements his reputation as one of China's most important—and certainly most fearless—living writers." — Kirkus Reviews

"Yan has built his substantial career on exposing the surreal absurdity of China’s 20th-century tragedies. . . . [This] multilayered novel is . . . a vital historical testimony." — Library Journal (starred review)

"A stinging indictment of the illogic of bureaucracy and tyranny . . . the literary structure is tight and the prose incredibly accessible. Readers will have difficulty putting this down." — Publishers Weekly

"One of the masters of modern Chinese literature, Yan Lianke gives all the pleasures one gets from reading. He can extract humor from the bleakest situation. I wholeheartedly recommend this latest book." — Jung Chang

"[A] rich and complex novel." — Booklist

From the Publisher

★ 02/01/2015
Yan (Dream of Ding Village) has built his substantial career on exposing the surreal absurdity of China's 20th-century tragedies. His latest-in-translation features the 99th district of a reeducation camp, where intellectuals controlled by a maniacally cruel yet innocently naïve child endure merciless conditions designed to recommit them to communism. Among the Child's prisoners are the Author, the Scholar, the Musician, and the Theologian, who like other inmates must fulfill impossible production quotas in areas from harvesting to smelting, driven by the Child's promises of freedom. Surviving the Great Famine, which experts estimate claimed a staggering 2,043 million victims, has unfathomable costs. Yan's multilayered novel is presented as dovetailing excerpts from the titular Four Books: the Author's Criminal Record, written in exchange for early release; the Author's own Old Course; an anonymous narrative called Heaven's Child; and a philosophical fragment from A New Myth of Sisyphus. The title is also a brilliant evocation of the foreshadowing of death (four and death are homophones in Chinese), Christianity's Four Gospels, and Confucianism's Four Books. Ironically, the Four Books and Five Classics of Confucianism were the foundation of imperial China's civil service exams, which created the intellectual class: communism's enemies. Books remain significant throughout—hidden, beloved, confiscated, burned. VERDICT Like Xianhui Yang's unrelenting Woman from Shanghai and Xinran's gentler China Witness, Yan's new work is vital historical testimony. [See Prepub Alert, 9/29/14.]—Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC

Library Journal

2014-12-22
A searing, allegorical view of Chinese society during some of the darkest moments of the Mao era. Yan (Lenin's Kisses, 2012, etc.) is no stranger to controversy, running afoul of the censors even while taking a sidelong approach to his criticisms. This novel, more straightforward if sometimes absurd, will doubtless earn him a few more pages in the dossier. The titular four books are an echo of the Confucian classic by that name that the Communist state sought to undo, but they are also four fictitious texts that wend their ways through Yan's narrative—four texts that are layered onto still other texts, including the Christian Bible, which exercises an odd power over the story as a whole. The time is that of the so-called Great Leap Forward, the setting a re-education camp along the banks of the Yellow River—or, at least, where the river once flowed before the state trumped nature and moved it. The denizens of the camp are supposed "rightists," bearing names such as the Scholar, the Theologian, the Technician, the Author and so forth. The Author has been charged with the task of chronicling the activities of the others within the camp—spying on them, that is, so that the overseer, who bears the name the Child, can present a thorough record to the powers that be. The Child, who "appeared to be omniscient," is a mysterious figure, sometimes sympathetic and sometimes tyrannical. All, guards and prisoners alike, are caught up in a vast, dimly comprehensible machine that slowly grinds them to bits. Writes one suicide, having committed cannibalism before hanging himself, "A person's death is like a light being extinguished, after which it is no longer necessary to worry about trying to re-educate and reform them." And if the Child's charges are reduced to such inhuman acts, his fate is no less terrible in the end, Yan's allegory suddenly made very real. Yan cements his reputation as one of China's most important—and certainly most fearless—living writers.

Kirkus Reviews