Novel
Bolshevik Salute
布禮
Wang Meng · 1979
Synopsis
Zhong Yicheng joined the Communist Party as a teenager, before the founding of the People's Republic, and lives a happy marriage with Ling Xue. A promising writer, he sees a poem he wrote for children judged subversive during the 1957 campaign against rightists: he loses his party card and leaves for two decades of manual labour in the countryside. The narrative, in twenty-six episodes, moves constantly from one period of his life to another, by means that critics have called modernist.
Context
The story appeared in March 1979 in the review Dangdai, according to the China-West database in Zurich, in the very year of the author's rehabilitation. Renditions classes it among the prize-winning stories he published on his return to Beijing, where he used stream of consciousness. Wendy Larson translated it into English in 1989 for the University of Washington Press, with an introduction and a critical essay. No French translation has been found, although several collections by the author have appeared in French, translated notably by Françoise Naour.
Who it is for
A short narrative with a fragmented chronology; it can be read in English in Wendy Larson's translation, subtitled a modernist novel.
Prizes and reception
Kirkus Reviews reviewed the 1989 American edition, which was published with a full critical apparatus.
Sources for this page 6
The pages consulted to check this page.