Praise for The Day the Sun Died
New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice
Named a Best Book of the Year by Publishers Weekly
Named a Best Fiction in Translation Selection by Kirkus Reviews
An Amazon Best Book of the Month
“China’s most controversial novelist . . . [A] preternatural gift for metaphor spills out of him unbidden.”—Jiayang Fan, New Yorker
“A poetic nightmare . . . The Day the Sun Died is set in the course of a single, perpetual summer day and night in which the inhabitants of a small village in China rise from their slumber and sleepwalk through town.”—NPR, “Weekend Edition”
“Yan is one of those rare geniuses who finds in the peculiar absurdities of his own culture the absurdities that infect all cultures . . . [The Day the Sun Died is] the creepiest book I’ve read in years: a social comedy that bleeds like a zombie apocalypse . . . Yan’s understated wit runs through these pages like a snake through fallen leaves . . . Invokes that fluid dream state in which everything represents something else, something deeper . . . A wake-up call about the path we’re on.”—Ron Charles, Washington Post
“Gripping . . . Yan’s fable, joining a long lineage of so-called ‘records of anomalies’ in Chinese literature, forces readers to reflect on the side of the world that is ‘too absurd, too cruel and too unpleasant.’ . . . Yan’s subject is China, but he has condensed the human forces driving today’s global upheavals into a bracing, universal vision.”—Julian Gewirtz, New York Times Book Review
“Revelatory. We are inside Xi Jinping’s ‘Chinese dream,’ a nightmare of corruption and wasted potential. Disgust and hope fight it out, as the reader sits ringside.”—New York
“Floats between surrealism, sci-fi, horror, and absurdism, while never letting go of its satirical eye. Yet the language and structure of the novel reads more like Samuel Beckett or James Joyce than it does The Handmaid’s Tale . . . Bears the largesse and cadence of myth, but it is also the story of a family, told by a simple boy of fourteen. Yan’s physical descriptions can be rich and specific, grounded in realism, but also far-fetched and steeped in surprising metaphor . . . No matter where we live, this is our story, too, or could be, if things don’t change.”—Ploughshares
“By turns terrifying, violent, satirical, and darkly funny.”—South China Morning Post
“Yan trains his fantastical, satiric eye on China’s policy of forced cremation in this chilling novel about the ‘great somnambulism’ that seizes a rural town . . . A riveting, powerful reading experience.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Yan’s novel belongs in the company of Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo and even James Joyce’s Ulysses.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Dark and sinister . . . In his unflinching satire, Lianke shows an incredible mastery of words, both brilliantly humorous and offbeat, making this novel a gripping read.”—Booklist
“This exuberant but sinister fable confirms its author as one of China’s most audacious and enigmatic novelists . . . His writing—resourcefully translated by Carlos Rojas—feels both ancient and modern, folkloric and avant-garde . . . [Lianke] seeds his reader’s imagination, and his outlandish fantasia germinates many varieties of interpretation.”—Economist
“Explores with a strange elegance and dark, masterful experiment these twin themes of night and death, dreams and reality . . . A brave and unforgettable novel, full of tragic poise and political resonance, masterfully shifting between genres and ways of storytelling, exploring the ways in which history and memory are resurrected, how dark, private desires seep or flood out.”—Irish Times
“The Day the Sun Died takes on Xi Jinping’s ‘Chinese dream’—a promise to restore China to a position of global importance . . . Yan’s disgust for his country’s moral degradation is unmistakable: a predatory ruling party exploiting its people even in death.”—Guardian
“In this novel, dreams suggest that the present is still haunted by nightmares . . . Remarkable.”—Scotsmam
“Powerful . . . Poignant and unsettling.”—Mail on Sunday
“Gloriously defiant . . . Sophisticated in the layered, gothic excesses of its allegorical zombie narrative . . . A powerful, captivating work of art.”—South China Morning Post
Praise for The Years, Months, Days
“Emotionally loaded stories . . . It’s hard not to be moved by the running theme of self-sacrifice.”—Wall Street Journal (Best New Fiction)
“Vivid and hallucinatory . . . [Yan Lianke] conjures suspense.”—Boston Globe
“Yan Lianke creates imaginary wounds in real blood . . . His books read like the brutal folklore history couldn’t bear to remember, and his characters feel stranded, forgotten by time . . . like Beckett’s most memorable characters . . . Desolation has rarely seemed so sensual, so insistently alive.”—New York Times Book Review
“Utterly unpredictable and brilliantly weird.”—Bookforum
“[Yan’s novellas] showcase his hallucinatory imagination and satiric wit.”—BBC.com
“One China’s great contemporary storytellers . . . these are tales to savor.”—Toronto Star
“Magnificent. . . [Yan Lianke’s] masterpieces are sure to engage readers.”—Booklist (starred)
“Compelling. . . a surreal mixture of brutality, openness, even sly humor.”—Library Journal (starred)
“Yan Lianke’s talent for the fantastical shines.”—Publishers Weekly (starred)
“Apocalyptic, eerie visions . . . Yan draws on the conventions of folklore and science fiction alike to produce memorable literature.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred)
Praise for Yan Lianke
Winner of the Franz Kafka Prize
Two-Time Finalist for the Man Booker International Prize
“One of China’s eminent and most controversial novelists and satirists.”—Chicago Tribune
“His talent cannot be ignored.”—New York Times
“China’s foremost literary satirist . . . He deploys offbeat humor, anarchic set pieces and surreal imagery to shed new light on dark episodes from modern Chinese history.”—Financial Times
“[Yan is] 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.”—New Republic
“One of China’s most successful writers . . . He writes in the spirit of the dissident writer Vladimir Voinovich, who observed that ‘reality and satire are the same.’”—New Yorker
“There is nothing magical about Yan Lianke’s realism . . . [with his] unflinching eye that nevertheless leaves you blinking with the whirling absurdities of the human condition.”—Independent
“One of China’s most important—and certainly most fearless—living writers.”—Kirkus Reviews
“The work of the Chinese author Yan Lianke reminds us that free expression is always in contention—to write is to risk the hand of power.”—Guardian
★ 2018-09-17
Satire meets sci-fi, horror, and social criticism in the prolific Chinese novelist Yan's latest concoction.
Something is always happening in Yan's villages: They're booming in The Explosion Chronicles (2016), turning into Red Disneylands in Lenin's Kisses (2012), imploding under the weight of profiteers' schemes in Dream of Ding Village (2011). Our narrator here is 14-year-old Li Niannian, nicknamed "Stupid Niannian," who laments, "My own reputation is as minuscule as a speck of dust lost in a pile of sesame seeds, or a flea nit hidden on the back of a camel, an ox, or a sheep." The child of morticians, he lives across the way from a writer named Yan Lianke in Gaotian, a village that, Niannian believe, lies at the center of the world. When we meet him, Niannian is imploring the celestial beings to protect Gaotian, his family, and Yan from decidedly weird events—for the people of Gaotian have turned in for the night, but they cannot sleep, and as they "dreamwalk" they do untoward things: Uncle Zhang goes off to work a field, waking in a start, only to chide himself: "You are truly fucking debased! Your wife ran away with someone else while you were busy working, yet you still come here to thresh grain for her." More dangerously, Zhang Mutou, sure that his wife is messing around, finds her supposed lover while sound asleep and cracks his skull. Other dark mischief and many deaths—539, precisely—ensue, so that the village's busiest enterprise is the crematorium, producing a gusher of icy-smelling "corpse oil": "Most of this coldness was produced from people's hearts, and without it the barrel would simply have been an ordinary barrel of oil." It's as if to say that the official dream of "capitalism with Chinese characteristics" is capable of producing only death—a message that surely won't cheer the Politburo, for which reason Yan's work is often banned in his native country.
As dreamscape realized, however horrible, Yan's novel belongs in the company of Juan Rulfo's Pedro Páramo and even James Joyce's Ulysses.
