Shaogong Han Book order
Han Shaogong is a Chinese novelist whose work draws inspiration from traditional Chinese culture, mythology, folklore, Taoism, and Buddhism, while also freely incorporating Western literary techniques. Influenced by Kafka and the magic realism of Gabriel García Márquez, his writing features a modernist style and an avant-garde approach. Han is recognized as a leader of the "Search for Roots" (Xungen) movement, which explores cultural identities. His prose delves into themes of historical reflection and the search for meaning in the modern world.
- 2021
- 2005
A Dictionary of Maqiao
- 416 pages
- 15 hours of reading
From the daring imagination of one of China’s greatest living novelists comes a work of startling power and originality–the story of a young man “displaced” to a small village in rural China during the 1960s. Told in the format of a dictionary, with a series of vignettes disguised as entries, A Dictionary of Maqiao is a novel of bold invention–and a fascinating, comic, deeply moving journey through the dark heart of the Cultural Revolution.Entries trace the wisdom and absurdities of Maqiao: the petty squabbles, family grudges, poverty, infidelities, fantasies, lunatics, bullies, superstitions, and especially the odd logic in their use of language–where the word for “beginning” is the same as the word for “end”; “little big brother” means older sister; to be “scientific” means to be lazy; and “streetsickness” is a disease afflicting villagers visiting urban areas. Filled with colorful characters–from a weeping ox to a man so poisonous that snakes die when they bite him–A Dictionary of Maqiao is both an important work of Chinese literature and a probing inquiry into the extraordinary power of language.