Chaos and All That: An Irreverent Novel: 3 (Fiction from Modern China) - Tapa dura

This brilliant little novel, set against the backdrop of post-Mao China, juxtaposes recollections of childhood, pet ownership, and marriage with discussions of art, sex, and murder, weaving together an absurdist tapestry that is the inner life of the novel's felicitously named protagonist, Huang Haha. Subversive, iconoclastic, and wholly irreverent.

This brilliant little novel, set against the backdrop of post-Mao China, juxtaposes recollections of childhood, pet ownership, and marriage with discussions of art, sex, and murder, weaving together an absurdist tapestry that is the inner life of the novel's felicitously named protagonist, Huang Haha. Deftly manipulating language and point of view, author Liu Sola combines a range of different voices from past and present, binding the resulting clash of disparate narrative and linguistic elements together with a rollicking sense of the absurd. Subversive, iconoclastic, and wholly irreverent, this novel was published in Hong Kong in 1991 but has yet to appear in China.