— Publishing News (London)
“These stories reflect the changing repressive conditions of modern China … . Two friends tell each other absurd stories in which a strange cast of characters negotiate the narrow space between party rules and criminal ‘bourgeois liberalism.”
— The Boston Globe
“Mordantly satirical fiction to capture the grim paradoxes of late-twentieth-century China … Ma Jian mixes in sections of the writer’s fragmented yet utterly involving novel … . Echoing Gogol and offering an urban variation on the themes of Nobel Prize-winner Gao Xingjian, Ma Jian presents a bleak yet compelling vision of an aberrant society in which people are caught in the grip of a capricious and treacherous power and starved for kindness, beauty, and reason.”
— Booklist
“These stories, by turns surreal, disturbing, and humorous, form an eloquent portrait of that peculiar generation confused at having been nursemaided by the Cultural Revolution and then wrong footed by Deng Xiaoping’s reformist Open Door Policy.”
— The Times (London)
“Here, black comedy meets eviscerating social commentary … . Jian blends fact and fantasy with such beauty that China appears as potent a land for fiction as it is implausible for free speech.”
— V Magazine
— MSNBC.com
ALSO BY MA JIAN
Red Dust: A Path Through China
Stick Out Your Tongue
Ma Jian is the author of Red Dust: A Path Through China, which won the Thomas Cook Prize in the U.K., and the novel Stick Out Your Tongue. He lives in England.
THE NOODLE MAKER. Copyright © 1991 by Ma Jian. Translation copyright © 2004 by Flora Drew. All rights reserved. For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
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Originally published in 1991 by Tiandi Publishing Company, Hong Kong, as
Lamianzhe
English translation originally published in 2004 by Chatto and Windus, Great Britain
eISBN 9781429924023
First eBook Edition : April 2011
EAN 978-0-312-42479-4