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...Staff writer Lingbo Li can be reached at lingboli@fas.harvard.edu...
...denunciation ceremony, which the entire town is obliged to attend, it becomes clear that her vocal cords have been severed so that she cannot cry out counterrevolutionary slogans. But like a stone cast in water, the ripples of this execution spread out wide and The Vagrants - Yiyun Li's first novel after her extravagantly praised and miraculously poised prizewinning debut collection, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers - anatomizes with both precision and humanity all those touched by Shan's death...
...Li reveals the lines of connection - some hidden, some potential, some accidental - between these lives and gives each of them vast, rich interiorities, news reaches Muddy River of Beijing's Democracy Wall movement (in which reformists posted calls for political change on a wall in the city center). It is followed by more shocking news: just before her execution, Shan's kidneys had been harvested for an influential Communist Party official who needed them. A fledgling protest haltingly tries to gather momentum in Muddy River - but when the democratic movement in Beijing is suppressed, Muddy River's hopes of change...
...Based on a true story, The Vagrants is a bleak masterpiece, written without sentimentality, its anger a cold, controlled fury rather than a shrill rage. The surface of its unshowy prose disguises an enormous achievement for the realist political novel. Li's relentless calibration of the cost paid by the innocent to sustain a dehumanizing and brutal sociopolitical order marks it as a milestone in the literature of oppressed, extinguished lives...
...provided a valuable new mode of informal communication, Welch said it is not going to replace their traditional print advertising anytime soon. The plus side?“It doesn’t cost us anything to tweet,” he said.—Staff writer Lingbo Li can be reached at lingboli@fas.harvard.edu...