Word: yu
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Bring a raincoat, or else get soaked by all the tears in Yu Hua's woebegone novel Cries in the Drizzle - originally serialized in a Shanghai literary journal in 1991, but recently published in English for the first time. In this glum and afflicted work, a schoolgirl blubbers when a snowball hits her; an unfaithful husband sobs at his wife's grave; a bride bawls when molested by her father-in-law; and, in the grisliest scene, a son keens into the void after a canine kills and eats his feeble mother...
...author of four other novels, Yu has earned his reputation as a literary brute, whose characters constantly suffer at the claws of icy fate. He openly admires Faulkner's novels, and the grotesque absurdities in Yu's fiction wouldn't feel out of place in Faulkner's degenerate American South: a teen tries to rape a woman in her 70s to see what it's like, a man tries to pawn his dead father's frozen body, a drunkard drowns in a cesspit...
...Much of this gratuitous misery can be read as the blackest of comedy, but there are plenty of other dimensions to Yu's writing besides gallows humor. Narrated in the first person by Sun Guanglin, a sensitive and lonesome soul who's trying to make sense of his bizarre childhood, Cries in the Drizzle stitches together a patchwork of genres - from pastoral vignettes to sweaty cinematic action sequences (a teen threatens to kill his hostage girlfriend with a meat cleaver); disconsolate philosophical observations ("Our lives, after all, are not rooted in the soil as much as they are rooted...
...college campuses or residential neighborhoods. “I want to be as involved with Harvard as possible, period,” he said. Some Harvard students, however, find the Holyoke Center location inconvenient. “Honestly, I rarely ever go in that direction,” Lisa Yu ’11 said, “I can just eat at Annenberg...
...Club, tel: (86-10) 6593 6215, by the north gate of Workers' Stadium for drinks and partying. It's one of the oldest nightclubs in Beijing but it was renovated in May and has separate rooms for hip-hop and house. If the night is still young, head to Yu Gong Yi Shan, (86-10) 6404 2711, on Zhangzizhong Road. This is a pub that caters to the music-loving crowd. The beer is cheap and there are regular live performances by local bands, some of them surprisingly good...