Word: yu
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...ARTS Books: Afghan Women Books: Yu Hua comes West...
...Thankfully, even dentists can mellow. In the 1990s, Yu began producing novels that, though still suffused with suffering, were leavened by a touch of Chekhovian compassion. Two of those novels, To Live and Chronicle of a Blood Merchant, first published in 1992 and 1995 respectively, were translated this fall into English for the first time. While less experimental than his previous works, these books encompass the collective tragedy of China's 20th century?and will help one of China's top writers gain the international recognition he deserves...
...ARTS Books: Afghan Women Books: Yu Hua comes West...
...Outside his homeland, Yu is probably best known from Zhang Yimou's award-winning 1994 film To Live. (Yu co-wrote the screenplay.) Following a peasant family from the Chinese civil war of the 1940s through the spasms of the Cultural Revolution, To Live is a historical fable with a long-suffering protagonist, Fugui, to rival the Biblical Job. If something bad happened to China over the past 60 years, it happens to Fugui and his family?again and again. The constant calamity may leave readers drained of empathy, but Yu's stringently honest prose succeeds in making an existential...
...Chronicle is at heart more hopeful than To Live, which sometimes reads like Chinese Beckett, the tragic necessity of sacrifice is never absent. The book's translator, Andrew Jones, compares its informal structure to traditional Chinese opera?but instead of the public celebration of life experienced in such art, Yu depicts a community that is forced by perverse Maoist mandates to revel in the destruction of its weakest members. Though Yu might no longer dream of performing unanesthetized dental work on his poor characters, he's ever willing to take a drill to the society that torments them...