Subscribe to Read | $0.00
Join today and start reading your favorite books for Free!
Quick and Easy Sign Up!
It takes less then 1 minute to sign up, then you can enjoy Unlimited eBooks.
Join today and start reading your favorite books for Free!
Quick and Easy Sign Up!
It takes less then 1 minute to sign up, then you can enjoy Unlimited eBooks.
Read Anywhere and on Any Device!
Rate this book!
Write a review?
i've been trying to get away from writing a review of this book. i've been coming up with scenarios in which such writing is impossible. i have to walk the dog. i have to go to bed. there is too much distraction right now. this is the story of the aftermath of an execution in a small provincial town (more a community than a town, really) in communist china. the narrator tells us that the historical period is the period that followed the cultural revolution, but since my knowledge of chinese hist...
I couldn't connect with this book as much as I had hoped.Ratings:Writing 4Story line 3Characters 3Impact 3Overall rating 3.25
In my reading of almost nothing but Japanese novels for the last 5 years, I learned that the world's most depressing fiction comes from that island country. But with this novel -- written by a young Chinese-American who grew up in Beijing -- as well as Lao She's Rickshaw Boy, my view must be adjusted a bit. I seem to be drawn to depressing works of art, and "The Vagrants" takes the fucking cake. It took me a relatively long while to finish it because it is so relentlessly bleak and grim that I f...
Part of my Fall 2017 Best Of Chinese Literature project; more here, and a cool list of books here.Nini's mother was beaten savagely while she was pregnant, and Nini was born badly deformed. Her assailant was Gu Shan, who, political tides having turned against her in 1979, is now set to be executed. Kai, an announcer for the government radio and a minor celebrity, secretly sympathizes with her. She's picked the side opposite her government employee husband. Gu Shan's father did that once too, whi...
(This review was originally published on The Rumpus: http://therumpus.net/2009/03/no-one-i...)When I think of Beijing in 1998, I think of a worn-out train bound for a town fifty miles from the capital. Across from me sat a Chinese man in his late twenties who, for a while, would not meet my eyes. Only after the train began moving, the noise of the rails nearly deafening, did he lean forward across the little table that separated us and say, “English?”I nodded, grateful and relieved to have someo...
3.5. Very bleak story set in 1970's Communist China. The book follows the lives of several people living in the town of Muddy River in the aftermath of an execution. The person executed was a young woman who had been a counterrevolutionary and had spent ten years in prison. The book got a bit long for me but I was completely invested in the characters.
Review to come.
“Heaven’s door is narrow and allows only one hero at a time, but those going down to hell, always travel in pairs, hand in hand.” The year is 1979 in a rural province of China named Muddy River. It’s inhabitants are overwhelmingly poor, unhappy, and terrified of saying something that will lead to them being charged as a counterrevolutionary. The novel begins with the story of Shan Gu, the 28 year old daughter of two prominent teachers in the city. Shan has been less than discreet about her dista...
Certainly paints a dismal picture of China in the 1970s. There were several wonderfully drawn characters: the intelligent yet impotent Teacher Gu; the morally bankrupt young scoundrel Bashi; the crippled Nini, prenatally defeated. Yet, so many other characters were just black silhouettes on the background. I liked this book and I will read whatever Yiyun Li writes next. But, I didn't love it. I guess I didn't need to be convinced that the Chinese version of Communism is not a rational existence;...
An exquisite telling of an absolutely brutal story. The book begins on the day of the grisly execution of an allegedly counterrevolutionary woman in a small town in China two years after the death of Mao. It continues with the story of how several memorable townspeople are affected by the aftermath of this wrongful death. Do they protest, turn away, submit, betray? It doesn't seem to make a difference as they iron fist of tyranny seems to gradually tighten around each of them in turn, squeezing
I read "The Vagrants" for a class on women's issues as seen through literature and film. Had I not needed to read it in order to participate in class discussion, I probably would have stopped reading it at some point. "The Vagrants" while beautifully well written, is a very difficult read. The story takes place in China right after the end of the Cultural Revolution and shows the interactions among an array of characters as they witness and react to a Denunciation Hearing just before a young wom...
If you want to get a vivid sense of the societal dynamics and daily life that ensued from the Maoist China - or more generally, what it is like to live under an extreme authoritarian regime, where brainwashing are fear-mongering tactics are the cornerstone of stability - this is your book. Li shows the immense poverty, violence, and destruction of cultural and artistic knowledge that happened under this regime. Perhaps the most striking thing to see during the reading experience is this: Li stri...
Dreamscape novel written by a master of short story prose. There is a misty glow to her art, a literary fog out of which the characters form to stand on the stage and tell the stories of their lives. I loved Gold Boy, Emerald Girl and didn't realize until just now that Yiyun Li wrote that marvel of a book. The Vagrants unfolds visually rich and personal. One street in Muddy River. Nearby the Eastwind Stadium where counterrevolutionaries are denounced in public ceremony. Mr. Hua and Mrs. Hua, liv...
