At An Extreme

I wondered last weekend whether I might finish Yan Lianke's The Four Books before the working week began. It was proving a fascinating read. I wasn't at all sure I had a solid grasp on the allegorical elements of Yan's account of the years of the Great Leap Forward, but the broad outline seemed clear enough and the surreal power of the plights of the various characters stuck in the Re-Ed camp by the Yellow River was clear enough. The novel won the Franz Kafka Prize in 2014 and that was obviously a fitting award.

Up to the final seventy or so pages I'd found Yan's story easy enough to read in the sense of not being too overwhelming in its sense of outrage over the historical events involved. I suppose I'd been half-expecting something along the lines of Solzhenitsyn's The First Circle and was a touch relieved to avoid that level of intensity. But what started to slow my reading down last weekend was the advent of the famine resulting from the insane agricultural practices that the second half of the work turns its attention to; quite simply, I found it difficult to deal with pages evoking the grim reality of starvation on a grand scale.

So I've spent the week dipping into the ensuing horrors attendant upon people starving to death, finishing the novel today negotiating depictions of cannibalism made all the more horrendous due to the deliberate blandness of the descriptions thereof.

I've never read anything quite like this before. Brilliant stuff. But close to unbearable.