Dictionary of Maqiao

16 hrs. 53 min.

Miscellaneous

Language Russian

Author Shaogun Han

Narrator Alexander Vasilyev

Description

“The Dictionary of Maqiao” (1996) is the author’s most significant work, recognized with the Shanghai Literary Prize. The novel is included in Asia Weekly’s list “100 Best Works of 20th-Century Chinese Literature.”

Some critics compared “The Dictionary of Maqiao” to Milorad Pavić’s “Dictionary of the Khazars”: both texts appear in the form of dictionaries. However, Han Shaogong also introduces a series of vignettes disguised as articles, and places a young man at the center of the plot—“relocated” to a small village in rural China in the 1960s. Based on daring inventions, and an exciting, comic, deeply moving journey through the dark heart of the Cultural Revolution. In the entries, Maqiao’s wisdom and absurdity can be traced: petty quarrels, family grievances, poverty, infidelity, fantasies, madmen, hooligans, superstitions—and especially the strange logic in the use of language.

Recognized as one of the most important works of contemporary Chinese literature, “The Dictionary of Maqiao” is a layered narrative in the form of a dialect dictionary from a fictional locale in southern China—where the narrator was sent for “re-education” during the years of the “Cultural Revolution.” The dictionary entries assemble into a leisurely narrative that introduces the residents of Maqiao, their traditions, folklore, and beliefs, but overall the book reads like a real encyclopedia of 20th-century China—very deep and poetic, saturated with the flavor of China’s hinterland and lightly seasoned with magical realism. It appears on Asia Weekly’s list “100 Best Works of 20th-Century Chinese Literature.”

Maqiao is a remote mountain village in Hunan—an “island” of pre-Confucian culture. During the “Cultural Revolution,” students from the cities were sent to such villages “for re-education”—and that’s how a fifteen-year-old hero ends up in Maqiao. He will spend six years there: bending his back in the fields, falling in love, learning the local dialect, adorning all horizontal surfaces with quotations of Chairman Mao, and doing everything he can to break back into the city. Finally, he manages to escape—but years later he will discover that Maqiao was precisely that forbidden Peach Blossom Spring, from which it’s no longer possible to return.

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