This Novel Slanders Mao Zedong

Practically all I have the time for these days are blog posts featuring quotes from books I'm reading. While the page count for the writing projects pile up into miniature towers of novelistic architecture of brutalist design, any idea of free time goes way out the window into the San Francisco Bay. So here's another, from Chinese novelist Yan Lianke's hysterical and gut-punchingly serious-indeed Serve the People!

"As things stood, matters had now swung from the deadly serious to the unimaginably ridiculous--to a level of absurdity beyond Wu Dawang's own comprehension, but still artistically consistent with the fantastical parameters of our story. Neither character, in fact, had grasped the full ludicrousness of the scene they were acting out, or of their roles within it. Perhaps, in very particular circumstances, emotional truth can shine only through the curtain of farce, while earnest restraint will always fail to ring true. Maybe absurdity is the state that all affairs of the heart are, finally, destined for: the ultimate and only test of worth." Lianke, Serve the People!

Truer words, never spoken. I long for more of Lianke's translations. His most recent novel, Dream of Ding Village, concerns an AIDS outbreak in China and was, once again, banned by the government for, and I quote, "dark descriptions, to exaggerate the harm and fear of AIDS." Apparently, there's a bright side to AIDS of which I've been unaware? It's been referred to as the Chinese answer to Camus' The Plague, and even were I unfamiliar with Lianke's work up to this point, that comparison alone would interest me, as the The Plague was, I always thought, Camus' best work.