This is a nice set of stories showing life in China for everyday people. Being fiction, it is hard to say whether it is an accurate depiction of China, but it's probably pretty close. In these stories, focus rests briefly on brutishness, petty cruelty, small-mindedness, and all the other everyday evils of daily life, with two particularly ugly scenes setting the tone in the first 2 stories as a 'halfwit' man is tricked into becoming complicit in the killing of his only friend, and a small boy is tortured by a vendor for stealing an apple. There are some nice scenes, too, but not so many, or so frequently that we can forget that under the nice veneer, any of these people may posses a much crueler side, as simply another aspect of their very normalness. The people in these stories struggle with finding the balance between conformity and individuality, good behavior and servility, and the wrong step at any point can prove disastrous in a society where everyone is watching and eagerly waiting for their chance to get ahead of you without being seen to be trying too hard.
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It took me a long time to read this book.

It took me a long time to read this book because this collection of short stories has parts that are so unimaginably cruel, I had to put it down. His characters are not just unkind, they are callous, cold-blooded and bestial.

Hua's writing is unflinchingly honest, wrought part with disaster, part satire and the darkest kind of humour I can imagine. Often, when authors are writing unlikeable characters, the reader can sometimes feel they're doing it to be edgy or because they can, but with Hua, it's something completely different all together.

When this author starts a short story, I have no idea if it will end well or in total chaos, and I probably won't know until the last paragraph, and that's something that I found really captivating about his writing. I would read a paragraph, my stomach would drop, I'd close the book in protest, only to open it up again.

Yu Hua writes stories of people in China, the peasants, the poor, the factory workers, the beaten women. He walks over them and makes characters beat each other until you're crying out for them to stop. Men and women wax poetics about their greatest achievements, but Yu Hua also writes them vomiting, hacking up phlegm, smoking, shitting and cursing their way through their lives.

While most of it's true, I have to ask myself, do I want to read stories like that? I think, as an author, it would be a challenge to write stories with few likeable characters, where happy endings rarely happen. All of the 'formulas' I've been taught for writing are thrown out the window and Yu Hua's characters just come to life.

Where are the characters you want to root for? They're there, sometimes. Or they're not.

I have to wonder, how many observations did Yu Hua make to write this collection? How many fierce and unlikeable moments did he witness? That's what it feels like, not a collection of fiction but a series of moments strung together to tell us who we really are.

I didn't like this collection, but I'm fascinated by his writing and am compelled to keep reading his work.

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Much preferred China in Ten Words. ( )

This is the first book of a Chinese author I've read. I can't say I'm interested in China, it doesn't fascinate me, unlike North Korea. Besides, I find the cover frightening.

But I saw very contradictory reviews on Amazon. In my experience when one person says "It's a wonderful book, let's read it, everybody!", and when the other says "Oh my god, it was terrible, why would someone want to read this book?!", this means that the book is not simple at all, and it's worth reading.
So Boy in the Twilight is a collection of small stories, which describe to us life in modern China. I have to admit, I know very little about the mentality of Chinese people, since I don't know anyone from China and am not familiar with their literature. This book was like a little adventure to the mysterious eastern soul.
The stories are independent, and I found only one connection between them, about the boys, whose father operated on himself. Each story is happening in a new place, new characters are introduced briefly, but vividly. The author definitely has a sense of humor, but the title story is really sad and can put off some sensitive readers.
Be assured, the rest of the book is not as distressful.
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