Not Yan Lianke's Best

"The Explosion Chronicles" is not Yan Lianke's best work. This one follows the basic plot of several other novels: rapid modernization at the expense of human dignity. It is an obvious critique of modern China that can be applied to the rest of the world.

Like "Dream of Ding Village," and "Lenin's Kisses," three books I would recommend before this one, "The Explosion Chronicles" follows several greedy anti-heroes. Readers will not sympathize with these characters who discard personal relationships and their own integrity in order to turn their village into a metropolis.

What brings "The Explosion Chronicles" down is the long narratives. Details are frequently repeated page after page without much literary effect. I found this to be true with Yan's "The Years, The Months, The Days" as well. Both books contain a tremendous amount of mysticism. In "The Explosion Chronicles," the mysticism is used to demonstrate just how quickly the city, in Yan's fictious Balou Mountains, develops beginning in the late 1980's through the early 2000's.

Yan is one of the world's greatest writers. He is ably supported by Carlos Rojas' translations. If readers are looking for something from Yan, I would recommend "Dream of Ding Village" and "Lenin's Kisses" before this one. ( )

The Explosion Chronicles is the fourth novel I’ve read by award-winning Chinese author Yan Lianke, and once again it is a surprise that he is able to pen a fiercely political satire like this despite the Chinese censor.

That’s not to say that the book arrives unscathed: I have my doubts about the allusions to Chinese military expansion in the South China Sea. It seems to me that these allusions need more than is there on the page. Nevertheless, this satire about the Chinese economic miracle is a powerful denunciation of the human cost of economic development at any cost, and it seems angrier than the other Lianke novels I’ve read. Lianke’s humour has always been dark, but in this novel there’s not much humour at all.

As the title suggests, the novel uses the form of an ancient Chinese chronicle. In an excellent introduction, the translator Carlos Rojas explains that the predecessors of this chronicle go back to Sima Qian’s 1st century BCE ‘Records of the Historian’ which is a resentful lamentation on the rule of the Yellow Emperor. Sima Qian had been castrated for offending this emperor, so he had good reason to feel resentful and apparently he lists his personal setbacks alongside the achievements of his era. This chronicle became the model for 24 dynastic histories, each commissioned by the Imperial Court to chronicle the preceding dynasty.

Another historical genre as a source for Chinese history is the local gazetteer. These were regional histories comprising narratives, biographies and anecdotes, and Lianke binds these together in his Explosion Chronicles, along with Prefatory Material purporting to be the chronicler Yan Lianke’s Preface about his reasons for writing the chronicle and his negotiations with the character commissioning it; an end-of-book Postface purporting to be by the chronicler Yan Lianke justifying his chronicle to the outraged character who commissioned it, and an author’s note in which Lianke uses the term mythorealism to describe how literature can be used to expose the absurdity that lies at the heart of the new China. The Great Leap Forward, he says, was based on absurd decrees that people could actually reach targets like making steel or growing vast crops when they manifestly did not have the wherewithal to do it, but the Higher-ups persisted anyway. China’s growth, he says, is based on China trying to achieve in decades what Europe and the US have achieved in centuries.

This plays out in the novel in the development of the mythical village of Explosion from a village to a town, to a county and then a city, and finally a megalopolis, all over the lifetime of four brothers. This chronicle covers thousands of years, but it scampers over earlier periods, focussing squarely on the era after Mao’s death when the Opening Up and Reform movement began. Where Mao’s Collectivisation had upset the order of things by collapsing the power of agricultural landlords over peasants, the emergence of capitalism brings the rival clans of the Kong and Zhu families together when entrepreneurial initiative is unleashed.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2016/12/26/the-explosion-chronicles-by-yan-lianke-trans... ( )