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Sto caricando le informazioni... The Vagrants: A Novel (originale 2009; edizione 2010)di Yiyun Li
Informazioni sull'operaThe Vagrants di Yiyun Li (2009)
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Iscriviti per consentire a LibraryThing di scoprire se ti piacerà questo libro. Attualmente non vi sono conversazioni su questo libro. Adult fiction. Surprisingly effective debut novel about the repercussions of a young woman's execution in a smallish town in China during the Cultural Revolution. Tells not only the story of the mother and father of the punished "counterrevolutionary" but also the neighbors, the neglected girl, the lonely child, the town idiot, and many others--each story is engrossing in its own way. ( ) > Un beau jour de printemps, par Yiyun Li. — Le premier roman de Yiyun Li met en scène des âmes opprimées, impuissantes à défier un régime où Lénine est devenu le complice du père Ubu. La nouvelle recrue des lettres chinoises écrit en anglais et se nomme Yiyun Li. Née en 1972, elle a grandi à Pékin avant de s'installer aux Etats-Unis, où elle a fait des études de médecine. Alors que Belfond vient de publier quelques-unes de ses nouvelles (Un millier d'années de bonnes prières), voici son premier roman, Un beau jour de printemps, qui met en scène des âmes opprimées, impuissantes à défier un régime où Lénine est devenu le complice du père Ubu. Nous sommes dans une petite ville de la Chine profonde, Rivière-Fangeuse, en 1979, au moment où l'on annonce l'exécution de Gu Shan, une ancienne garde rouge passée dans le camp de la dissidence. Toute la population devra assister aux séances de dénonciation de la "contre-révolutionnaire" et c'est un décervelage collectif que décrit Yiyun Li, même si certains de ses personnages - la mère de Gu Shan ou la speakerine de la radio officielle - vont essayer de résister... Un roman à la Kadaré, qui démonte remarquablement les rouages de la machine totalitaire post-maoïste. —L'Express It's 1979, Chairman Mao has been dead for a few years, and a counter-revolution is bubbling up. In the provincial city of Muddy River, the citizens are called to a ceremony to denounce one of their own, a young woman named Gu Shan, prior to her execution, for counter-revolutionary activities. Shan had already been tried once and sentenced to jail time, but her retrial several years later ended with a death sentence. Dragged onstage by two guards, she appears frail and almost catatonic, her throat covered with bloody bandages. We learn that her vocal cords have been cut to prevent her from making a public statement. Later we learn that this is not the only horror she experiences: her kidneys were harvested for transplant into a party leader (the actual reason for her retrial and death sentence), and her body is brutally desecrated after her execution. Shan's life and death stand at the center of this novel as the author reveals the effect on the people of Muddy River. There are her parents, Teacher Gu and his wife; the Huas, a childless vagrant couple who has taken in abandoned girls, only to have them snatched away by government plans; Nini, a 12-year old born with a deformed face, hand, and leg, the unloved third daughter in a family of six girls; Bashi, a spoiled, socially awkward outcast teenager with a history of pestering little girls; Tong, a young boy who dreams of winning the red scarf and becoming a party hero; Wu Kai, beautiful former actress, now a news reader who is assigned to speak at the denunciation ceremony; and her adoring husband, Wu Han, a rising government official who has gotten a boost from his parents, prominent party members. All of these people are in some way touched by Gu Shan and her tragic ending, their individual stories all in some way overlapping. Her parents, of course, suffer the greatest loss, and their marriage is tested as Teacher Gu tries to get on with life and follow the rules while his wife's grief propels her towards reckless decisions. Others whose crimes may be as slight as having been in the wrong place at the wrong time suffer the same (or worse) consequences as those organizing a protest denouncing Gu Shan's fate. This is not an easy read. Yijun Li does an incredible job of depicting the constant state of paranoia in which citizens of Communist China lived, never quite sure who to trust or what they could or could not say. It's a cruel reminder of the dehumanization of totalitarian regimes, and a reminder to us all of how lucky we are to live in a democracy and that we must be vigilant to preserve it in the face of radical political ideologies.
“The Vagrants” begins on March 21, 1979 — the spring equinox — which is this careful writer’s way of telling us that a long winter of privation and darkness may be giving way, at last, to the blossomings of spring. It is set in one of the new nowhere towns of Mao Zedong’s China, 700 miles from Beijing, a bare, rationed place of small factories and overcrowded shacks laid out in anonymous rows. Eighty thousand people live in Muddy River, essentially migrants from the countryside, and, almost in the manner of a documentary filmmaker, shooting in black and white, Li homes in on a few typical souls whose names alone give you something of the settlement’s flavor: Old Hua, Teacher Gu, a dog called Ear, a deformed 12-year-old girl called Nini and a teenage boy as brutish and unassimilated as the name he brandishes, “Bashi.” All are victims of a crippled society that has effectively outlawed humanity and made innocence a crime. Appartiene alle Collane EditorialiKeltainen kirjasto (438) Premi e riconoscimentiMenzioniElenchi di rilievo
In the provincial town of Muddy Waters in China, a young woman named Gu Shan is sentenced to death for her loss of faith in Communism. She is twenty-eight years old and has already spent ten years in prison. The citizens stage a protest after her death and, over the following six weeks, the town goes through uncertainty, hope, and fear until eventually the rebellion is brutally suppressed. Sumei, a mother of a young child, is sentenced to death as an anti-Communist activist. They are all taken on a painful journey; from one young woman's death to another. We follow the pain of Gu Shan's parents, the hope and fear of the leaders of the protest and their families. Even those who seem unconnected to the tragedy -- an eleven-year-old boy seeking fame and glory, a nineteen-year-old village idiot in love with a young and deformed girl, and old couple making a living by scavenging the town's garbage cans -- are caught up in remorseless turn of events. Non sono state trovate descrizioni di biblioteche |
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Google Books — Sto caricando le informazioni... GeneriSistema Decimale Melvil (DDC)813.6Literature English (North America) American fiction 21st CenturyClassificazione LCVotoMedia:
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