Scan barcode
A review by arirang
The Explosion Chronicles by Carlos Rojas, Yan Lianke
3.0
Yan Lianke's The Four Books, originally published in 2009, was, in its English translation,long- and ultimately short-listed for the 2016 Man Booker International prize. I had read it before the prize list and although I saw its merits and was pleased to see it on the longboat, it wouldn't have made by personal shortlist.
In particular the narrative device of the story, apparently told from excerpts from four different books was innovative but the author didn't quite bring it off. And the fantastical nature of the story for me rather diminished the terrible impact of the real-life events underlying the story. See my review https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1531971348
Now this novel, originally published in 2014, and translated into English again by Carlos Rojas, as The Explosion Chronicles, has made the longlist for the 2017 Man Booker International.
Whereas The Four Books focused on The Great Leap Forward, and the resulting famine, this focuses on a more contemporary topic, China's 21st century explosive economic growth.
The same techniques are used. In this case the narrative form is modelled on the Chinese form of "local gazetteers, regional histories compiled by officials and local gentry" (from the translators helpful introduction), themselves based on the twenty-four official dynastic histories that began in the first century BCE with Sima Qian's Records of the Historian.
And the story, as with The Four Books, is told in a manner that blends the realistic with the fantastic and exaggerated, history with allegory, logic with illogicality.
In an illuminating afterword, the author explains his technique. He highlights two key variations in literary history on the realist novel, absurdity, which he attributes to Kafka (who makes no attempt to explain how Gregor Samsa turned into an insect) and magic realism, pioneered by Gabriela Garcia Marquez (where effects have causes but not necessarily realistic ones) but he argues that the exceptional situation of modern China demands a new third type of literature which he labels Mythorealism.
The economic activity on which the villagers initially achieve their wealth is entirely parasitic. Kong Mingliang encourages them to first simply steal and resell items from the goods trains that travel through the area, while, under Zhu Yong's rival, and equally successful, plan the girls of the town go to work as prostitutes in the neighbouring city, before becoming themselves in charge of "women's vocational training."
Later as the village is first redesignated merely as a town, one of the more successful businesses is a "newspaper processing plant" which simply copies stories from newspapers in the north of China, slightly rewrites them and submits them to newspapers in the south, and vice versa. And the very pollution caused by the rapid economic development itself fuels more growth:
In the end everyone in Explosion stopped farming, though no one was left idle. The various industries and factories made this new own bustle like a pot of boiling water. Every day, the sky was filled with black smoke from the factories' smokestacks, producing a burning stench that you could smell in the air and taste in the water. But everyone in Explosion quickly grew accustomed to this door, so much so that when it was washed away by a rainstorm, the fresh air would leave everyone with a cold. As a result, the hospitals became extremely busy, having more sick patients than the schools had students. With this sudden increase in patients, the town needed its own pharmaceutical factories and medicinal packaging plants, and with this increase in packaging plants there also developed an increased need for tax collection and sanitation services. With the rise in tax collection, the town was even busier than before, and virtually every day there was a ribbon-cutting ceremony celebrating the opening of a new industry. Later, when Kong Mingliang recalled the initial period of Explosion's growth and development, he told me:
'Those were good times, when you could open a newspaper processing plant with nothing more than some glue and a pair of scissors. I'm afraid China will never see times like those again.'
And indeed as Explosion's size and Kong Mingliang's ambitions grow, the hurdles become higher, the achievements more fantastical, and the sacrifices demanded of the people and of the environment greater. And the line between the history of the area and the present, the real and the fake, becomes blurred:
The entirety of Explosion's past consisted of reality, history, and people's memories.
On account of this tension between history and reality, Explosion's old streets and the new city became divided into two distinct worlds.
[...]
The real pigeons were just like fake ones, and the fake ones were just like real ones, but he found this mixing of reality and imitation to be completely unremarkable.
Ultimately this worked better for me than The Four Books. The framing device was more successful and less interfering (albeit perhaps, the opposite, too understated), and I appreciated more here what Lianke was doing with his Mythorealism, which also seemed more suited to the subject matter (albeit I am not convinced that this is a new development in literature to rank alongside the innovations of Kafka and Garcia Marquez). And the story of the rivalry between the four brothers and the three clans successfully maintains the narrative tension of the story to the end.
For me on the cusp of 3 to 4 stars, and on the cusp of being shortlist worthy - but ultimately not quite making either.
One signature motif in the novel is how nature mirrors the economic developments and moods of the characters, with flowers spontaneously blooming or dying, and fruit trees producing crops in record time. And the novel ends:
Meanwhile, along the bloody path that the Kong family had left behind on their way to the cemetery, there were not only flowers but also all different kinds of trees.
In particular the narrative device of the story, apparently told from excerpts from four different books was innovative but the author didn't quite bring it off. And the fantastical nature of the story for me rather diminished the terrible impact of the real-life events underlying the story. See my review https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1531971348
Now this novel, originally published in 2014, and translated into English again by Carlos Rojas, as The Explosion Chronicles, has made the longlist for the 2017 Man Booker International.
Whereas The Four Books focused on The Great Leap Forward, and the resulting famine, this focuses on a more contemporary topic, China's 21st century explosive economic growth.
The same techniques are used. In this case the narrative form is modelled on the Chinese form of "local gazetteers, regional histories compiled by officials and local gentry" (from the translators helpful introduction), themselves based on the twenty-four official dynastic histories that began in the first century BCE with Sima Qian's Records of the Historian.
And the story, as with The Four Books, is told in a manner that blends the realistic with the fantastic and exaggerated, history with allegory, logic with illogicality.
In an illuminating afterword, the author explains his technique. He highlights two key variations in literary history on the realist novel, absurdity, which he attributes to Kafka (who makes no attempt to explain how Gregor Samsa turned into an insect) and magic realism, pioneered by Gabriela Garcia Marquez (where effects have causes but not necessarily realistic ones) but he argues that the exceptional situation of modern China demands a new third type of literature which he labels Mythorealism.
"While realism rigorously accords with a set of logical causal correlations, absurdity discards this causality, and magical realism rediscovers reality's underlying causality - though this is not precisely the same causality we find in real life. Mythorealism, meanwhile, captures a hidden internal logic contained within China's reality. It explodes reality, such that contemporary China's absurdity, chaos and disorder - together with non-realism and illogicality - all become easily comprehensible. In the cohoes of today's China, once novels succeed in grasping the wild roots growing under the soil of reality, the significance of reality itself pales in comparison."The Explosion Chronicles tells the story of the rapid transformation over just ten years of the small (a few hundred people) and insignificant Explosion Village into a 20+ million population megalopolis to rival Shanghai, Beijing, Tokyo or New York. And the story of the three main clans in the original village, the four sons of Kong Dongde, in particular his second son Kong Mingliang who leads the transformation, Zhu Yong daughter of the village chief he deposed, who marries Kong Mingliang but plots revenge for her father, and Cheng Qing, daughter of the Cheng family, who becomes Kong Mingliang's right hand woman and lover and Zhu Yong's bitter rival.
The economic activity on which the villagers initially achieve their wealth is entirely parasitic. Kong Mingliang encourages them to first simply steal and resell items from the goods trains that travel through the area, while, under Zhu Yong's rival, and equally successful, plan the girls of the town go to work as prostitutes in the neighbouring city, before becoming themselves in charge of "women's vocational training."
Later as the village is first redesignated merely as a town, one of the more successful businesses is a "newspaper processing plant" which simply copies stories from newspapers in the north of China, slightly rewrites them and submits them to newspapers in the south, and vice versa. And the very pollution caused by the rapid economic development itself fuels more growth:
In the end everyone in Explosion stopped farming, though no one was left idle. The various industries and factories made this new own bustle like a pot of boiling water. Every day, the sky was filled with black smoke from the factories' smokestacks, producing a burning stench that you could smell in the air and taste in the water. But everyone in Explosion quickly grew accustomed to this door, so much so that when it was washed away by a rainstorm, the fresh air would leave everyone with a cold. As a result, the hospitals became extremely busy, having more sick patients than the schools had students. With this sudden increase in patients, the town needed its own pharmaceutical factories and medicinal packaging plants, and with this increase in packaging plants there also developed an increased need for tax collection and sanitation services. With the rise in tax collection, the town was even busier than before, and virtually every day there was a ribbon-cutting ceremony celebrating the opening of a new industry. Later, when Kong Mingliang recalled the initial period of Explosion's growth and development, he told me:
'Those were good times, when you could open a newspaper processing plant with nothing more than some glue and a pair of scissors. I'm afraid China will never see times like those again.'
And indeed as Explosion's size and Kong Mingliang's ambitions grow, the hurdles become higher, the achievements more fantastical, and the sacrifices demanded of the people and of the environment greater. And the line between the history of the area and the present, the real and the fake, becomes blurred:
The entirety of Explosion's past consisted of reality, history, and people's memories.
On account of this tension between history and reality, Explosion's old streets and the new city became divided into two distinct worlds.
[...]
The real pigeons were just like fake ones, and the fake ones were just like real ones, but he found this mixing of reality and imitation to be completely unremarkable.
Ultimately this worked better for me than The Four Books. The framing device was more successful and less interfering (albeit perhaps, the opposite, too understated), and I appreciated more here what Lianke was doing with his Mythorealism, which also seemed more suited to the subject matter (albeit I am not convinced that this is a new development in literature to rank alongside the innovations of Kafka and Garcia Marquez). And the story of the rivalry between the four brothers and the three clans successfully maintains the narrative tension of the story to the end.
For me on the cusp of 3 to 4 stars, and on the cusp of being shortlist worthy - but ultimately not quite making either.
One signature motif in the novel is how nature mirrors the economic developments and moods of the characters, with flowers spontaneously blooming or dying, and fruit trees producing crops in record time. And the novel ends:
Meanwhile, along the bloody path that the Kong family had left behind on their way to the cemetery, there were not only flowers but also all different kinds of trees.