Staff Picks: Satire, Suzi Wu, and Starling Days
Ma Jian. Photo: Flora Drew. © Flora Drew.
Ma Jian’s , translated by Flora Drew and published earlier this month by Counterpoint Press, is a short, sharp-toothed satire of Xi Jinping’s China. The novel depicts a corrupt bureaucrat’s attempts to implement a new government initiative to overwrite people’s dreams. Ma, a dissident writer who lives in exile in London, portrays a contemporary China in which consumerism goes hand in hand with totalitarianism, and memories of the Cultural Revolution surface at the most inopportune events. is funny in a kind of hopeless way—the title itself comes from a slogan popularized
