The Noodle Maker

by Ma Jian

Book Overview

From Mi Jian, the highly acclaimed Chinese dissident, comes a satirical novel about the absurdities of life in a post-Tiananmen China.

Two men meet for dinner each week. Over the course of one of these drunken evenings, the writer recounts the stories he would write, had he the courage: a young man buys an old kiln and opens a private crematorium, delighting in his ability to harass the corpses of police officers and Party secretaries, while...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312424795
• ISBN13: 9780312424794
• Release Date: April 2006
• Publisher: St. Martins Press-3PL
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

NOT a cookbook

What do you get when you mix a career blood donor and a propaganda writer? A book that will get your blood pumping while you laugh. The characters are, uh ..... unique. What I learned: If you are considering cremation, you may want to re-think it. Plus, don't trust your love life to someone with a street cart. And, don't let your girlfriend have a cat. Banned in PRC for very obvious reasons.

DD

DD could mean disturbingly delightful, or delightfully disturbing. Both descriptions seem to fit this book equally well. I picked this one up (random choice, I admit) on sale at a bookstore, and it was worth every penny, and more! Ma Jian captures the spirit of post Tiananmen China in this satirical novel, through a dialog between a professional writer and a professional blood donor. This is not the kind of book you judge based on reviews...its the kind of book you simply have to read, because its worth it.

A Wonderful Read

Ma Jian, Noodle Maker. 1991. New York: FSG, 2004. The English translation of this wonderful book only came out 13 years after it was published (wisely) in Hong Kong. Its structure is a tapestry of interconnected fables ("noodles") emanating from the mind of an impoverished writer, the noodle maker. Between stories the reader is treated to hilarious colloquies between the noodle maker and his permanent weekly guest, a professional blood donor. The tales are wild and original, and reach quite deeply. They include a benign version of Animal Farm, The Lady and the Tiger, and a generous helping of anti-Communist commentary aimed at the stupid bureaucracy and forced rote memorization of patriotic songs with ridiculous lyrics, such as "Our beloved Party, you have been like a mother to me," played over loudspeakers in an attempt to break up a mob engaging in gang rape outside West Friendship Park. "Chairman Mao's Brilliance Lights Up the World" was also played. Five very large stars.

Insightful and delightful

I picked up this book and read a few stories from it when my girlfriend was reading it. The writing is witty and very insightful to the workings and ironies of modern day china. I would recommend this book to anybody as being one of the best I have encountered in the last few years. It is rare to find a writer who can amuse you while being so revealing about the painful, beautiful, and absurd of a culture. I'm going to get my own copy to pass around and one for my mother too.

SIMPLY BRILLIANT!!!

Sardonic... insightful... hilarious... satirical... curious... elliptical... Gogolesque... playful... surreal... bitingly sarcastic... cosmic... bizarre... magical... Kafkaesque... touching... disturbing... profound... hugely entertaining. How many ways can a marvelous work of fiction be praised? Ma Jian's THE NOODLE MAKER deserves all these accolades, and more. This is a dead-on depiction of life's vagaries and absurdities in the earliest years of Communist China, yet it transcends both time and place to describe the human condition. Set just after Deng Xiaoping's pronunciation of the Open Door Policy to modernize and open China to Western ideas and business, THE NOODLE MAKER tells the story of two friends, a professional writer named Sheng and a professional blood donor nicknamed Vlazerim. Sheng has been charged by his Writer's Association to pen a short novel about a modern-day Lei Feng, an actual Red Army soldier who died in his country's service and was effectively canonized by Mao for his supposed good deeds while alive. Not only can Sheng not think of anyone to write about, he can only think of stories drawn from his own acquaintances, people whose actions illustrate the most unconventional responses to Deng's vision of a "new China." Most of the book consists of stories Sheng would have written had he been granted the artistic freedom. He begins with undoubtedly his best piece, the story of a young man who buys a used kiln from an art school and turns it into an upscale crematorium, complete with corpse pick-up service and a wide range of legal and illicit music for the deceased to swoon to as he or she enters the furnace. The young man and his mother become wealthy from his business, enough so that the mother decides her time has come to move on to the next life. Other stories deal with a failed actress who arranges her own, very public suicide in the jaws of a tiger, a middle-aged editor who embarks on a series of love trysts until he encounters a textile worker who won't let go, a writer of love (and rejection) letters who comes to realize that he himself can love someone, a woman whose large breasts ruin her life and career, and a painter who lives with a philosophical talking dog. Ma Jian tells each story with panache and a wonderful sense of comic timing. His characters are absurd and their actions grotesque, yet they lovably empathetic, each in his or her own peculiar way. The characters' lives and stories are cleverly interconnected, so that as the novel unfolds, we begin to see a community, not just a random collection of individuals. At the same time, each story offers sharply satirical and wonderfully funny commentary on life in a socialist state bent on control of every detail of peoples' lives. The result is a society so full of rules, all rules are meaningless. Some readers will be reminded by this book of DEAD SOULS, or perhaps Kafka's THE TRIAL or THE CASTLE. For me, THE NOODLE MAKER was most reminiscent of Italo C