The Noodle Maker; A Novel

by Ma Jian; Translated by Flora Drew

• ISBN13: 9780374223076
• ISBN10: 0374223076
• Format: Trade Book
• Copyright: 2005-01-12
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Summary

"One of the most important and courageous voices in Chinese literature." --Gao Xingjian, winner of the 2000 Nobel Prize for Literature From the highly acclaimed Ma Jian comes a satirical and powerfully written novel--excerpted in The New Yorker--about the absurdities and cruelties of life in post-Tianamen China. Two men, a writer of political propaganda and a professional blood donor, meet for dinner every week. During the course of one drunken evening, the writer recounts the stories he would write, had he the courage: a young man buys an old kiln from an art school and opens a private crematorium, delighting in his ability to harass the corpses of police officers and Party secretaries while swooning to banned Western music; a heartbroken actress performs a public suicide by stepping into the jaws of a wild tiger, watched nonchalantly by her ex-lover. He is inspired by extraordinary characters, their lives pulled and pummeled by fate and politics, as if they were balls of dough in the hands of an all-powerful noodle maker. Ma Jian's masterpiece allows us a humorous yet profound glimpse of those struggling to survive under a system that dictates their every move.

Author Biography

Ma Jian is the author of Red Dust, which won the Thomas Cook Prize in the UK. A former dissident in China, he now lives in England.

Table of Contents

The Professional Writer	3	(4)
The Professional Blood Donor	7	(14)
The Swooner	21	(22)
The Suicide or The Actress	43	(28)
The Possessor or The Possessed	71	(40)
The Street Writer or The Plastic Bag in the Air	111	(20)
Let the Mirror Be the Judge or Naked	131	(12)
The Abandoner or The Abandoned	143	(8)
The Carefree Hound or The Witness	151