The Seventh Day

October 20, 2014
“I roamed on the borderline between life and death.” Yang Fei is late for his cremation. His soul won’t be laid to rest until he appears for his appointment with the incinerator. Hua’s (Boy in the Twilight) eighth book follows 41-year-old Yang Fei’s week of wandering in the afterworld in a powerful testament to alienation that stretches beyond the land of the living. Yang Fei drifts through the afterworld and pieces together how he lost his life and what he lost with it. He visits his ex-wife, who died by suicide after a scandal. He encounters a young woman called Mouse Girl, who killed herself after her boyfriend gave her a fake iPhone and did not answer her angry, melancholic blog tirades. He sees his birth mother, from whom he was separated just after his birth. He searches hardest for his father, a man who raised him alone, forsaking friends, lovers, and the opportunity for a much different life. Hua’s prose has a lilting, elegiac quality that is both soothing and distant, but his characters, quite like apparitions, never fully materialize.

November 1, 2014
In this melancholy view of the afterlife, dying without a burial place leaves a man in limbo, where he revisits his life through memories and the spirits he encounters. The life story of Yang Fei begins, like Yu's 2009 epic, Brothers, on a toilet, a hole in the floor of a China train. The character's mother, near term, is kneeling over the aperture when she gives birth through it and faints. The infant is found and raised by a kindly railroad switchman, and their relationship, as the boy matures, finds and loses the love of a woman and returns to see his father through a final illness, is the novel's sweet center. Other committed couples will appear with various ties to Yang Fei, including two bickering chess players who are skeletons (limbo is flesh-optional) and recall the titular siblings of the previous novel. Yu Hua may be saying something about the persistence of love beyond death. He is certainly commenting, often acerbically, on how life and death are valued in contemporary China, where a young woman dies while trying to get the attention of her boyfriend, who then dies after selling a kidney to buy her a burial plot. Officials manipulate death tolls from a store fire to avoid embarrassment. A couple weary from work fails to heed the warning that their building is being demolished. Unwanted infants and fetuses are dumped in a river. The novel's hero enters life as an apparent turd. He leaves life, by the way, because he is too engrossed in reading a newspaper account of his ex-wife's suicide to absorb the panic around him in a restaurant that soon explodes from a kitchen fire. Compelling moments and black humor go some way toward relieving the lugubrious funk of this episodic work, which might adapt well as a one-man show for John Leguizamo but falls short of being a fully realized novel.

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November 15, 2014
Yang Fei is dead, and the notice on his apartment door directs him to report to the funeral parlor the next day for his cremation. Stuck in a shadowy limbo, able to see and interact with both the living and the dead, people such as Yang have no relatives to mourn them or arrange for their proper burial. Thus they are fated to endlessly roam an afterlife in which they encounter both loved ones and casual acquaintances. For Yang, this means a prolonged search for the father who raised him and the wife who divorced him. Listening to the life stories of the people he meets, Yang is exposed to a riotous panoply of crimes and betrayals, from graft and corruption to greed and consumerism, that contributed to their deaths. With a mesmerizing vision of what the afterworld might look like, internationally award-winning novelist Hua (Boy in the Twilight, 2014) crafts a discerning critique of contemporary Chinese culture through an evocative allegory revealing fates much worse than death.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)

August 1, 2014

Lost by his mother after being born on a train, Yang Fei must wander the afterlife for seven days when he dies at 41, meeting those he missed in life. From a multi-award winner and contributor to the New York Times Opinion page whose work has been excerpted in The New Yorker.

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from October 15, 2014

Yang Fei is dead. Arriving at the funeral parlor as directed, he's denied eternal rest because he has "neither urn nor grave"; over the next seven days, he revisits his short 41 years. Yang Fei was temporarily famous as "the boy a train gave birth to," having accidentally slipped from his birth mother through a toilet opening on a moving train; he was rescued by a railway employee who became his devoted father. When Yang Jinbiao falls morbidly ill, Yang Fei abandons job and home to care for him. Unwilling to drain Yang Fei further, Yang Jinbiao disappears, setting in motion an afterlife journey for both father and son. VERDICT Arguably China's best-known contemporary writer (To Live, adapted into Zhang Yimou's acclaimed film; the Man Asian Prize-shortlisted Brothers), Yu offers a new work that is surprisingly gentler than his previous titles. Although the author retains his signature outlook of an absurdist new China with little regard for humanity--27 fetuses floating down a river, iPhones worth more than life, kidney harvesting from willing young bodies--this latest is ultimately less graphic expose and more poignant fable about family bonds made not of blood ties but unbreakable heartstrings. It will assuredly reward Yu's readers, familiar and new. [See Prepub Alert, 7/21/14.]--Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 15, 2014

Yang Fei is dead. Arriving at the funeral parlor as directed, he's denied eternal rest because he has "neither urn nor grave"; over the next seven days, he revisits his short 41 years. Yang Fei was temporarily famous as "the boy a train gave birth to," having accidentally slipped from his birth mother through a toilet opening on a moving train; he was rescued by a railway employee who became his devoted father. When Yang Jinbiao falls morbidly ill, Yang Fei abandons job and home to care for him. Unwilling to drain Yang Fei further, Yang Jinbiao disappears, setting in motion an afterlife journey for both father and son. VERDICT Arguably China's best-known contemporary writer (To Live, adapted into Zhang Yimou's acclaimed film; the Man Asian Prize-shortlisted Brothers), Yu offers a new work that is surprisingly gentler than his previous titles. Although the author retains his signature outlook of an absurdist new China with little regard for humanity--27 fetuses floating down a river, iPhones worth more than life, kidney harvesting from willing young bodies--this latest is ultimately less graphic expose and more poignant fable about family bonds made not of blood ties but unbreakable heartstrings. It will assuredly reward Yu's readers, familiar and new. [See Prepub Alert, 7/21/14.]--Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.